Of Schedules, School, and Summer

Since we homeschool, I figure that we shouldn’t tie ourselves to the public school schedule and we should do something resembling year-round schooling.  In fact, that’s what we’ve done up until now.  Things are changing, though.

This summer is very busy for my kids.  Wild Man has baseball every day of the week until he goes to camp at the end of of July.  When he comes back from camp, he has two weeks of daily band lessons.  Rosie Girl is at camp right now then will be working on some math lessons.  She will have two piano lessons and works on piano daily and will have a week-long dance intensive in August.  They have more outside structure on their time during the summer than they do during the school year.

This school year, though, they are both going to be involved in classes at the public schools and co-curricular activities.  Wild Man will play percussion at the middle school and Rosie Girl wants to take choir at the high school.  So, we will have to follow the school schedule to a certain extent next year and we won’t be able to take time off on a whim.  In addition, we need to finish when the public schools finish so that Wild Man will be ready for baseball next summer (now that I know how crazy the baseball schedule is for traveling teams).

This is going to seriously impact my scheduling plans.  Last year, I scheduled a week at a time.  We did our Sonlight Core work together so our progress was determined by how I felt as well as everyone’s schedules.  This year will be a lot different, I think.  Rosie Girl will be largely independent in her work.  There isn’t much in the way of new skills to learn, except in math (which her dad will teach her).  I am going to schedule her work at least a month ahead of time, but allow her to work ahead if she wants.

Wild Man’s scheduling will still be done mostly a week at a time.  I’ll probably schedule his Sonlight work several weeks ahead, but his progress in spelling and other language arts subjects will depend on how his skills are progressing.  His reading is much improved this year over last, but I just don’t know how many of the readers he’ll be able to read on his own and things like that.

I guess I’ll spend the next several months trying to sort all this out!  I guess it’s a good thing I like being organized!