A day in our Life

The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on how the school year is going, make changes, or forge ahead. I think it's important to be able recognize when things are working or aren't! Sometimes it seems easier to keep going with something, but the freedom that homeschooling affords gives us the ability to get up and change it up! And that can be a wonderful thing!

I often wonder what a day in other people's days look like, is it as crazy as ours? More structured or less. I have a great appreciation for scheduling and planning and really love to do it, but something God has been teaching me slowly is to let Him intervene in our day and to be okay with that. That can be difficult for a control freak.

After feeling flooded with too much to do and not enough time to do it all in, I knew I needed to find an answer, and though a schedule doesn't necessarily appeal to me (I'm more spontaneous than I admit), it does help to have a bit of a skeleton, what I like to call a routine.

 I started by reading Managers of their Homes {you can find some blog posts about that here, I really enjoyed the idea of having a time to fit everything in as well as add things like hobbies and crafts, etc. With that I was able to put together a schedule using her technique....Her book comes with everything you need to build a schedule for everyone in the family {even the baby}.

So what is working for us now? Our day goes something like this::

7-9:00am~ We are getting up, getting dressed, eating and doing at least one chore. I usually choose something that needs to be done rather than the same chores every morning.

9:00-10:30~ We start off with circle time. For us that includes reading books, doing character training, singing songs and following some of these activities from Homeschool Creations . We move onto Bible next and then either Math or Language Arts for the day.

10:30-11:00~ We have a nice big healthy break, and a snack (this is code for me kicking the kids out of the house and forcing them to play~okay it's not that tough to do)

11:00-12:00~ We finish up the other subject and sometimes work on our current Science or History Unit.

We have lunch, take another break and somewhere around 1:30-2:00ish we have story time and then quiet time. The rest of the day is dedicated to PLAY! (and of course I can do my list of chores and get dinner ready!)

One day a week we have dedicated to ONLY Science, Art and History (and reading aloud). We changed this up (just in the middle of the year!) because our other schedule (ie~trying to cram in science and history after lunch) just wasn't working. And my kids love those subjects, but I felt like I was short changing them. So now one day a week we only do those, have a good time doing experiments, painting, digging into the Ancients. And they love it. For us it's been Fridays, but you could do it in the middle of the week and break up the monotony or the beginning and set the week off to an easier start. Either way it's really worked for us!

So I wonder what do your days look like? Are you strict on your school day? Starting and stopping at specific times? Or are you more flexible.