A Day in Our Home School

For my own documentation purposes, I want to include a brief look into a day in our home school. I originally debated whether to be very stringent on our starting time, or whether to be open to beginning whenever we are ready in the morning. While I shoot for a start time of as close to 10:00 a.m. as I can get, I have decided that it is not worth the struggle to start at 10:00 on the dot. (Plus that makes our time portion of school a little more interesting too.) I also initially wondered if I should be laid back about letting the kids "get ready" for school, and about where our classroom was, but decided this was an area where I wanted more structure than not. As a result, the kids and I made a set of five before school rules:

1. Eat Breakfast
2. Get dressed
3. Brush your teeth
4. Comb your hair
5. Make your bed

These may seem like pretty common sense rules to most people, but in our world, if we don't have some place we have to go on a given day, some of these things may never happen. These rules have actually been very good for us, and I think it's ironic that after having kids in pre-school co-ops and other activities for years, homeschooling is the thing that has lead to the most structure and routine that our life has ever had. Crazy.

Anyway, once we have gotten ready for school, it's time for class to start. In our home school, the day always begins with Circle Time Activities. Circle Time Activities are as follows:

*Ring the Bell

*Time-The kids use a digital clock to set the time on our toy clock and I record the date and time in our home school log. During this time we review numbers 1-12, count by fives, learn to understand the nature of time--hours and minutes, discuss how many seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, etc.

*Song--We use "Here We Are Together on our Home School Day"

*Prayer

*Pledge of Allegiance

*Calender Time--This includes reviewing the Months, Days of Week, the Year, Numbers 1-31, counting forwards and backwards, counting by twos, learning general calender knowledge like yesterday, tomorrow, etc, and actually going over what we have on our family calender for the week. I found songs for learning most of this stuff.

*Weather--during weather we go over the seasons, change our weather chart, and record the actual temperature each day. This allows Maddi to work on solidifying and comparing higher numbers. For instance we might discuss: yesterday it was eighty degrees, today it is sixty-seven degrees. Is today hotter or colder than yesterday?

*Shape of the week

*Color of the week

*Number of the week

*Letter of the week

After Circle Time is over, we then move to Table Time. If we are focusing on Numbers that day, we get out our number tiles, our noodles, our calculator, or other math tools and manipulate numbers. The kids do tracing sheets to practice writing numbers, they do math worksheets and activity sheets, dot-to-dots, etc. They also do math problems with magnetic numbers and number tiles using both greater than, less than, and equals to signs, as well as basic addition and subtraction. If we are focusing on letters, they do a tracing sheet, a coloring sheet, and all sorts of activities with letter sounds. As Madison is already a reader, most of this is review for her; however, since all the kids are home schooling, it is really great for them. (Maddi does additional reading time later when the kids are napping too.) It also allows me to work individually with them on penmanship and proper letter formation so that they can learn to make letters and numbers with a single pencil motion rather than picking up their pencil to add humps or tails, etc. My goal is to be through this basic review of all of the letters and number 0-25 before Christmas Break and then move on to diagraphs, etc. for the second half of the year. This will also all be review for Maddi, but I don't want to get her too ahead of where the kindergartens in our area are. While some parents might home school to breed geniuses, that is not my reasoning or my goal.

Once Table Time is over, it's usually almost lunch time and so we break from school for a while. Then at some other point in the day we resume for an hour (or so--we can't seem to keep class to an hour) of either Science, Geography, or a Special Unit class. For these classes, we're a lot more unstructured doing projects, reading books, taking field trips, etc. This is by far the kids favorite part of home school. After all of this, we try to conclude our home school day with a ten minute journal time where the kids can journal (write or draw) about anything they want from that home school day, or even just anything that's on their mind that day.

Well, sorry to bore you all, but that's a typical day in our home school life. Right now we are planning on year round school with an average of three class days a week and random vacations whenever we might choose. This is by far my favorite part of home school. Heaven help us when we decide to send these kids back to public school and have to schedule our lives on someone else's terms!