A friend recently asked me to share our schedule, so I took some notes about what we did today. Our homeschooling week is a little unusual because of parental work schedules. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we do what I think of as our “basic core,” because there is limited parental time at home. On Tuesday and Thursday there is a parent home all day, so those are the days we schedule things like projects and science experiments.
Here is an example of how much work Alex does in a “basic core” day.
7:45: I woke Alex up. Colin had already been up for a while, listening to stories. Everybody got dressed and had breakfast.
8:40-8:50: Writing With Ease 2. Right now she’s doing studied dictation. That means that yesterday she copied a written passage, and today she took the same passage as dictation. We talked about the writing conventions in the passage; today the focus was on punctuating interjections. The passage was from Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper:” “Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats. Oh, how I wish we had a trap!”
8:55-9:35: Math. Alex did pages 86 and 87 in the Beast Academy 3b practice book, which involved more practice applying the distributive property. She was given a set of story problems about the game Beastball, which has oddly-named scoring events worth various numbers of points. When you stripped away the cute story, it was asking her to work problems like:
6 x 13 + 7 x 6 = 6 x (13 + 7) = 6 x 20 = 120.
She likes these problems and concentrated well, so math went really smoothly. I don’t have the book at hand right now, but I’m guessing that two pages worked out to about 14 problems. (Beast Academy has a “fewer, but harder, problems” philosophy.)
9:35: Ten-minute break for Alex while I read Colin Henry and Mudge.
9:45-10:15: Michael Clay Thompson’s Grammar Island. We read about indirect objects and how they operate in sentences, and also how the object of a preposition differs from direct and indirect objects. For four sentences, Alex identified all the parts of speech (noun, verb, etc.) and the parts of the sentence (subject, simple predicate, direct object, indirect object).
10:15-10:40: Lively Latin. After reviewing a handful of old vocabulary terms, she studied a new vocabulary set, listening to an .mp3 of the Magistra pronouncing the words and then repeating them after her. Afterward she did a vocabulary worksheet that involved giving the Latin words for a series of clip art pictures, and a Roman history review sheet that involved labeling a map with early Rome’s neighboring tribes and remembering which enemy tribe was involved in various historical incidents. (We had to look a lot of them up.)
10:45-11:05: All About Spelling 4. For each spelling lesson, we set the timer on my phone for 18 minutes and work wherever we happen to be in the book until the timer goes off. Today it was sentence dictation, so I read Alex sentences and she wrote them down in her spelling notebook. She had to make several corrections today, so we only got through four sentences in 18 minutes. Sample sentence: “This apple is the worst one of the bunch!”
When spelling is done, we’re done with “basic core.” I did ask Alex to pick the next book she’s planning to read from the “2nd grade reading” shelf, because she finished Nim’s Island on Friday and hadn’t started a new one yet. She chose A Lion to Guard Us by Clyde Robert Bulla and read the first few chapters – maybe 24 pages. It looks like a pretty easy read. In her free time she’s reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so it feels a little funny to prod her to choose from the assigned shelf too. But I want to establish the habit that she reads our choices as well as her own choices, and I don’t want to judge her personal reading by saying that Harry Potter is a legitimate assigned-book replacement but, say, Zita the Spacegirl isn’t.
So, that’s it. That’s a school day at its most basic. Tomorrow I don’t go in to work at all, so we have a lot more time – among other things, I’ll do a 90-minute chemistry lesson with lab experiments for Alex and her friend Benji. Yesterday Michael didn’t work at all, so they read about the Ottoman Empire in Alex’s history book and did some map work and built a model cannon that shoots ping-pong balls out of cardboard tubes and rubber bands. Art and music and PE fill in all around the edges, often with our nanny in the afternoons; for example, so far this week there’s been some painting, a lot of origami, a trip to the swimming pool, and a playground visit.
If you have a 7-year-old or second grader in public or private school, I would be really interested to know how you think the volume of work compares. Obviously the day is much shorter; people say that homeschooling is much more efficient, but I wonder if Alex is also just doing a lot fewer assignments than the average school kid her age.
