How we homeschooled today #103
And tell me how you structure your work/holiday time
A question for you
I’ve been really pleased with how the children have taken to their work after the December break. They’ve come back refreshed and keen, there’s minimal complaining and my daughter often does more than is asked of her. So it was clearly a good idea to take a break.
The question is, if a break is beneficial, when should we take the next one? Before Christmas we kept going until we couldn’t go any further. I was burnt out, and the children had seriously had enough. I’m sure there must be a way to plan regular breaks instead of just waiting for the burn out!
So if you homeschool, I’d love to hear how you structure your work time and your holiday time. Do you follow school terms, do you have a three weeks on/one week off plan, do you just take every day as it comes? Please share your wisdom and experience in the Comments!
How we homeschooled today
(If you’re new here, my children are 8 and 6.)
We were out with friends for most of the day. The list this morning looked like this:
Handwriting: both children did a few more words on the handwriting pages I’ve made for them. My daughter is copying a bit of Ramona Quimby, Aged 8, and my son has a sentence from Illustrated Tales of King Arthur.
Maths: More Prime Climb. Today they asked to play it backwards, so instead of using addition and multiplication to get to 101, we used subtraction and division to get to 0. This is a great way of getting more mileage from the game if you’ve already had it a while and want a new challenge. Don’t forget How We Homeschool readers in the US and UK have access to a special discount code with Math For Love until March 1st: details in yesterday’s post.
Ancient Greek: We translated the names of half a dozen Greek gods and goddesses.
Science reading: They chose You wouldn’t want to live without antibiotics, which covered things like how the ancient Egyptians treated wounds, Pasteur and Semmelweis. It packs in a lot of information, but I wouldn’t recommend it for squeamish children (or their parents!). I also feel it makes microbes out to be worse than they are. It would pair nicely with Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes, which is better at getting across that most microbes are either harmless or positively beneficial.
When we got home my husband read them another chapter of The Hobbit, and now they’re snuggled up reading Flat Stanley and Varjak Paw to themselves.
Possibly no post tomorrow—I’m thinking of taking Fridays off—so have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.
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Homeschooled alum here! 🙋🏻♀️Planning to homeschool my little one when he’s old enough. I loved the way my mom structured our school year. She stayed home and all 4 of us kids were homeschooled through 12th grade. She structured the year by starting the last week of August and continuing the first term through the end of November-ish to Exam week, which intentionally coincided with Thanksgiving. So about 12 weeks per term. We often took nearly a month off for Christmas. With 3 terms in the school year, we finished in early June and had the rest of the summer off.
Some notes on our structure (my sons are 4, 6, and 7): M,W,F fuller morning work days. T,TH much shorter lessons. Monthly (or so) changes in routine on Thursday afternoons - outing, playdate, etc. We typically take at least a full week off at times not corresponding to public school breaks or holidays (to take a family trip or host out of town friends or family). We take a very light work schedule all June, July, and August.