Year round schooling?
What is it?
Do you do it?
How do you do it?
Why do it?
Isn’t that over board?
Don’t kids need a break?
You’ve probably realized by now what this post will be discussing. I’m going to talk about the in’s and out’s of year round schooling FOR US. Of course, every family and school house is different. Not one is just like another. That’s probably my favorite thing about homeschooling (outside of the time that it gives me with my children). Each school is unique to each family. How beautiful is that? That’s how education should be, in my opinion. It should be one of a kind to cater to every single child’s specific needs.
For our family, that looks like a huge blend of curriculums, methods, approaches, programs, learning styles, curves, ect. In a ‘perfect world’ to some people, all kids would be a grade ahead and perfect little learners. In our world, we aren’t perfect nor do we aim to be. We struggle sometimes. We aren’t all ‘ahead’. We don’t all learn the same way or at the same pace. We have kinesthetic learners. We have visual learners. We have open and close learners. We have a dyslexic learner. We have an ADHD learner. We have a hard of hearing learner. We have a learner that learns so fast and effortlessly that he gets bored way too easily. We have a preschool learner. We have a learner that tries with everything that she has to do everything right and gets genuinely upset when she gets something wrong. We have overly competitive learners. I could go on and on about our little students but my point is that not one child is exactly the same. They are a blend of many things with different needs. That is why our programs range so widely and why we do not exclusively use one curriculum or teaching approach. That’s why we school year round. That’s why we have flexible school routines and schooling locations. That’s why we skip days sometimes. That’s why I never do more than 3 hours of focused learning in one day at my kid’s ages.
Year round school is just as it sounds, it’s year round.
We do year round schooling because it helps keep curriculum fresh in the kid’s minds. There isn’t that 2 1/2 month break between grades where students aren’t learning/reviewing what they learned during the school year. We also do it because it gives us the chance to really touch on the struggling areas before we move on to the next grade level or stage.
For our school house personally, we do cut back a bit during the summer time though. We only school 3-4 days a week and it’s usually a lot of reviewing/copy work/memory work. My goal in this is to really pound in those core facts and details. The same concept as sight words. Getting them so used to specific basic curriculum that it’s instinct to know them on the spot. Skip counting. Sight words. Musical curriculum that teaches history timelines and state capitals by song. Science flash cards that quickly trigger anatomy parts by visual learning. The list of examples and approaches that I use are endless. It’s a little bit of a spiral approach during the summer months but that’s okay with us. It works incredibly well.
In doing the memory work and lessening the amount of time that we have school, it helps to not over load the kids or burn them out on it. We also travel and school on adventures outside a lot when the weather is nice so that helps too with there not being a sense over over kill. I have done this since our kids started school. It isn’t new for us but now it’s exciting for me because what I’ve always done during school breaks will correlate with what I’m teaching all year long. Year round schooling is not for every family and that’s okay. However, if it is for you - embrace it. Make it light hearted. Keep it fun. In fact, do that anyways. As a Charlotte Mason styled teacher I’m a huge believer in embracing nature, literature, art, poetry, the Bible, music, animals, etc. I just all around have a free spirited approach to things and it works beautifully for my family but you can still keep things less structured at times even if you have a traditional style of teaching.
H a v e f u n. Learn with your babies. Embrace this calling to homeschool. Soak it in and enjoy the journey. It’s a stage of life that we will never, ever get back.
Post a Comment