Home School Curriculum Experts

“What does your day look like?” I get that question often from other homeschoolers and prospective homeschoolers. Maybe they’re looking for suggestions, or maybe for reassurance that, compared to me, they aren’t doing so badly :) My reply is usually “which day?” Being a fairly (okay, extremely) Type-A person, I do have a daily schedule which I begin each year with, always hoping that this is the year we are going to stick to it. But somewhere toward the middle or end of the first week, something happens to throw a monkey wrench into those plans – a doctor’s appointment, a sick child, an unexpected field trip opportunity, great weather, a speech therapy appointment, a needed book not coming in at the library or in the mail, a friend needing help….just a few of many reasons why I have to start juggling my day again. Being not just Type A, but rabidly Type A, for the first few years this threw me into a tailspin – if I could not keep my day’s schedule in the order I wanted, I felt like a homeschooling failure. Yes, I had heard that one of the benefits of homeschooling was that you did not have to recreate the classroom at home, but for someone like me it was one thing to hear it and another to really believe it and think that my kids would be okay if something put a glitch in their educational day. So I would struggle…always trying to strain each day into the schedule I had created, and feeling defeated when I did not. But I learned something along the way. My diligence to the kids completing their work and learning did not have to come in the form of a rigid daily schedule. Math did not have to be completed at the kitchen table every day at 9:20 a.m. in order for it to happen and for learning to take place. Sometimes math happened in the car, or in the waiting room. Sometimes it happened at night, or on a Saturday. I was so afraid of letting go of that schedule, afraid that in doing so my kids’ education would splinter and fall apart. I had seen people whose children just did not get taught, and in my mind that was the thumb in my back, the thing that kept me clinging to my schedule. I was not going to let that happen. As I got a few years under my belt, however, I noticed something. For all the years I had fretted over schedules gone awry, my kids were still doing fine academically. We still got things covered. They still, for the most part, were learning what they needed to learn. Education officials were not knocking down my door, wondering why my daughter did not know her times tables.

Although I have learned not to let the unexpected throw me as much as it once did, I find that it still helps me to start the year out with a schedule - but it’s a different sort of schedule. I know that, for me, I have to at least have a framework in place, a goal to shoot for, a benchmark to measure with. I have had years when I came to March and realized that we were only halfway through what we needed to learn that year. I have also had years where we were finishing in March, and I realized that the reason some of my kids had struggled that year was because I had pushed them too fast and too hard. So now, the daily schedule is not so much a factor in our lives, but the yearly schedule is. Before the school year starts, I sit down and set concrete academic goals for the year, and then I divide those goals quarterly, and then weekly. For me, this provides the security I need that we are somewhat on track, that even though that day or even that week did not go as planned, in the big picture we are still moving where we need to go. Do I still have to revise that? Sure I do – a child struggling academically (or advancing faster academically), a poor curriculum choice, changed priorities – all these things factor in and may force me to change my big picture. But for me, having that big picture in the first place provides me freedom – I know what my boundaries are and I have the freedom to work inside those boundaries, as well as the security that boundaries and a framework provide. It works for me…my own little playpen:)