Our Day and Week at a glance | Homeschooling

Yearly Homeschool Schedule

With a First Grader, Pre-K, Toddler, and Newborn... This is what our days look like with our three boys and a girl at home.

We are shooting for a July/Aug to March/April school year. Now, this is because I've watched our family the last few years, and ALLLL we want to do when the snow is melting in the early spring is get outside. Explore. So, we still can "do school" from Sept through to May or June like "normal" schedules, but I want to TRY to just be done before then. Plus, it's so hot and exhausting by the time July heat and humidity rolls around that we're done weeding, working in the yard, and ready to stay in the cool house for a few hours every day anyway, so this year, it made sense to get started.

This year, 2017-2018, we started school August 1. 

Most school calendars account for 32 to 36 weeks of school. I don't have a state requirement yet that makes us do a certain number of school days per year, or even number of hours, so we are flying by the seats of our pants, following what others tend to do.

Monday-Thursday, we follow a loose plan. And some Fridays.  

We basically just try to hit these three points

•Morning High Five (five things to start the day on the right foot: See below, for more on this)
•Morning Time (sing the Doxology, bible story, story of the world history or weekly read aloud, bible memory, skip counting, sing ABCs)
•School Lessons (Recitation, Copybook, Math, Spelling, Reading/Phonics, Read to Me)

At breakfast I might read one of the things we need to hit for the day: short poem from our enrichment list, or story of the world, or a bible story from our curriculum. Sometimes I also read through what we're reading together in the Bible. This year, it's the Psalms again, because we didn't get far last year :)
A Happy Household Helper.

Morning High Five

1. Make bed

2. Get dressed & put pj's away

3. Eat breakfast

4. Brush hair & teeth

5. Happy household helpers

For Morning High Five, we got the idea from A Nest Full of Squishers blog . She shares this great free printable, too! So please head over to that site and read about Morning High Fives :)


It doesn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes to do something helpful. My rule is that the Happy Household Helper thing should be outside of their standard chores (like tidying up their own toys in there room, or clearing their own meals or putting their dirty clothes away...) It should be something in a common place. To do this happily as a helpful household duty is a blessing to the whole family. "Clean the kitchen floors" "Vacuum the rugs"... Those are the kinds of things that the kids know I expect from their happy household helpers time. We trained them in on it, and now it's easy. I throw a few options/ideas out there. I might say, "who wants to do this, this or this" and when I list three things, those three hustle to the one they'd rather do.


typical break from the heat.
Bathtime is one thing to keep these two in one place for 10 mins.
(bath is right off the kitchen so I can see them and Cody at the table if he works there) 
Codeman, doing some K Math with the Math-U-See blocks and other flashcards
This sight is part of our every moment this year :)

Everything I do feels like its feeding someone, cleaning up someone, or physically helping someone in some way. That's the exaggerated version. But it helps you in the virtual world to see that I'm not bouncing around, chipper and free-handed to do things magically, all the time. I am often nursing a babe from the couch, shouting things to my kids before I'm able to get up and join them. There are a lot of times that I have to say, "Not right now." Sometimes the cyber world makes things appear more glamorous. Please don't pretend bloggers and youtubers aren't real. We are all real! Some are more skilled at other things than you, and you are more skilled at others than them. In the same way, everyone has their own circumstances. Different numbers of kids, different houses and properties, different towns and cities and states and countries... It's so fun to see what there is and how others do life, but just remember that YOU ARE BLESSED. 

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