Homeschooling…ya’ll I just have to share how much I LOVE homeschooling my children. I know I’ve been scarce around the blog lately, but that’s because this time of year just rocks for homeschooling adventures. We’ve been busy soaking up as much fun and adventure as humanly possible.
My second favorite thing about homeschooling is the flexibility in scheduling that homeschooling allows. Sometimes, it’s easy to get bogged down with checking off the ‘to do’ boxes and miss the amazing perks that come with homeschooling. Ya’ll I’m a box checker- getting to the end of the books, teacher guide, etc are pretty important to me. I do often remind myself that even public school kids don’t read or complete every page in their textbooks each year, but I am still compelled to complete to the very last page of almost every subject I teach.
How do I balance these two, competing, areas that I feel are important? Through creative scheduling! I’ve found that opportunities for fun and adventure are scarce in the hottest and coldest times of the year, so I use those times to our advantage for completing our ‘bookwork’. We often begin school as early as July, doing schoolwork only on days that we don’t have anything fun planned, thus completing several weeks of work before public schools open their doors. Then, in January and February we often do double work in at least one or two subjects each day to get even farther ahead. This means that though it’s only mid-April, but we only have 9 days left of written work to complete our last subjects!
As the weather has finally turned Spring-like we’ve spent hours playing in our yard, riding bicycles, going on a nature hunt with friends, roller skating, having park play dates with old friends as well as brand new friends, and spending extra time just soaking up the beautiful weather. Though we only have 9 days of ‘school’ left, we probably won’t finish our year until the first week in May. Instead of bookwork every day, we’ll be ‘schooling’ while spending a day at a local farm, going strawberry picking, learning about Colonial Life at a local plantation, having park play dates, visiting the nature museum, and riding our bicycles.
Homeschooling has some amazing perks, you just have to remember to break routine and take advantage of them!
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