In another thread some were talking about taking breaks. Especially, when burnt out. The breaks sound so fantastic to me. But, how?? According to my state we need to school 180 days and 5 hrs a day. How do we do that and still have summer vacation?
It's just like full round public school. I believe its on 3 off for 1 with a little variation to fit 180 days in equally. So you would school through the summer but make the schedule a little lighter. Maybe work in june take of July, etc.
That's why I would NEVER live in New York!!! 180 days divided by 5 gives me 36 weeks. There's 52 weeks in a year. That leaves 16 weeks free.
Well if you think of it, there are 365 days in a year.. minus 180 that means you have 185 days free. I'm not sure I see the problem. For us we try to go year around, we NEED December off because of the holiday and 3 kidlet birthdays all in the same week as Christmas. We try to start the second week of July, "school" for 9 weeks and take a week off, then school for 9 more weeks and take off the week of Thanksgiving through the first full week after New Years (this is a 6 week break). We then go 9 weeks, take one off and go 9 more and finish the second week of May. Now, when we get burned out, I still want to be able to count those days as school... so we will do field trips, or watch videos or play games... or what ever.
Ok I think you are misunderstanding NY regs. You need to do the equivalent of 180 days which for elementary is 900 hrs broken up however you want. You can include, Sunday School, going to the park, household chores, field trips (zoo, park, museum...), sports, educational computer time, library trips..... You will find that it is so easy to go over the 900 hours if you remember to include all of those things when counting your hours. Also remember the school year officially starts in NY on July 1st. There is no reason you can not count any summer activities in your hours if they have an educational component. We take off a little time at Thanksgiving and then a couple weeks at Christmas. We also take off a day here and day there through out the year (trips to family, family visiting, birthdays, Mom just needs a day off...) We start at the end of August and finished at the begining of June. Dd had way more hours than the required and we normally finished our standard work by noon.
Since this is our first year HS, I am not sure how it will work out, but we started on the 9th of August in hopes that we could take a couple extra weeks off at Christmas to enjoy the holidays! I plan on teaching my kids about the different traditions around the world that people have at Christmastime, so technically we are still in school, right? Anyway, it will be fun this year not to stress about school parties and getting items brought in and buying for a kid, ect. I plan on doing a lot of baking with the kids at the holidays this year!
I guess that does make sense. We have done a lot of field trips already. Every vacation we go on my dh and I make sure to find something educational for them to do. All my kids like to do is play educational games on the computer and with all the sports they do I have gym covered. So I guess we are off to a good start. Thank you for all the helpful advise. I told my kids since we have already completed the "first day" of school. On the first day of public school I will bring my kids to a amusement park near us. It would have to be in between my runs. (I drive school bus for local ps) What smiles. I told them just because we can!
All you have to do is figure out what school really means to you and what its all about. Is it primarily about honor roll, cliques, lunch, social interactions, influencing and being influenced by others, going through "the process" just for the sake of going through the process, and studying to the test and for the test and forgetting almost everything afterwards? Or is about learning for the sake of learning and exploring the world through books, manipulative's, models, art, the environment, media and life itself? When you ever a HS is doing something that shows them, or reinforces something they already know, thats "school" So, yeah, a good baking day, if viewed through the right lenses can be counts as math, health, Home Ec, even social studies if you converse about the fact that in the US we eat certain things that other nations would never eat! and maybe recall something about global diets you read, heard or saw, talk about and speculate on what other nations/regions eat and why they eat those things! Remind your children not to judge or criticize people for their different diets (some people DO eat bugs!)and you can even call it Citizenship/Character lessons! Talk about the price of ingredients and how it fits into your budget, mention the family budget and responsible spending habits and why you can only afford to bake 9 items in one day once or twice a month and you can even say you did a bit of economics or personal finance. Open your mind to the possibilities and realities of learning and free yourself from the "There is But One Way -- The Typical Public School Way" mentality!
We also school year round. We only do in-house schoolwork Mon-Thurs. Fridays are "field trip" days, which can be anything from a day at the museum to a day at the playground to a day helping Papa garden. We don't take off for the summer. Instead, we take off days or a week or two as needed for holidays, vacations or just a break. I'm so thankful that our province doesn't require us to account for any certain amount of time spent on school.
In Louisiana, when you send in your notification to the state each year, you "promise" to do 180 days of a sustained curriculum that is at least equal to the quality (and I use the term quality loosely) of that taught in the public schools for the age or ability level (in the case of special needs kids) of the child. But NObody actually checks - they accept your signature that you did/are going to. No hours to count per day, no specified subjects to teach in any specified order (although they kind of assume, apparently, that if you're providing the "quality" of the public school, you're also providing the same subjects), and other than your signature on the paper, no specified number of days per year. That said, I feel that because we're schooling Other People's Kids, we need to adhere to a 180 day schedule (well, we plan 180, although circumstances may make us miss a day or so here and there. The public schools can miss a certain number of emergency days without making them up, so I figure we can too.
