Homeschool methods update – Part 2 of 3 – a typical day

This is the second in a short series of three posts we are doing for a friend who is starting to homeschool this year. We have no illusions about our homeschooling method and plans being right for anyone else, but we thought it might be a help for others to get a sense for what works for at least one family. The following is links to the first and third of the three posts:

Homeschool methods update – Part 1 of 3 – curricula
Homeschool methods update – Part 3 of 3 – college

Today I am going to try to describe a typical day of homeschool in the Chapman household. This is material about which I have previously written, but due to an email we received from some of our friends in Australia who are just getting started homeschooling I thought it might be nice to explain how we go about it. We make no claims about our homeschool methods other than that they work for us. Most days are not typical homeschool days because every day of the week is occupied with, not only the academic subjects we cover, but all the extracurricular activities in which the children participate. I will try to capture all of that, too. This will divided into two categories. First, there is a the kids study schedule. Second, I explain what I do to prepare, teach, and correct.

Schedule

• 5:50 – Dad goes to work
• 7:00 – Get up, make their beds, get dressed, read their bibles, and memorize their bible verses
• 8:00 – Christian practices guitar, Kelly practices Piano
• 8:45 – Breakfast
• 9:15 – Clean up (floss, brush, wash face, etc.)
• 9:30 – Morning academic subjects: Math, grammar, history, literature, vocabulary
• 12:00 – Lunch
• 12:30 – Afternoon academic subjects: Writing, Spanish, science
• 2:30 – Break for a snack
• 2:45 – More literature, history, catch-up, and corrections
• 3:30 – Go out and play until Dad gets home.
• 4:30 – Dad comes home and calls his partner, Ron at Quality Corners
• 5:30 – Dad starts corrections
• 6:00 – Kids come in and start on corrections and work with Dad on new materials
• 6:30 – Dinner
• 7:00 – Spelling and continued work on corrections and new materials
• 7:30 – Kelly and Christian read aloud to Dad and work on a jigsaw puzzle while he does his exercises
• 8:15 – Goof off until bedtime at 9:00

We are playing to do one or two days per week of drawing, painting, or pottery starting in the next week or so in addition to the following extracurricular activities:

Monday – Kelly baby sits a group of small kids with a girl from Santiam Christian School
Tuesday – Tennis and Kelly’s Piano (we are deciding on what to do about Boy Scouts on Tuesday nights)
Thursday – Tennis and Christian’s Guitar

Preparation

Each week I prepare a one page schedule for each day of the week for each of the kids. We stick very close to the schedule recommended by our Sonlight curricula provider for Science, History and Literature. We go a little faster than many on the mathematics because the kids can handle it and the Teaching Textbooks lends itself to one lesson per day. The same is true for the Wordly Wise vocabulary program and the Easy Grammar and Easy Writing programs. They spend twenty minutes per day on Rosetta Stone Spanish. Christian spends 30 minutes per day on his elective material which is C# programming while Kelly spends that much time or more writing and illustrating stories that we are going to put into a book at the end of the year.

The schedules are setup so the kids know what they are supposed to do before breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, and when I get home. It is setup as a checklist that gives them enough flexibility to make some decisions on their own about when they will do each element of the program, but structured enough so they can know whether they are ahead or behind at any given point in the day.

It usually takes me a couple of hours on Saturday morning to put a weeks schedule together and I usually have two weeks of schedule ahead of the kids when they start on a Monday morning. I keep each schedule in one large spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org. We print out five pages (one per day) per kid per week that they keep in a large, zip-up loose leaf binder. If I have to make adjustments during the week I can just pencil them in. When they finish any materials, they put their work into the binder behind the schedule for the day on which they are working so I can easily get to it for correction. They also put a red sticky note in any books where they have performed work so I can find them easily. When I correct, I put a sticky note of another color into the places where the corrections are required.

Testing

In addition to the normal, end of chapter tests we give in Math and Science, the kids take a nationally normed standardize test each year to see where they are relative to government, private, and homeschool students throughout the country. This year they will take the test in early April. This testing takes two or three days and is much more comprehensive and rigorous than the testing performed on the Oregon government school students. The State of Oregon is currently going through another effort to further lower the score required to pass and/or rigor of their tests. Kelly and Christian will be taking the Stanford Achievement Test which will be administered by one of the local private schools.

Next: Our plans to prepare the kids for college