How our days look like

This week question for the blog cruise is:
“Do you follow a traditional school day/time/schedule/year?”
While homeschooling you can have a pretty flexible schedule.   If you observe different homeschoolers you will quickly realized that no two houses will have a same schedule.

Homeschooling permits you do adjust regularly while facing life’s events.  But at the same time, I find that routine is also necessary for children.

Consequently, I try to start school at about 830ish in the morning.  Some days we can start earlier than that and other days we start at 9ish but most of the days we start on time.

My eldest son knows that his days should start with reading the Bible and doing his devotion (just like me).    As the kids grow and learn to read, we want to instil the habit of reading the Bible on a regular basis. 
When all the kids are up, their job is to empty the dishwasher.   We are a family all living in the same house and everyone has to pitch in on the daily chores which are part of life.

Our “school” time in the morning goes up until noon.    During that time, I try to cover the basics like maths, English, and French.   In the afternoon, I would do other things with my eldest while the other kids take a nap.  

The only day where this routine is changed would be the Wednesday where the two younger kids nap in the morning and the two older boys and I would do some science in the morning.  Right now, we are studying the Human Anatomy together.  In the afternoon we have swimming lessons.

On Thursdays, the kids go to AWANA in the evening.  This also mean that they go to bed later that night.   Consequently, the Friday morning is more relax but we still do school.

We don’t follow the tradition school schedule.   For example, even though Christmas has come, we still did the basis some days during the Christmas Holidays.  Why?  Simply because we have found in the past that the month of February is the hardest for us.   So now we slow down in February and take it easy.   We do school but not as much as the other months.   

During the summer, we explore various things and still learn but not with the books per say.    Routine is not established during the summer per say.   We often take the opportunity to go explore the surroundings of our trailer site, fishing and travel a bit.   In our travelling, we always make sure that we visit various museums, zoos or aquariums if possible.

In the end, our learning is year long.   Anything that could be converted as a teaching lesson is taken advantage of.   Normally, we start our “school” in August and are able to finish in May.   We had a year we were even able to finish at the end of April.

While homeschooling we have the opportunity to have flexibility in our days/months/years.    We won’t have two years the same for that matter.    The beauty of homeschooling is that we can adjust the pace depending of what is happening in the family.