Creating a homeschool schedule that works efficiently for your family starts with thinking about your family’s lifestyle, out-of-school commitments and the environment you’re homeschooling in.
Term-Time Home-Ed
Many families start home education by sticking to the timetables of schools: Mon-Fri, 9-4. That can be an effective routine – but it doesn’t have to be the schedule that your homeschool follows.
Benefits of Term-Time Homeschooling (using school schedules)
Home educating according to term-time school makes it easy to sync a curriculum of learning to the corresponding curriculum a child would follow in school. Approaching home education using a term-time schedule allows home educators to follow school-based lesson timetable plans, ensuring home learners are studying in line with their peers.
Home education might be the right choice from an academic or health perspective, however, it can sometimes lead to home learners feeling disconnected from school-going peers because their days look so different that it’s hard to relate. Term-time schooling removes some of this disconnect as home-learners feel the same work-load and look forward to term breaks as much as their peers!
One of the difficulties home educators face is balancing how much time their children are spending actively learning with the freedom of being at home. Term-time schooling takes the pressure off parents facilitating an education at home: During term weeks, school-style timetables apply, and free time is outside school hours.
Cons of Term-Time Schooling (using school schedules)
Homeschool is not school. Individual lessons might take less time to teach at home than in a classroom, but topics can often take longer to cover at home because home-learners can learn at their own pace. This can mean that students who’d be rushed through a school topic without fully comprehending can spend more time learning in a home-ed classroom to fully understand the topic, and students who are enjoying the topic can dive deeper into the study than they’d be able to do in school.
While term-time scheduling of home-ed lessons can make planning easier for home educators, the pressure that then puts onto you to make sure homeschool lessons follow the strict schedule of schools can be a cause of stress and cancel out the relaxed environment for learning that home educating allows you to facilitate.
Home-Ed Term-Time School
If term-time schooling is the structure you want to apply for your homeschool scheduling, but you want to avoid feeling the pressure to ‘keep up’, shortening the holidays by a few days and allocating a block of catch-up days into every term can help.
Homeschool days, even if your child is deep-diving into topics, inevitably offer bonus time. In a homeschool environment, all the lost time in classrooms – waiting for everyone to settle, packing/unpacking bags etc – doesn’t apply. Over the course of a day, these blocks of 5/10 minutes interruptions add up. Over a week, these bonus minutes equate to hours. Collectively, these bonus hours can be allocated to catch-up in any subjects that have fallen out of sync with the pre-planned learning schedule.
Year-Round Schooling
Year-round schooling means planning a homeschool across the calendar year rather than sticking to term-time scheduling. This doesn’t mean home learners don’t have breaks from school or take time off for holidays, just that the actual learning is timetabled across 52 weeks rather than 38.
Year-round schooling allows for more flexibility with daily routines, allowing you to shorten the school day or timetable according to a 4-day week. It means as a family, there is more flexibility for holidays and taking breaks according to the needs/commitments/plans of the family.
Year-round schooling can free-up extra time for interest-led learning in a weekly schedule and gives home learners the opportunity to combine normal academic schooling with focused blocks of time concentrating on hobbies/skills/sports. For home learners who regularly enter (eg) sports competitions, there is enough flexibility to allocate the ‘days off school’ this type of non-academic learning requires.
Seasonal Schooling
Seasonal schooling is a way of timetabling home education according to your child/family’s routine during each season.
We integrated this style of homeschool timetabling whilst living abroad, where incredibly hot summers made studying difficult. In hot countries, summer holidays are generally much longer than in the UK, for this exact reason. We didn’t want to stop school for 3 months of the year, nor did we want to struggle with learning during temperatures of +30C. If we switched up lesson timings to schedule school in the morning and evening, there was no time of day when the weather was cool enough to get outside, so it felt like we had to choose school or fun – not a great choice when you’re home educating.
To get around this, we adjusted our expectations of what school looked like during the different seasons.
Winter, when the weather makes everyone naturally gravitate indoors, is a period of intense learning. School days are longer in winter.
In summer, school days are short. An hour or two of learning in the morning and another couple of hours of learning in the late afternoon. Summer ‘school’ focuses on skills practice, revising material covered the past year, interest-led learning and pre-reading for topics to be covered the next school year.
Your family’s natural rhythm and preferences might mean shorter homeschool days in winter, allowing you to take advantage of winter sports, or you might want to take an entire month off in spring to travel.
Combining planning the curriculum over 52 weeks, using a year-round schooling method, and adapting our homeschool’s daily routine according to the seasons gave us a homeschool schedule that achieves our curriculum goals and prioritises enjoying this time in our children’s lives.
Time moves so quickly that before we know it, they’ll have graduated from homeschool and will be making their own ways in the world. We want to enjoy this time with them without sacrificing their education. Homeschooling in this way gives us the flexibility to do that.