Weekly Wrap Up - Scheduling My Homeschool Day

Each year I'm more and more in awe of the the flexibility homeschooling affords us, and also how much it requires. After all, this is our home, our life. Homeschool is not carried out in sterile concrete halls with bells and whistles and regimented staff members. It's carried out at kitchen tables and on carpets with crying babies and ringing phones.

For the last few months I've clung to our old schedule, white knuckles and determination, only to find...it's not working. At the end of last week, after an episode of me trying to vacuum a filthy house (because I hardly accomplished any housework all week) while tossing different articles from one end of the living room to the other (yelling things like: I told you to pick that up, how many times do I have to tell you to hang up your coat, if I find this on the floor one more time so help me it's going in the trash!!!!) Hubby decided it was time to sit me down and have a talk.

Thank God.

Of course I was surly and impatient and completely unreasonable. But he was patient and helped me calm down. He reminded me that if there's not enough time for everything then we either (a) have too much going on or (b) are doing things in the wrong order. So we discussed the days schedule and why I always felt so behind, why the house was a wreck (again). And came to the conclusion that the homeschool schedule is on longer working for us.

We've had the same schedule for years now, and it's worked so well for us. Even when Bram was a baby I was impressed that I didn't have to change anything. But now he's a toddler...an energetic toddler who is bouncing off the walls in the morning and calmer in the afternoons. He manages to triple the time it takes to complete our Bible Study and read aloud by the sheer volume of interruptions.

It got to the point where we would start our read aloud time at 9AM in an effort to get it accomplished and barely finish in time for lunch. Fox's independent study time was suffering, so was my chore time, Bram's educational-play time and all of our sanity. After taking a step back it was easy to see what needed to be done.

Rather than starting our read aloud time earlier we postponed it until after lunch. It's just too much before lunch. We still do our Bible Study first,because I think it's important to start with that. But it's not a challenge for Bram to sit through those 15 minutes, especially when he knows Mom will be free to play afterward.

This week has gone MUCH more smoothly.

Soooooo, this whole long meandering post was to demonstrate that it's okay to be flexible, it's okay to try something new. You never know, it might just work better!

That's it for our week. How about yours? Share and link up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.