School Hours

   I shared with you our "normal" school day here.  It's changed a bit now that we are embracing our inner night owl.  This weekend I was thinking about how to make it work a little better and started looking through some different books and things for suggestions.  I stumbled across a couple cool ideas but really liked one suggested in the Foundations book from Classical Conversations.  My girlfriend attends one of the groups in Lansing and got me hooked on the fun memory work they do so I ordered the book :0)

   In the book the author recommends deciding how many hours you need to set for school and then set a timer at the beginning of the hour and let the kids get going for 20 minutes and during those first 20 minutes play with little ones and then from 20-30 minutes work with your K-3 graders, 30-40 work with 4-6 grade, 40-50 Jr. High and 50-60 High School.  I like the idea because Elijah's work probably only takes about 20 minutes at a time and then I can spend 10 minutes reviewing and answering questions with him.  The olders keep working until you get to them at their "time".  This means they are getting at least 30 minutes of time alone with Mom.  The author set 4 hours a day and said it worked well because it didn't matter when they got to it, they knew they were done when the 4 hours were done.

   I think we may adopt this way for a bit and see how it works.  We would probably need 4 hours as well. 1 for read alouds and Sonlight Core, 1 for writing/Table Time, 1 for math and other subjects and 1 for reading. I don't think I 'll set what they need to get done in their hour, they have a list and know what they need to do. They can do it in whatever order they choose and just know they need to finish it within our 4 hours.

   The other reason I like this is because we have had some busier days lately and because we are sleeping in we don't always get all of our work done early.  When we pick it up in the evening I often get the "Uuuuh, mom!" because it's family time not "school time".  But, if they know we only completed 2 of our 4 hours it will be no surprise what's expected that evening.  I'm wondering if that will be enough time for Carter as we add more advanced courses for him.  I guess we'll just have to see.  He may have to bump to 5 hours like suggested by the Robinson Curriculum.  I really like some of their ideas over there.

  So for the next week or two we will be experimenting and we'll see how it goes.

 What do you think of this idea?