Spring Break, and Rethinking Our Schedule

Spring Break give us time to review our last homeschool session and to determine if a change in schedule is necessary for the coming session.

Since we switched our public-school like calendar to a more homeschool-friendly calendar last November (three 12-week terms), our Spring Break is a glorious two weeks long! Unfortunately, one of my children is not able to enjoy her Spring Break yet.

You see, two weeks before Spring Break was ready to begin, I wrote out a list for each child of everything they needed to complete before Spring Break. I even went as far as to tell them that if they finished their work earlier than that, they could start Spring Break early.

Well, Jaden finished his work up, leaving only a tiny bit to do last Friday, the official last day of the term. But Jerah procrastinated a bit — well, more like a lot — and as of Friday, she still had at least two to three full days of work left.

And so, although Spring Break for Jaden, Joely, and me started Monday, Jerah has been going up to work with Jeff, sitting in the hallway outside his office, and working without interruptions. So far, she's been working faithfully, and it looks like she might even be done this afternoon. But I won't count my chickens quite yet.

Jaden and Joely have been begging to go up to the lake since Spring Break started, but unfortunately, the weather has been a big cold and the winds have been hovering around 25 miles per hour all day long. That's not the kind of weather I want to be outside in for hours on end. And so we're waiting until the weather clears up.

Meanwhile, I'm working on planning out the next 12-week term. This term, instead of giving my kids all their weekly assignments at the beginning of term, I'm going to give them daily assignments from the very start. Jaden did pretty well working with the flexibility of the weekly assigments  last term, but Jerah, as I had suspected, did not. So we're switched back to a more rigid framework. It'll be a quite interesting printing out 60 days of daily work for each of the three kids for the entire term. But once it's printed out, I won't have to do it again all term. And that will be so nice.

Spring Break and schedule changes in the future will be another area for us to evaluate after the coming 12 weeks of homeschooling. Homeschooling allows for flexibility which is great in meeting the needs of all types of learning patterns in your children.