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Hi Rebecca!
I wrote a much longer thing offline this morning and then decided it was too detailed/boring. The shortened version: I think the workload sounds similar to Ava’s last year, with two exceptions: math and writing. Ava probably did a little more math as she always did a solid hour of math every day. Kids who worked faster had more work, so she was always working even though she’d always finish the assigned work early. For her, this probably meant 2-3 pages in the workbook, 0 to 1 pages of homework (they had about 3 pages a week and they could finish in class), a two-minute drill of math problems, and one or two “challenge sheets.”
Ava had a very writing-focused teacher last year, and I think she wrote for about 45 minutes to an hour a day. Some of it was not technically writing– she would illustrate her books so she’d draw as well. But I think an hour was usually devoted to the production of a book, formal letter, poem, or journal entry.
Of course, it’s important to mention that Ava has a pretty well-behaved class of only 14 kids, so time is probably spent more efficiently than most schools.
Molly, thanks for your comments. (I probably would’ve been interested in the long version too.) I am not surprised that you see a big difference in the writing – that’s often talked about as one of the major difference between homeschooling and school.
I love hearing about your kids’ school. It’s wonderful that you guys have it in your life.
Hi Rebecca,
I love reading your blog. It’s wonderful to see your journey, and it makes me feel more in touch when I miss you all. Which is often.
It’s worth noting of course that Ava’s 5 pages of math a day is volume-wise more, but still less efficient than Alex’s because, even though her school is about as individualized as a school can get (her last page or two a day is specifically chosen for her current abilities), it’s still not reflecting exactly what she’s capable of at a current moment like Alex’s work is.
I’ll include the more detailed description about the writing– feel free not to read if it gets too long… I did love the way her teacher inspired the kids.
The teacher rotates through intensive time on each reading group (with 2-3 kids in a reading group, about 1.25 to 1.5 hours a day, I think). The other days the kids rotate through a series of writing and reading. I think there are five choices, and rotate through: silently reading their collections of poems and songs (they love this!), reading their assigned reading (can be anything from their Lexile Level box), and then open journal, guided journal, and creative writing. I think they end up writing at least 3-6 hours a week, in different chunks, depending on the kid. (For kids who really need to work on reading, they get extra time with the teacher or our class intern, so I think they spend less time on writing).
For guided journal, the kids have a series of questions they can answer. (It led, for example, to a list of Ava’s Pet Peeves, which included, “Being tidy” and “not hurting other people when they hurt me”). Sometimes the teacher has them all do guided journal based on a question she writes on the board, or has them go outside and write a poem on the season or the weather. Every year in the 2nd grade the kids get deeply into creative writing and “publish” their own books. Any child who finishes a book can “publish” the book on Fridays by reading it to the class. The kids will write sequels or companion novels to each other’s books and get so into it that they often continue writing if they have indoor recess in the classroom due to bad weather. The children also write letters to each other and to their class stuffed animal, Sunny. The kids love it that Sunny writes back! (When Mia was in second grade I felt guilty because she wrote to Sunny almost every day, in code… after decoding many letters Sunny finally wrote back that he was just a simple dog with a dog’s brain and needed English letters only, please).
There are exceptions to this routine. Last year two parents who are published book authors came in and gave them lessons about different aspects of creative writing (they made their own manga books with the dad; from the mom they learned every bit of the process of making a picture book: brainstorming, plotting, writing it, having it formally edited, doing multiple drafts, choosing the end papers, and having a book launch party). Every year they also spend about 3 weeks working on their Author’s Tea story. They formally map their plot, write their own stories and revise them at length, then illustrate them. Then one evening the parents, grandparents, classmates, and friends all show up while they take turns reading their story out loud during the class’ formal Author’s Tea. Every class has an Author’s Tea, and kids from other grades come to listen. After hearing about ours, some of our local homeschool friends started hosting their own Author’s Tea.