I’ve read in a few homeschool books and heard some experienced mamas on blogs/podcasts talk about how they schedule their year differently than the normal school year. After a lot of research, thought and discussion at home we’ve decided to give it a whirl! We are starting to do six weeks of school and then one week off. I was super hesitant at first because this means we won’t have a ‘real’ summer break of 3 months off. The more I read and heard about it, the more appealing it became… Every six weeks we get a break to relax and I have the chance to evaluate what is working and what isn’t. I can plan for six weeks at a time without feeling overwhelmed and we can start working on a loop schedule. Looping will help me get to the subjects that get pushed aside when there isn’t enough time in a day to do alllll the things. I will explain more about looping in a future blog, but essentially what we do is our everyday subjects; bible daily devotional, math, language arts, handwriting and reading and then one loop subject when we can. So I came up with a small list of subjects I would like to cover with the kids; science, geography and art, which we will rotate through with our loop. We took our week off this week and I planned activities/books to read to cover those subjects. I feel more prepared than I have all year and we are so excited for the coming weeks!
During our week off my kids got to play outside, spend time with their grandparents, and play! Some of the things they played in our home had my heart soaring!! We recently did a small science section on the rainforest and while I was busy working on planning, they created a rainforest in our home. I was SO impressed with literally everything! They created a waterfall out of paper on our window with rocks at the bottom, they created paper chain snakes, worms out of playdough, they cut out pink dolphins, made a paper sloth, they made pineapple trees, palm trees, flowers and soooo many animals. Then Cecilia played rainforest sounds on our Alexa. They grabbed camo gear, binoculars and a video camera to capture their findings as they traveled down the river in the rainforest. All of this made me smile bigger than I have in a while, I didn’t use some fancy curriculum to teach them this…we did some craft crates that I found and grabbed a TON of books from the library. They clearly absorbed more than I could of hoped for. For me, this is what education is becoming and everything a kid’s childhood should be.
