One lesson we learned last year is that it's unreasonable for us to expect that every week will be a five-day home-school-a-thon and go by uninterrupted. Sometimes stuff happens that gets in the way. People get sick, schedules get changed at the last minute, emergencies arise.
This happens in public schools, too, but with their class sizes and institutional safeguards in place, the school calendar is pretty much what it is.
But there's no substitute for a home schooling Mom. If she goes down, the day is lost.
Our pipe dream last year was to run school from the middle of August to the second week of May. Our plan was to go only take time off for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and a week-long trip to Grandma's house in the spring. The only other scheduled days off would be for birthdays.
As it turned out, we needed until June 3rd to get the state-required number of days completed.
Sure, there were emergencies. We missed nine days in January because of my grandmother's funeral. We started back from Christmas break a couples of days later than we intended to. We decided to take the Friday after Thanksgiving as a day off.
But what really pushed us late in the year were sick days. There were days when Laura just couldn't go, and we had no real plan for what to do when that happened. (Occasionally we would have a make-up day on Saturday, but what fun is that?)
This year, we have a plan for days (like today) when Laura isn't well. We call them "flex days."
We decided that instead of rushing through the school year, we would take our time. We started on August 11th and plan to wrap up on May 29th. We still have the same holidays planned (2 days at Thanksgiving, 2 weeks at Christmas, a week of Spring Break.) We still give the girls a day off for their birthday, Laura's birthday, and my birthday. We were able to count four of the days of our summer vacation as school days since we visited the Space & Rocket Center, the Chattanooga Aquarium, the Creative Discovery museum, and the Chattanooga Zoo.
But this year we have also built "flex days" into the school calendar. Every other Thursday, Laura gets a day off. If she feels good and wants to teach that day, the flex day goes in to the "bank" for her to use when she needs it. She promises not to "overdraw" her flex day account, I promise not to freak out about the school year running three weeks longer than it's supposed to, and the girls get nine days of school every two weeks. Everybody's happy.
So, homeschool veterans: How long does it take you to get through the state-required number of school days? How flexible are you about whether or not to have school on a given day? And what do you do when Mom gets sick?
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Yay! I can comment now. I've been reading along since you posted about this on FB.
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that you are so involved with the girls' education.
We have varied our approaches throughout the years. Sometimes we school year-round and other times we do more of a traditional 9 month calendar. To me, it's pretty easy to achieve the required days because I view each day as a learning day. :o) I know what you mean though, it is hard when the teacher isn't up to teaching. We sometimes double up on the work or school over the weekend to catch up.
I just love the freedoms we have with homeschooling.
I guess moving to Texas is out of the picture? We don't have govt. requirements like you do. Instead of counting days, I looked at our curriculum and figured out what it would take to complete it. On the other hand, we would often have days that consisted of "outside the box learning" and I considered them valuable as well. During the diaper intensive years (3 kids 4 and under) I had back-up plans in place. Educational games, videos,software, and lots of extended reading time. Also "do whatever you want but don't make a mess." Currently my kids are 26, 24, 19, 17, and 15. I guess we all survived! God is so very faithful.
ReplyDelete-Renee