OK, I lied.
In my post about Homeschool Planning & Organization I told you I didn’t plan our weekly schedule. Well, it looks like I have made a conscious effort to do so in the past. In going through my homeschool files, I happened to come across an attempt at creating a weekly rhythm for our family. Looking back, we did roughly stick to this. So I figured maybe this year it’s worth updating it and actually hanging it up on our activities wall, the area in the kitchen with a calendar and schedules for karate, science, art, theater and other activities.
We don’t really have set times for this. My husband works with the boys (now ages 9 and 6) on math, science, tech and woodwork. I do the language, critical thinking (brain food), history, and art, and we both do geography. On Wednesdays I try to send them a link to a fun website – either a game site, nature site or some article on a topic that interests them. Some days we’ll get started by 9, other days we won’t. We’re usually done by noon and they can spend afternoons practicing piano, playing Minecraft or another game, playing outside, reading or doing their own creative play. Some ‘lessons’ are an hour or so, others just 15 minutes. Sometimes we work on it together, other times we give them ‘homework’ for the next class so they have an opportunity to work on their time management skills.
This biggest change in this weekly rhythm is that we have scaled back on the frequency of topics. Math used to be 3 days, now it’s two. This is because we’ve found we sail through the Singapore Math books and we want to slow it down to have time for fun supplements. Also, I put reading on the schedule but that’s purely for my benefit so I make time to read with my six-year-old, whether he reads to me or I to him or we alternate pages. We do not have any fixed time for reading or keep reading logs of any kind. I think they’re a bad idea.
Theoretically, I think having a weekly rhythm is a good thing. But even better for us is having flexibility so that when illness, work demands or something interesting comes along, we can adapt. So I consider this a fluid document and fully expect to start adapting it within a week or two.
Do you have a daily or weekly rhythm for your family?
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