Year Round Homeschooling
I’ve mentioned before that we’ve decided to do year round homeschooling.
Why, you ask, would we want to homeschool year-round?
There are many reasons, but here are our favorites:
- Greater flexibility: School adjusts to our lifestyle and special circumstances instead of the other way around. It also allows for us to just take those training/discipline days when the kids (or the parents!) need it most.
- Natural flow: We live life year-round. We are disciples of Jesus year-round. Homeschooling fits that vision for us as well. In addition, learning won’t become a compartmentalized part of our kids’ lives only associated with “school.”
- More efficient: Avoids common pitfalls of long breaks and inactive brains. More can be done in a year without feeling like a greater burden. I believe this will even be true as we do a lighter load during good-weather months (for us, parts of fall and summer) and keep shorter school days the norm.
We were already kind of doing the year-round thing, but made it official for planning purposes so I could wrap my brain around what we could/should/want to do during Jaron’s Kindergarten year.
This post by Gentle Revolution Homeschooling helped me a lot to visualize what year-round homeschooling will look like. There are other systems, but we like this one enough to just copy it.
Each school year consists of:
– Summer Semester (June – August)
– Fall Semester (September – November)
– Winter Semester (December – February)
– Spring Semester (March – May)
Starting in June and ending in May means that the kids will end a school year at roughly the same time the rest of the world is ending their school year. This just makes sense. It’s easier to talk with friends and family about what grade the kids are in and what they did that year.
As far as the details, each semester is about 6 units, each unit being 2 weeks. Then the remaining weeks are vacation/breaks. For us, when those breaks happen will likely be at a different time during each semester depending on life circumstances and what we feel like doing! It gives us all the fun and flexibility of homeschooling but helps this mama do her planning. 🙂
Granted, our year’s work will be driven by our kids’ needs and interests instead of only typical grade-level objectives, and we will change our plans and schedules as needed. But this system has already proven helpful to us.
To start planning, I printed this 13-month ruled calendar from the Donna Young web site (love that site!), choosing the one that started in June 2012 since that’s when our school year started.
I penciled in the semesters and units, and wrote in what the units would be a little ways out while resisting the temptation to plan the whole year. This will help me have a rough sketch of what I will be doing in a given semester, month or unit and adjust to our planned breaks accordingly.
Doing this up front has also helped us decide on some fun traditions for our family. For example:
- First Day of School (beginning of summer quarter): We took their official school pictures for the year and took them on a special outing. The kids received some little gifts as well.
- Not Back to School Day (first day of public school): We’re thinking we’ll go out to breakfast in our pajamas and let the kids open their school boxes with new school supplies. I love school supplies – I think my kids should to! 🙂 Then we’ll do something really lazy all day like play video games and play at the park.
We’ll have family vacations, Easter and Christmas breaks, holiday celebrations, co-op activities, field trips, and so on as well throughout the year.
Have you considered year-round homeschooling? Do you already do it? Got any tips and advice for pulling it off well?
We are doing year round schoolin’ as well and are enjoying it. This summer we are focusing on medieval times. You should bring over your gaggle for a “jousting” tournament latter this summer 🙂 Pool noodles are the javelin. Its going to be awesome.