I wanted to post this because it transformed our homeschool last year. Each year, like most of you probably, we would start off strong and by Christmas were burned out. Then we would try to get all psyched to get back to school in Jan, only to be ready to end it by the end of April, and often not finishing something or other for the year. Well, I stumbled across a method of homeschooling/scheduling in the Home Educating Family Magazine last year, early summer. It is called Sabbath Schooling. The idea is that you do school for 6 weeks and then take a week off, thus calling it the "Sabbath Week". Then back to school for 6 weeks and another week off, and so on. We did this and took 4 weeks off in December and our spring break was scheduled during a "Sabbath Week" during the week of April. This leave you finishing school mid-late June and then taking about 6 weeks off for the summer. This is all on a 4 day school week too! How did it work in our home? Let's just say that for the first time since we started homeschooling we did NOT get burned out. It helped me to keep my daughter focused and gave her something to work hard for and look forward to. The dreaded threat of "you can always do schoolwork during our Sabbath Week", was enough to keep her movitated. I would do my lesson plans for 6 weeks at a time and on my week off I would refresh, reflect, and do another 6 weeks of lesson plans. I encourage anyone who has suffered burnout before to read this blog about Sabbath Schooling: http://angelinainlouisiana.blogspot.com/2008/10/weekly-report-sabbath-week.html!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!! I haven't even checked the link yet, but I can tell you that I feel like you might have just saved my sanity. We suffer burn out so bad, especially the older the kids get and the "heavier" the burden of school becomes. I'm a little scared to make lesson plans for 6 weeks at a time, though. Scary stuff.
You would not need to do lesson plans for 6 weeks at a time if you didn't want to. I just do. I find it works well for us because we sometimes get behind in a lesson or two in science or history if we need to stretch it out a bit and then I don't have to erase a bunch of stuff. I am not the type of person to do lesson plans for a whole year or even semester. I used to do them each week for the next week, I just don't have time now. It is the "method" that you follow that saves you from burnout, not the lesson planning. She explains it all in the blog I posted, but even for attendance requirements (whatever state(s) has them), it works, I do believe. I will never do any other way of schooling. I feel like finding this was a nugget from God to help me with my own sanity.
We do a variation of this but in 9 week cycles - we call the week off our "bye" week - we took the idea from my ds' rocket football schedule. The "bye" week was the week your team did not have a game. We find it works really well for us. We don't completely stop doing work - we finish projects, do extra art, go on a field trip or schedule extra time with friends and family.
We do Sabbath Schooling, too. Though I will admit that sometimes our break may come a week early or late, depending on if it will coincide better with an event or activity. Last year was our first year, and we LOVE it!!!
I do wonder though how you do a 4-day week AND Sabbath schooling while still getting in days? Of course this is assuming you have to cover 180 days... LOL
We do block scheduling on a modified 4 day schedule. Our Mondays typically involve sports, tutoring, etc, so we are too "busy" to get a lot of school done - that is usually the day I try to do read alouds and the like. Plus, the tutoring is in Math, so the kids get math every day. Then we do history/language arts T/TH and Science/Math W/F. We also do piano and spanish 4-5 days a week as well. We do this schedule for 8-9 weeks, then have our Bye-week.
A 4 day week will not coincide with 180 days. We do 36 weeks of 4 day school weeks. The math adds up to 144 days. If you HAD to keep your days at 180, you could do 5 days like that and it equals 180 days. That said, we have no attendance policies in Florida. Our 5th day is our homeschool group day for park days and field trips. I found we had adequate amount of time to get all of our curricula done with just 144 days.
