Tag Archive | break

To School Year Round or Not?

Homeschooling for me has been an organic and ever changing experience. When we first started our schooling the twins were pre school age and I was adamant that we needed a set curriculum with 5 days a week during the public “school day”… I can tell you the boys were frustrated, I was bored… we had to weed out tons of things that simply did not fit our family (or our country as the best curriculum I could find was American and we were in Canada at the time). We took summer off and really were more “schooling at home” than living the homeschool life.

Our years after that flexed and changed… through pregnancy and illness, trips to the United States and more one thing became abundantly clear – taking a “full summer” off resulted in a backslide that was not only frustrating for all of us but discouraging for Mommy. It felt like we lost precious ground in our learning. Public school days on and off simply did not work for us…

So now we do a brief break here and there and half days on those lovely warm days where are afternoons are out and in the sun. Of course that can be translated into journal entries, pictures, surprise science lessons… learning in real time.

The blog site Kristen Joy Awake has a wonderful post about the concept of learning outside of the usual time structure in their post Take Your Learning Out of the Box: 5 Reasons to Homeschool Year-Round. You can read the entire post HERE. Her family has gone with an 8 weeks on 1 off rotation. That allows for extended holidays but an abbreviated summer. Either of our set ups are more than viable, as Kristen wrote: “The truth is that school can look like whatever you want it to look like when you teach at home.”

She has 5 reasons to follow the more year round process in whatever incarnation works best for your family:

  1. It keeps me from burning out. *AGREED!! breaks are very necessary!*
  2. Flexibility *this has opened us up for opportunities that we would otherwise miss as well as made it easier for us to deal with infant and toddler siblings… if you can take a shorter day in the hot then when it is cold and the babies are willing to sit and enjoy a tv show a full day is MUCH easier*
  3. It works well around holidays.
  4. Summer breaks are shorter so the kids don’t lose everything they just learned. *This has massively decreased my new year frustrations when the stuff we worked so hard to learn has not slipped away and left us with lengthy review*
  5. Continuity. *I don’t know that anyone knows how pleased I am that someone else feels the love of the routine and decrease of bored tv watchers*

It is one of the joys of homeschooling, you can tailor it to your family and find what works. So don’t feel like you HAVE TO go the year round route… don’t be intimidated by Kristen’s 8 weeks on 1 week off. Whatever version of scheduling works for you… embrace it, alter it to suit and be proud of it!! We have the freedom and that is what is important!

Enjoying our summer while we combine with it some learning! Balance!

Enjoying our summer while we combine with it some learning! Balance!