This Fall marks the start of our third year homeschooling, so I finally feel like we’ve done enough trial-and-error to talk about what’s really worked for us, and what hasn’t, and what our routine looks like.
I know I’ve seen lots of people new to homeschooling wondering how to set up the day. And the truth is, everyone does things differently. Unschoolers tend to do learning activities and reading throughout the day; while other have a rigid schedule that lasts most of the day. For us, we’re sorta in-between. Personally, I prescribe to more of the nordic model. This has worked out well, since both my children miss the school cutoff, so wouldn’t even be able to start school until they were almost 6 anyway. I also firmly believe in the power of play and free time for kids, and know that the amount of time young children need to learn is pretty short.
With that said, what does our homeschool day look like?
9 am – we have a rule (it’s literally ignored egregiously) that the kids need to get dressed, and brush their hair and teeth before ever going downstairs in the morning—even if parents aren’t up yet. I’m also supposed to do the same. But, more realistically, we eat breakfast, and then get ready for the day. I get a cup of Bru ready for when we go to start school.
10 am – this is when we start school. We don’t have a specific subject we h a v e to start with, since my husband took over teaching math (so that’s usually taught in the pm), but we usually start with English. The other subjects are pretty hands on, or reading-forward, so we start with the most formal thing. Plus, my daughter enjoys it, so it warms her up to learning and focusing. From there, we typically move to whoever subject is the least messy, to the most messy, so we can pick up in the end.
12 – if we have a longer school day (or a terrible one where no one wants to engage), it might take us a full 2 hours—remember, my husband takes care of math later. That puts us at about 30 minutes a subject. And then we are done, and have lunch.
And that’s it for our official school part of the day! The kids are free from there, until they have their extracurriculars (which clock in at more time a week than ‘school subjects’ right now).
I know, I know, some of you must be thinking: 30 minute a subject? That’s it?????!?
It is.
As my daughter gets older, it will take more time to get through lessons, but we’ve found 30 minutes is the perfect amount of time to keep attention and aid learning. Plus, our English curriculum, which really holds your hand, takes about that long per lesson. These days, it’s closer to an hour, but that’s fine. We just do one lesson. So we’ve used that as a guide for all the other subjects, as well. If you finish what you planned to do sooner, great. If it takes longer, maybe you do it—especially if everyone’s just enjoying learning and wants to keep going—or maybe you stop at 30 minutes, and pick up another day.
This schedule has worked really well for us. Formal learning doesn’t take too long, and it keeps my daughter feeling positive and interested, most of the time, because she knows it’s not going to be a huge amount of time per subject.
In the future, I’ll make another post about what our week looks like with various subjects (because we do’t do all the subjects every day!). But for now, I hope this helps you out, and makes you feel better about not trying to replicated a public school’s all-day schedule with your younger kids.
Good luck!
