>The 2010-2011 Homeschooling Plan: The Schedule

>So here’s where I’m still not entirely sure how to proceed.  I really thought that planning out my days, weeks, and months into neat and orderly five-day-a-week, thirty-six week segments, with 180 days of instruction was going to be easy.  After all, planning things out in advance is something I’ve always enjoyed.

But I’m actually stumped.  At first I had this beautiful outline, with a start date and end date, and evenly spaced-out week-long breaks in between.  Actually, at first I had us taking off the entire months of December, April and July, plus half of August, along with a week-long fall break in October and another in February, plus a third in June.  The days were planned out perfectly, and it all matched up.

But then I joined a homeschool group, and they have get-togethers and group field trips.  I’ll want to be a part of those.  And what about Bug?  There’s a soccer program that runs on weekday mornings that’s literally 1/2 mile from our house that I’d love to put him in.  What about the field trips that I want to take with them on my own?  And what about the days that Tony has off from work?

It’s not so neat and clean anymore, and I’m afraid that if I make this big plan and something fun or educational comes up, I’ll either not take advantage of it because it doesn’t fit in, or I will do it and it will throw us off altogether.

I guess where I’m stumped is by the technicalities: I’m supposed to have a 180-day school year.  But what if it turns out that Bear’s humming along really well and has met the first-grade requirements 3/4 of the way through the year?  Am I still obligated to continue on with lessons from the next grade level, or can we call it an early end to the year?

Also, I want to begin our school year in the final days of August, which blends into the first days of September.  This will be two weeks after we’ve moved The Critters into their new home, which means they’ll have had two weeks to get adjusted to the time difference and learn their way around their new bedrooms and bathrooms and backyard.  Plus it will give me time to get everything together, unpack all the boxes, and find my bearings that I’m almost certain that I’ll have lost by that point.

But here’s the issue: the local school district begins its year on August 4th, which is nearly a full month before we start.  And they end their year on May 27th, which is well before we’ll be done.  I guess that’s not a huge deal, but if she’s got friends in the public schools maybe they’ll want to play while she’s still tied up with schoolwork.  (I think I’m thinking too hard here, but it’s a concern.)

Here’s the thing: I’m scared of this first year.  I don’t know how it’s going to go, and that’s why I want to schedule in planned breaks, so that if either of us is getting burnt out, we know there’s a stop-point to pause and pull ourselves back together.  (And by ‘we’ I actually mean ‘me’.  I think you knew that, though.)

In an ideal world, this is what my homeschooling schedule would look like (not taking into regard state requirements of days spent in the classroom):

• School work four days a week, with one day reserved for field trips (either with a group or on our own) and special activities.  Weekends off.
• A scheduled one-week break every 7-8 weeks to give us some time to catch our breath and/or make up for sick or non-school days that may have occurred in the previous months.
• More of a year-round feel to our schooling, so that at Christmas we get two to three weeks off for enjoying the season and/or visiting family, and only a four to six week break in the summers, to help combat the “I forgot everything I learned last year” catch-up at the beginning of each new school year.

I’m sure I’ll come up with something that works for us, but mostly I think that this first year is going to be filled with a lot of trial and error, in every regard.  We’ll need to figure out the rhythm of our days and how to incorporate Bug into them so that he’s being attended to and I’m also able to focus solely on Bear when she needs my full attention.  We’ll have to work around Tony’s days off of work as well as his potential absences from the home for work reasons.  We’ll have homeschool support groups, and play dates, and extracurricular activities, and field trips to work into the mix, as well as figuring out how to keep the house reasonably picked up and moderately clean.  With clean underwear in our dressers and food in the fridge and on the dinner table, too.

I’m working on a post about all my homeschooling fears to be published later, though.  Probably in a month, when you’re least expecting it, because I know I’ve already hit my quota for this month.

I don’t know.  I guess I’ll work on it still, and see what I can come up with.  Which I guess makes this post obsolete because I had nothing to say other than, “I have no clue what I’m doing”.  Sorry.

(By the way, any feedback that you can give me – any at all, the exception being: “Send her to public school and then you won’t have to worry about it” – is more than welcome.  Thanks.)

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