In this post, I walk through our daily homeschool schedule on a typical day for us right now. It’s second semester of second grade for my 6-year-old daughter. I have a 2.5-year-old and a newborn who turns 1 month old this week.
Due to the nature of having a newborn, I feel like I’m awake all night. Whether that’s technically true or not, I’m not sure. But if I wake up (from not sleeping?) and it’s after 5 am, I get up and start my day. What and how much I get done depends on whether baby girl is sleeping or being held. But I usually try to get some work done before my older kids wake up. Which is around 7 am most days.
7:00 – 8:30
My 6-year-old and 2.5 year-old wake up, eat brekkie, and play together. While they’re eating, I will usually go over my daughter’s AWANA verses and have her practice them once or twice.
8:30
My alarm goes off. It’s time for the kids to get dressed and get ready to start their day. If I haven’t done it already, I will use my weekly school schedule to write out my daughter’s Daily Assignments sheet. That way, she knows exactly what needs to get done. If she finishes a subject early, great. We go on to the next. I’m more than happy to finish early. This rarely ever happens though. So the following times are pretty accurate.
9:00 – 9:55
By 9 am, we should definitely all be seated around the kitchen table and ready to start school. Our first “class” is maths. We do flashcards together and then, depending on the day, my daughter is usually working in her Abeka textbook or her Singapore textbook. (I have an entire post about how we use multiple maths curricula.)
My 2.5-year-old, if he’s not playing with his trucks or train, and wants to be involved, he’ll either get his sandpaper number cards and we’ll go through the numbers 0 – 10, counting out the appropriate number blocks for each card. Or he’ll get out his Kumon maths workbook for the numbers 1-30. This, of course, is way too old for him. However, it is a textbook with numbers and he feels like he is doing maths with his sister. Which he is. Baby girl usually wakes up sometime during this block, so my daughter ends up doing a lot of her maths on her own, with me checking it afterwards.
10:00 – 10:25
After maths, we have almost half an hour to study French together. Right now, we’re focusing on prepositions. We do matching games with flashcards for vocabulary and work on literacy (reading practice). I also end up using our whiteboard for French quite a lot and this will usually get my son interested in drawing on that when we go into our next block.
10:30 – 11:25
By now, we’re doing English. My daughter does Abeka for grammar, cursive writing and spelling. She then spends the rest of the time reading aloud to me. Unless my daughter is reading aloud, I can usually spend this time playing with my son, if he wants. He also loves to bring stacks of books to the kitchen table. So I will read quietly to him while my daughter works and I can answer questions and/or check her work as need be.
11:30 – 12:55
It’s now officially lunch. The kids play together (usually destroying the living room in the process) while I prepare a simple lunch. We sit down to eat together and listen to the audiobook version of our history textbook. This is a new thing for us since baby girl came and I had to improve our time management. As somebody who regularly listens to audiobooks on 2x speed, this is actually killing me. But my daughter likes it and I can eat while she hears her lesson. So it’s a keeper. I end up feeding baby girl again sometime around here. And the kids go back to playing together until it’s time for music practice.
13:00 – 13:55
After lunch, with full tummies and good blood sugar levels, my daughter and I practice violin together. She’s currently working on a Boccherini piece that she just loves, which makes practice time so much more enjoyable.
14:00 – 15:00
Science is my daughter’s favourite subject. And because I’ve gone all out this year in making sure we do a lot of hands-on activities and experiments, my 2.5-year-old is usually pretty engaged too. If not, he’s probably back to playing with his trains.
15:00
It’s tea time / goûter for the kids (and baby girl is usually waking up again). Our school day is officially over now. Anything that did not get done is moved to the following day. And anything not done by 3 pm on Friday is finished on Saturday. My daughter knows that she can finish as early as she wants if her work is done. I will not make up things for her to do until 3 pm. This usually helps motivate her to work at an appropriate pace. However, knowing that anything left undone has to be done on Saturday and will cut into her play time and screen time is usually a good motivator as well.
I never used to schedule our day like this – where each subject has a specific hour. The entire first semester of second grade, we always managed to get maths, French and English done before lunch, give or take a few minutes. Then we’d practice violin after lunch and finish up with science and history. We’d finish our school day around 3 or 3:30 pm every day.
However, after baby girl came and the interruptions got more frequent, I quickly figured out that some things were consistently not getting done. We were trying to finish the same amount of work as first semester (or less, even), but it was taking longer. In the interest of consistency over perfectionism, I decided to just keep the day moving like back when I ran a classroom of 30+ students and had to get through my lesson before the bell rang, no matter what.
It’s certainly a different approach to homeschooling. I have high academic standards for my homeschool, but I’ve never been one to say that homeschooling is just school at home. And yet, even though I feel like I’m back to my high school teaching days, this truly is the most efficient way to do school for us right now.
What about you? Are you homeschooling with little kids who haven’t started lessons yet? How do you accomplish your daily homeschool schedule without letting interruptions derail the entire day?
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Homeschooling when Both Parents Work
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