As we discussed last week, choosing your homeschool style and sticking to it can go a long way to help you get organized without feeling overwhelmed. As you move away from a school-based paradigm towards a homeschooling mindset, you’ll find that there are many ways to put together a homeschool schedule. And some of them don’t involve exact time slots!
Flexibility
One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that we don’t have to stop learning when the bell rings. When we are in the middle of an interesting topic, my kids and I have a tendency to go off on a tangent. We look up some related information, get into a discussion, and spend the next hour learning about something I hadn’t originally planned on. Of course, then we still need to go back to original topic, as well as move on to other subjects planned for the day. Scheduling subjects for specific time slots would be a disaster for my family! Instead, I make a list of subjects and topics I’d like to cover and a rough order in which to cover them (subject to change as we go along). This way, I make sure that we get to everything eventually. And yet, I leave myself and my children enough flexibility to spend time on topics we get interested in at any given moment.
Children taking initiative
When my children were younger, homeschooling only happened when I was present in the room and actively involved. As they got older, I started giving them assignments to do on their own. And of course, the best is when they decide that they want to learn something themselves. I can just step back and watch in awe as my child becomes an expert in something I was never great at myself.
That’s another important part of homeschool scheduling – leaving enough free time for the children to pursue their own interests. That, and regular trips to the library!
Trips and park days
Some families reserve one day a week for trips and park days. They don’t schedule any academics for that day. They join a local homeschool group and attend their trips and activities. Then they can take advantage of school and group rates when going on trips to museums, gardens, science centers, and the like. Or they can do their own thing and plan trips around what they are learning.
Many homeschool families prefer lists and routines to timed schedules. A popular homeschool strategy is loop scheduling. With a loop schedule, you make sure that you cover all the subjects, but you remain flexible in which subjects are covered when.
As with everything else in homeschooling, scheduling is very individual. There are many many options! Choose the one that works for your family and enjoy as much structure and as much flexibility as your family needs.
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