This year I made one homeschooling decision that has been so freeing. This one tweak is actually causing me to look forward to school each week. So what was this big change you ask?
The big adjustment was…
We aren’t going to have a “last day of school” this year, and we won’t be completing our curriculum by a certain date.
To understand why this was radical to me, you have to know a little more about how we were doing things. I’m typically a very black and white person who likes to have all of my ducks in a row. The last two years I have used the traditional 36 week school year like the public schools use. Unfortunately, what this created was a system where the size of the curriculum dictated our pace, instead of our learning setting the speed.
So why is it bad for the curriculum to dictate the pace?
- It takes more prep work up front and can be difficult to plan.
- It can mean some subjects require a large time commitment each week.
- It doesn’t leave room for unexpected days or weeks off.
- It leads to playing “catch up” with double the workload some weeks.
- It doesn’t ensure kids understand a subject before moving on.
- It doesn’t leave room to explore and go deeper while being guided by their interests.
Prep Work
I don’t buy boxed curriculum, and instead I buy each subject from a different vendor. This allows me to put together our ideal school. Picking and choosing our curriculum this way means we might have a science text book with 12 chapters, a history text book with 34 chapters, and a grammar workbook with 200 pages. With the old way of scheduling, I had to figure out how to make a daily schedule where each curriculum took exactly 36 weeks. Sometimes I was able to break it out nicely by chapters, and sometimes I had to assign it based on the number of pages we needed to complete. I would have to do this process for 6-8 subjects. Then each week I had to use a spreadsheet to try to keep track of what assignment we were supposed to be working on. It was crazy, and it took so much work to organize.
Time Commitment
The way I had been dividing school out, we had some really long subjects and some much shorter subjects each day. There was no consistency from subject to subject. Some subjects took so much time that they were just unbearable for my kids. Also, if for some reason we started the school date late, we had no way to shorten up school to get back on schedule because our workload wasn’t flexible at all.
Days Off
When all of your curriculum is planned out based on how many weeks you have, there is no room for the unexpected. It creates a “pressure” to keep going to stay “on schedule”. When a kid gets sick, you feel a need to do school so you don’t “get behind”. When a fun opportunity comes up during the week such as a field trip, you have to figure out how you will get all of that week’s scheduled work done with one less day of school. It just doesn’t leave much room for flexibility or spontaneity.
Catch Up
When you take a day or a week off, you end up having to find a way to make up all of the missed work. This meant we had some weeks we were trying to get through 2 full weeks of curriculum in one week. It was exhausting, and made for a miserable week. Sometimes we would get “behind”, and just felt like we missed so much that it was nearly impossible to get caught up. We were stressed as we rushed through things to get back to where we were “supposed to be.”
Understanding vs. Completion
When you have to get through a certain amount of work by a certain date, you tend to keep moving even if the assignment was just “completed” but not “understood”. If you stop and spend time on one concept, you can easily fall behind on your schedule. It doesn’t allow the freedom to pause when needed and work through a topic until it is mastered.
Going Deep and Wide
What happens when you find a subject that your child is loving, but you have a schedule to keep? For us, we didn’t have the luxury of really digging in and learning more about subjects that caught our attention. The school train was chugging along, and we needed to stay on it to keep moving forward. We didn’t have time for detours and rabbit trails. We missed a lot of the richness that comes from going deep and wide with our learning, and we rarely had time to include resources outside of our curriculum.
A Better Way
So my new way of doing things is based on time blocking. I have broken our school day into 1 hour time blocks.
Our current schedule (for a 3rd and 6th grader) looks something like this:
9-10 am Writing (IEW)
10-11 am Math/Reading (They do one chapter of LOF Math with me while the other child does independent reading)
11-12 am Science/History (We alternate science one week and history the next week)
12-1 pm Lunch/Bible (We do a Bible study together while they are eating lunch)
1-2 pm Grammar/Spelling (We alternate grammar one month and spelling the next month)
(They do their electives on Fridays)
This new schedule gives us so much more freedom and flexibility. Our schedule definitely isn’t set in stone, and it varies slightly from day to day. We don’t lock ourselves into exactly one hour per subject. If we start the school day late we can shorten a subject to get back on track. If we are really enjoying a subject, we can lengthen it. If a field trip comes up, we can skip a day all together and pick up the next day where we left off.
The biggest hurdle for embracing a system like this is realizing that kids don’t have to complete every curriculum in a typical school year. If they are still finishing up their history curriculum two months into the next “year”, it’s not a big deal. They can start the next curriculum whenever they finish the first one.
Based on our current pace, most of our subjects will be completed between March and May, however a few will go longer. This year we are alternating our science and history curriculums every other week. Our science curriculum is only 12 chapters long, but our history curriculum is 36 chapters. When we finish our science curriculum we will switch to doing history every week. We will do history through the summer, and should finish just before September.
For me this change better reflects what I am attempting to accomplish long-term, which is to instill in my kids a love of learning. I want them to have enjoyed what they learned, and to have actually understood it. So often in school I raced through subjects while learning it just long enough to get a good grade on a test. Then I forgot everything I learned. That is so opposite from how it should be. I want to shoot for true understanding of the subjects we study, not just a grade on a paper. There is plenty of time for them to learn what they need to know. We have to stop being in a rush. We need to aim for quality over quantity when it comes to their education.
Thank you for sharing.