In this new year, with growing kids and new needs, we have at last settled into a new routine. As a child I always had this thing that I could not “sleep in” because there was obviously ten thousand very important things that had to be done at soonest (or not 😁 ). And if I did try to lie in a bit, I would be overwhelmed by this extreme guilt and throw myself out of bed, anxiously looking for something very important to be done. That has luckily changed a lot and especially with having kids, the moment the opportunity to sleep late shows up, you grab it with both hands and don’t let go for as long as you can!
When starting with home-schooling however, initially I put so much pressure on myself to be up and going as early as can be, because obviously we cannot think that for a moment life could actually be a bit more relaxed now that we made this lifestyle change! And then when things didn’t happen early enough, I would feel that our day of homeschooling was a failure. Welllll, well, that has also luckily changed now and our way of doing have evolved into this lovely very relaxed new way of doing. When starting our homeschool journey and not really being surrounded by much other homeschool families, I remember that one of my biggest concerns and frustrations was “If I don’t just repeat school at home, how does a normal day in the life of OUR homsechool then look like?”. Although we chose this new way of doing, I do still like routine and with my kids it definitely helps to ground them, so the total free learning, free time (unschool) approach would not completely work for us.
There are SO many different ways of approaching homeschooling, and when planning to do so, make sure you expose yourself to as many as possible approaches, ways and routines. Soon you will find out what would work best for you, your kiddos and your family culture. This will (and should) all revolve around what you and your family value most together with what you would like to achieve through your homeschooling.
So for those of you still playing around with the idea, those who have already started but still looking around to see how others do it and for those who are just curious, here it is in short, with the obvious daily variation. Our basic perfect homeschool day would look as follows:
We’ll wake up without a clock, whenever everyone wakes up 😃 usually around 7 o’clock in the morn. After that the kids will start sorting themselves for breakfast, while me and Martin have a quiet'ish cup of coffee and chatting through whatever we need to chat through for the day. After that the kids all do their daily chores and then by the time I’m already making my second cup of tea we would start with the schooling part. Then we would be busy for round about 2½ to 3 hours (depending on what we are busy with), after which we are done. The rest of the day the kids play and have some extra-mural activities (not too much though!) and Bob’s your uncle! Day done! I try to spend two days a week on the 3 R’s (reading, writing and Maths), and 2 days on a variety of the social sciences, biology and science side. And on our 5th day we have our outings, a lovely long playdate or just about whatever we want!
Good luck with finding your way!
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