School Time
Filed Under (homeschool) by samantha on 02-09-2010
Tagged Under : homeschool, planning, schedules, time management
Every family has a different daily rhythm, depending in part on parents’ work schedules, obligations, and outside activities. While I have some friends whose children begin their schoolwork late in the afternoon and go into the evening, my children seems to get the most completed the earlier we start in the day. If I get them up and they start right to work, the younger ones can be finished by lunchtime, and John just has to work through the early afternoon, leaving time for chores, lessons, errands, and play.
That’s a good plan for us — if we followed it. But often, something deters us. Or rather, something deters me.
Sometimes, if my husband has to leave for work early before the children wake up, I find myself enjoying the quiet a little too much. I wait to get them up, using the time to catch up on projects or reading. It’s a productive morning for me, but they get started later, and the school day seems to go on and on. And if we have errands to do in the afternoon, the kids might still be working on assignments in the evening as well.
I’m thankful for caller ID, but sometimes it can make things more difficult. Though I can avoid morning calls from telemarketers, I also know when family or friends are calling in. Instead of letting the machine pick up the call, I’ll usually try to answer it; after all, it might be an emergency.
Another big distraction for me is the computer. While it’s an invaluable tool for researching assignments, finding worksheets and resources, and connecting with other homeschooling families, “school hours” is not the right time to do it. Though I plan to just “find an activity page” for my first grader, I usually end up checking email and looking around for other resources — in short, spending much longer than I intended, and losing the learning momentum that we started with earlier that day.
The answer? Set a time for school and stick with it. Wake up the children on time, or give them each an alarm clock to set so they’ll wake themselves up on time. Put a message on the phone saying that I’ll be available to take calls after a certain time in the afternoon. Leave the computer off until after all the schoolwork is done; if I need to look something up or find a worksheet, I can make a note of it and do it later in the afternoon. In short, reserve “school time” for school.
How do you keep yourself from getting distracted?
Photo by jppi




Over the past few days, there’s been someone in the family who’s not been feeling well. It seems some sort of stomach virus has been passed from person to person, making it difficult to stick to our regular schedule or get much schooling done. When we are experiencing sick days, I tend to let the lessons slide for the time being and have the children make them up the following weekend.
A couple of weeks ago, we were browsing through a thrift store when I came across a book entitled The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management by Hyrum W. Smith. Smith is one of the creators of the Franklin Planner, a planner my father enjoyed using for years. Because it seems I’m always working towards a better schedule for getting things done, I went ahead and purchased the book without even browsing through it. I think it cost a dollar.
We decided to wait until the second week of January to get back into our schooling routine, so we used the time we had this past week to reorganize our home. It’s something I had wanted to do for quite a while, but busy schedules just hadn’t allowed it. So for the past few days, we’ve been moving furniture, sorting through books, weeding through the toys, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And each day, after a few hours of work, we all take a break.
This year, I was going to be ready for Christmas early. I had finished much of my shopping after Thanksgiving, and I was going to have all my Christmas cards addressed and ready to go by the first of December. And to add a special touch, I was going to make the cards or have the children help me make them. I planned on printing photos of the family to include in the cards as well.
A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, my daughter Cassie turned our local public television station and came across a show called Hannah Help Me! She later relayed to me the contents of the 30-minute show, and I began to wish I had seen it with her.
At a get-together this morning, several of us homeschooling moms had an opportunity to compare what we’ve been doing with our children recently. I feel like we’ve finally found a daily schedule that is going to work well for us, so I told them about my plan. Other moms, then, told how they begin their mornings, and their ideas were great! I left feeling inspired, energized, and ready to make even more changes to the plan.
