When you think of a regular school day, what comes to mind? I’d guess that you’d picture desks, books and that your kids would be taught from early morning into the late afternoon.
The thing about homeschooling, though, is that it’s not at all like the traditional school day.
In fact, you can manage to fit an entire week of traditional schooling, into just three days.
Other than getting to keep an eye on my kids, my favorite thing about homeschooling is how flexible it is. And if you’re interested in homeschooling your children but are worried that you’re too busy, let me put you at ease.
I work from home full-time, run my own business and have three kids enrolled in homeschooling. And, despite what you may think, I’m no superhero! I’ve managed to do it by really taking advantage of the flexibility that homeschooling offers— and you can too!
A three-day-school-week for your children begins with instructing the core subjects for each of your kids.
How do you figure out what counts as a “core subject”? Start by looking over your children’s curriculum and assess each child’s specific needs. Then decide what needs to be focused on.
Subjects like math, language arts, history, science, and faith (since our program is faith based) and break them down by assigning each one to a specific day. Mondays might be just math and spelling, while Tuesdays could be reading, followed by history, and so on. (Of course, depending on your student, this can change; like if your child gets ahead in math but is “weeks” behind on history, you can adjust which subject is more important than the other.)
After you’ve figured what subject is more important for that given week, then put all of the week’s activities for each subject and count how many pages/experiments/worksheets are needed— and lastly, divide all of those activities by three to see how much we should do each day!
After the core subjects are taken care of, you can begin to add in the “extras” via enrichment activities that they can do on their own or you can get creative!
For my five-year-old, I often cover science and history through bedtime stories. This way they get the info in, but we don’t have to dedicate extra time to it during the day. P.E., or physical education, is covered through daily trips to the park.
You can also try conducting school during the summertime. I’d suggest doing only 1 -2 days of school a week. This will cut down on frantically trying to cover everything during Aug-May, while also giving you plenty of downtime around the holidays.
The important thing to note is that there are as many ways to home-school as there are families who choose to do it.
Keep in mind that as kids grow, approaches and expectations may change— Adapting to what works best for you, and your family is what makes homeschooling so great!
