As you know a traditional school goes Monday through Friday unless of course they adopt a four day school week like our wonderful friends in Meeker now have! Each school day in a traditional school is usually about seven and a half hours or so. Home schooling can be done in the same way where you do your lessons Monday through Friday as well but one of the wonderful things about it is that it doesn't have to be that way! For starters, it doesn't take 7.5 hours a day to teach lessons to two or three children. In a traditional school the teachers have to get 20 or 25 students through each lesson, there is a lot of transition time from one activity to another, etc. When you only have a few students they can learn the material much more quickly and there isn't much transition time.
So, how do we decide when to do "school" and how long to do it? We do our best to work around Joe's work schedule. On the days that he is working we always have school days which means we often have school on the weekends. This allows us to have a lot of our days off when he is off as well. I still try to maintain about as many school days a month as the public schools in the area so we do have school usually one to three of Joe's days off as he sometimes will have up to six days off in a row and I want to make sure we get enough school in. What each of those days look like varies greatly from a public school setting though. Due to us being able to cover more in a shorter time period when we do school at home we do about five and half hour days and that includes lunch and recess in it. We start out the morning with our Bible lesson and/or Saint lesson. Then we move on to Social Studies or Science. If we have an actual Language Arts lesson and activity we do that next. If not then we do our Grammar lesson and Writing. Then we have lunch time and recess and after that while Daniel is napping we do Spelling, Handwriting and Math and end with Reading. So many of our Science and Social Studies lessons are hands on sometimes they are done in the classroom and others they are outdoors.
Field trips are also a huge part of our lessons. Some field trips are included in our curriculum such as when the kids drew a map to get me from our house to the doughnut shop and only if I made it there based on their map would they get a doughnut or currently when we are studying architecture so we are going to the Church for them to draw a picture of it. Other field trips are just field trip opportunities that come up that may not be part of the lesson we are doing at that point but are educational none-the-less! We have gone to a play of Robin Hood which they did a review on afterwards and we did Landon's birthday party at a fabulous Children's Museum and Planetarium. We are also going to a corn maze in a few weeks. We try to do more field trips when Joe is off so he can participate as well! Here are some pictures from the Children's Museum.
On an ending note, one nice thing about home schooling and the flexibility of the schedule, especially for our family with the health problems we face, is that we no longer have to worry about sick days from school. While Texas is very lenient with their home schooling laws, they have pretty strict school attendance laws(go figure, right?). With Epi's asthma we were always worried last year we would have issues, as if they miss more then a certain number of days they can get you on truancy laws. Now with home schooling if one of our kids is really sick we can just allow them to have as many sick days as they need and make it up later. This is a relief as currently ALL THREE of the kids have suspected HEV68. Luckily we are staying on top of it with asthma meds and the doctors are hopeful that no hospital visits will be needed but prayers are welcome!
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