We school year round, and take mondays off. We take a week off for Christmas, and a couple for thanksgiving. So far so good!
Ours is as needed. I usually take off payday so I can go grocery shopping, pay bills, etc. Our days have been pretty short anyways lately like 1 1/2 - 2 hrs a day. So, I don't feel to many more days during the week are needed to take off. We take a couple days off for Thanksgiving, about a week for Christmas, have fun days on other holidays that hit during school like Valentines day, Halloween and all those. Dh doesn't like seeing us take off too many days during the week. His opinion is that if he was in ps he would be learning right now, so if I am going to hs him he needs to be learning during reg school days.
We don't have scheduled breaks. We take them as we need them. Grandma's coming to town-take a break. One kid is sick-take a break. I'm sick-take a break. Something fun comes up-take a break. PS friends are on break-take a (small) break. Disneyland in the Fall-take a break (7 days away BTW). You get the picture. We also do school on a shortened schedule through the summer so we can enjoy the nice winter weather more.
We take breaks as needed. We started school on July 1st because we like to take time off for the holidays and not be behind. This also allows for us to take last minute vacations too. Our vacations are rarely planned in advance because our plans tend to change because of Handsome's schedule.
Sometimes, we do two days work, so we can take a day off. For example, we are doing that today, so we can go to a Bible college tomarrow to their worship service, then we will go eat out, and then go back to hear a speaker from YWAM. This college, Christ for the Nations, has several things open to the public. If you live in the Dallas area, look them up. I believe it will be a good way to get some more of God into our school day, without cramming the info. Although we are not calling it a school day, I still consider it learning-Bible. I just don't present it to my ds that way.
In addition to the usual holidays, we usually take a day off about every four weeks. Our curriculum is grouped in 20 lesson increments, so this is a good time to take a little extra break in between. It provides an incentive for the kids to get done with each group of 20 lessons as well. We take a day off for field trips once in a while too.
We, it seems take off more breaks than others. But we still get all our work completed with a lot of extras. This year we have a 9 weeks on 3 weeks off schedule. We will take all of august off and have 3 - 3 week breaks through out the year. We also take 2 weeks at christmas. We use a workbook based system for our core subjects. One workbook should take about 3 weeks. If all 4 of the children have completed the workbooks they are suppose to by Thursday of that week they can all have Friday off. It works well for us.
