Quite a few people have asked me about our year-round homeschooling schedule, so I made a few different schedules to show you what we do. The most important thing for us is to remain flexible. Schedules in the comments. The first is a schedule of our breaks with how many days attending each month for a total of 180 days. Some districts try to say all paperwork needs to be submitted sometime in June to discourage year-round schooling. It’s for THEIR convenience. Let them know that it’s your right to school on a different schedule, and they must make accommodations. Umbrella schools and/or the HSLDA will assist you with that, and many other things, if you pay a yearly fee. We use Homelife Academy as our umbrella school to assist with transcripts and communication with the county and state.
Most kids thrive on a schedule. Schedules help prepare them for lives as adults with jobs. Schedules help busy parents plan so they can fit in everything they need to do that day. However, schedules can also make us slaves. We need to fill in every moment of every day to make sure our kids have the best social life, the best education, and don’t feel like they are missing anything. It’s usually not the kids needing such things, but us as adults instilling in them that this is what it takes to be happy. Some kids need that; they need every minute planned, or they don’t know what to do and tend to develop big emotions trying to figure out how to just be kids. Other kids feel overloaded with so many things and need time to unwind. Whether it’s alone with a book, playing with their toys or the dog, their siblings, or just relaxing doing nothing at all, be flexible to allow their needs to be met.
In our school day, we usually do our subjects in the same order. We do most of our subjects as unit studies, with all four kids learning the same thing at the same time. The studies are tailored to include more crafts and simplified assignments for the youngest, and they become more in-depth as the grades go up, including research and additional reading and writing assignments for our oldest. Of course, some days, our 5th grader needs an easy day in certain subjects (like History) to prepare for others (like a Math exam), so reading and a craft will suffice for History.
Our family attends 2 co-op groups during the school year that cover every subject at some point and change every 7 weeks. On the days we attend those, we don’t do much other work, maybe 3 subjects. During the summer months when they are out, we continue with lighter lessons and usually focus on the majority of our work 3 days a week.
Every day, there are more learning opportunities than we can put on paper. Documentaries, garden work, cooking, trips to the library, the zoo, music lessons, sports, dance, online art classes—so much learning outside of books, and it all counts!
Our state requires 4 hours a day of school. Let’s be realistic, Kindergarten doesn’t take 4 hours. Neither does 1st grade or 2nd grade. 3rd grade is questionable. The breakdown I made is an approximation. Some lessons are more involved and take longer, while others will finish in half the time I thought.
If you live somewhere that requires documenting everything, just remember, it doesn’t have to be just worksheets and books.
One more important thing for us, and being flexible, is to remember that homeschooling is not public school at home. Meet the child where they are. That has been difficult for me as we have a child who is neurodivergent.