Schedules are different. It's not bad to think about how much time certain activities take and when they fit best into your day, but if you are trying to get your kids to stick to a hard and fast schedule with a specific time for each activity throughout your day while you are all at home all the time, it might cause undue stress. Don't feel like you need to recreate the school schedule that your children once had. The schools needs schedules because they are organizing and coordinating large numbers of students, teachers, administrators, custodians, and other workers into each day. They are moving around hundreds of people, but you are only coordinating one family.
You can set up a routine for your family! We naturally plan days around meals, even when kids are in school, so that's a great place to start. In our 14 years of home education, we have had routines that work around meal times, too. Everyone needs to eat! Routines can be a list of things that happen in a certain order, but don't have to have a designated time.
For many years, the kids and I generally followed this routine (you do not need to re-create it, this it just to give you ideas that might be helpful):
- Everyone gets up, has some time to themselves
- I fix breakfast
- Kids eat breakfast with me at the kitchen table
- I do some reading aloud while they eat
- I clean up the kitchen, while they go get dressed and ready for the day
- I get a quick shower, get dressed, put on makeup and shoes
- I start a load of laundry
- We begin working on school work
We generally try to start school by 9:30 or 10 and work until lunch time, usually around 12pm, but again, that is really "scheduling". However, I thought it might help to give you a ball park idea of time. For the chunks of "school time" we would also get into a rhythm or routine, but it would look a little different each year, depending on the age of my kids and what we are working on at that time. When they were young and in elementary school, for several years, it would look something like this:
- Copywork at your desk or we work on handwriting all together
- Morning meeting where we looked at a big calendar, practiced memory work, and maybe sang a song
- Read aloud time - I read aloud books that might include great literature, history, science, music, poetry, art or even math stories, a few different books in one sitting, while the kids did something quiet like play with Legos, draw, or stuffed animals
- Snack time (see, there's another meal!)
- Math work
- Lunch time
Our afternoon routine would usually include:
- Individual time with each child working on reading and spelling, I would give them something to do while I worked with the other one when they were small, and as they got older, I would have one of them do independent reading while I worked with the other child.
- English and language arts together
- Afternoon snack
- Play outside
Usually, that would cover everything and then in the afternoon, I would try to get errands, grocery shopping, and other things done like putting away the laundry before I needed to start supper.
This is just one way to build a routine, the combinations are truly endless! Find a few priorities for your family and starting building a routine around them, if you haven't already. What makes a routine work for you?
No comments:
Post a Comment