A Good Schedule:
The Building Blocks
A successful Home Academic Program is built upon a good, workable schedule.
While each family's needs are widely varied, it is the basic schedule
you carve out for yourself which will provide the solid foundation for
your Home Academic Program.
It is important to set a daily time in which you will begin classes
and end them. The most successful homeschooling households have strict
schedules and they STICK TO THEM. Having a workable schedule will assure
you of ample time to cover each subject set for any given day. In our
household, the schedule has varied over the years, however, one thing
remains constant - we write up a daily/weekly schedule at the beginning
of each school year and carry it through until the last school day.
These guidelines will enable you to accomplish each daily task.
Your schedule needs to include lunch time as well as set break times.
The student needs to know when these will occur. If you have an older
student/s, involve them in creating their own schedule. 'Owning' your
own routine can be extremely empowering. My teenage son prefers to allot
time for each individual subject, having each schedule differ according
to the day of the week. This gives us both the structure we need as
well as providing enough daily difference to keep the routine from becoming
overly stale.
Because a short attention span is frequently synonymous with the home
schooled student, it can be best to tackle the more difficult subjects
first thing in the morning when she/he is feeling the freshest. The
'labs' or any other hands-own projects are generally conducted either
late in the morning or early afternoon in our house.
Now, having stated all the above, it is pertinent to stress that any
schedule you design is not necessarily set in stone. If you find it
isn't working, then toss it out and start over. By the very virtue of
the fact that you have a Home Academic Program, you have the ultimate
luxury which the public schools do not - flexibility. Use it until you
find a daily/weekly schedule which works the best for you and your student/s.
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