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Apr. 24, 2009
School year schedule
How do you schedule your school year? Do you follow the public school calendar? Do you school year round? Or a bit of a blend? To some extent it may depend on whether or not you children have ever been in a traditional school setting. A child who has learned that summer means no school may not want to school year round. Do you even get input from your children when scheduling? Every homeschool family has their own way of scheduling their school year and we are no different. Actually, maybe we are since each of my boys follows their own schedule. Really, it's not as confusing as it sounds. We all know that each child is different and that includes the way they like to pattern their days/years.
Ger (9th grade) likes to be "done"' by Memorial Day so he doesn't take any breaks during the year except maybe Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. He is a self-motivated learner so it works out for both of us. I'm sure you noticed that I put the word done in quotes, that is because he will continue 1 or 2 subjects into the summer. This year he will have one book left from his history program and he is a bit behind in his literature program so he will finish this years literature program and then begin next year's right away.
Mic (7th grade) doesn't decide so much on the length of his year, he decides on the length of his days. His school year then is a bit longer, usually until the end of June, because he doesn't accomplish as much in any given day. But once he is done, he is DONE. He much prefers to have his summers completely free of book work. But he is my "tinkerer", he will spend the summer taking things apart and trying to fix them. If he can't fix them he will save parts for his inventing. Now, if I could just get him to throw away the parts he is not going to use... He is also working on building a robot from scratch. Can you tell that book work is complete torture for him? I have tried to make his school as hands on as possible and where I can not be hands on I use living books. He loves the Genevive Foster books for history. He also loves true stories, this is the child who was upset when he found out Robinson Crusoe was mostly fiction! So we try to use biographies as much as possible too.
Ed (2nd grade) has never been to a traditional school so he doesn't care much about grade levels and schedules. He likes to follow Mic's schedule for the most part and say he is done at the end of May, but he will continue much of his work into the summer. This year he wants to continue with math all summer and he will do some reading and science as well.
So we are getting close to wrapping up with the books for the summer. Then we learn from God's creation. We will be learning about gardening, woodland plants and animals, weather etc. Even if the books are put away the learning never stops and THAT is about the most important lesson I can teach all year. |
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