Periodically it’s good to pause and look up. To check the balance between home and school is still right, to assess what’s working, what needs a tweak, and whether anything needs adding to or removing from the curriculum, the lessons, the routine. Theoretically you could do this over a weekend and carry on with normal school in the week. But truly assessing your homeschool requires input from the learners themselves, and that’s where study weeks come in.
Study weeks are a blend between a half-term holiday and a revision week, sitting somewhere useful in the middle. We call this downtime “study week” partly because it sounds educative enough to pacify the need-to-be-timetabled part of the parent-teacher brain, and partly because it reminds our home learners that it’s not a holiday and they should be doing something.
They’re also similar in spirit to deschooling: the period of decompression between leaving school and starting home education, designed to re-spark a natural curiosity for learning. Study weeks work the same way. A step back from the routine to let interests breathe and energy recover.
Why bother?
Balancing all the roles you play as parent, teacher, and facilitator can get tiring for everyone. It’s easy for home and school to blur: home life creeping into school time, or school taking over the whole house. Taking time out from formal lessons allows you and your home learner to reconnect as just parent and child for a while. The teacher’s away for the week.
It doesn’t mean you stop teaching. Questions are still answered. Home learners are still steered toward projects, games, activities that are good for them. But it does mean you get to spend time with your children without the home education side of the relationship sitting on top of everything. That matters. And if your learner is working toward exams, keeping one eye on the timeline is important, but one week off isn’t going to derail them.
What study weeks are actually for
A good education places as much importance on teaching children how to learn as it does on the content of the curriculum. Study weeks are one of the best tools we have for that.
During a study week, ask home learners to experiment with new software: a writing app, a new AI tool, something they’ve been curious about. Ask them to test-run any memberships or subscriptions that might be useful. Encourage them to spend more time reading, making things, going deeper into whatever interests them. What you’re doing, without making it feel like a lesson, is teaching them how to be self-directed learners, and that’s one of the most valuable skills there is.
For you, it’s a chance to review: go through the resources and textbooks you’re using and get rid of anything that isn’t working. Boring, too easy, too challenging: all of it brings unnecessary friction into the homeschool and none of it is compulsory. Look ahead at the next term’s plan, do whatever lesson prep you can do now, and file it away for later. Your future self will thank you.
Scan back over recent work too. What progress can you see? Note it down. It’s easy to forget how far they’ve come when you’re in the middle of it. If you spot a subject where they’ve been quietly trying hard, tell them you noticed. Recognising progress, even with something as simple as a “well done,” is one of the most effective ways to encourage them to keep going.
What learners should do with the time
It helps to have some loose guidelines: not a timetable, just a shape. Our rules are straightforward: read, make things, explore ideas, follow a thread. Go to museums, galleries, outdoor spaces in term-time without the weekend crowds. Cook and bake: life skills are valueable as the academics. Sleep (especially for teenagers, who genuinely need more of it than most of us allow). If they’re happy and being productive, they’re learning.
If a home learner picks an activity that doesn’t immediately look productive, ask them why they chose it. If they can make a reasonable case for it, let them have it. This works for everything: video-gaming, rewatching the same film for the fourth time, requests to spend money on supplies for a hobby they haven’t tried yet. The bar isn’t “this looks educational.” The bar is “can you tell me why you want to do this?”
It’s a small ask, but it does something useful. Asking them to articulate why they want to spend their time a particular way teaches them to think about the value of their time, full stop. That’s not really a home-ed skill. That’s a life skill, and study weeks are a surprisingly good place to practise it.
One of our learners once submitted a thirty-page project on Minecraft as his way of asking to download the game. Thirty pages: the origins of the game, the back-end code, the business structure, the revenue model. Properly researched. Well argued. He got the game. It was one of his best academic submissions that year.
Learning often doesn’t look the way we expect it to. Study weeks are a good way to remind yourselves of that.
I’ve shared the formula we use for Study Weeks in a free guide. Why not download and give it a try?
