This is a collaborative post: If you are a homeschool student trying to make your life a little less boring and wondering how interesting your life would be in an actual school, then you are at the right place.
Homeschooling can be both self-reflecting but lonely, lazy but productive. With a little effort, you can get a healthy balance between your studies, Netflix night, or a hangout with friends in your homeschool year. You can also go on crazy hikes and vacations, sleep 8 hours a day without having to worry about assignment deadlines. Homeschooling gives us the luxury to set our own pace while cutting down plenty of tasks from our to-do lists, such as waiting for a bus to get to school and also coming home at the end of the day. All of these inevitable errands consume much time from our day-to-day lives. With that time, you would have finished an entire episode and gone to bed already. Therefore, today I am here to help you figure out your schedule which will help you spend the year a little better.
Understand The Reason Behind The Rule.
The whole 9 months school and 3 months summer vacation has become a persistent tradition over the years because, in the early decades, kids had to give a hand to their parents to take care of the crops as most of the people back then were farmers. Today, that scenario is quite different. Good thing is, with homeschooling, you can tweak this rule a bit or change it completely to fit your schedule.
Make a Rough Draft And Then Personalize It.
To set up your schedule for the whole year, calculate the overall school weeks and free weeks first. On average, we do 36 weeks of school and 16 weeks of summer break. That makes a total of 52 weeks a year.
Now that you’ve got that out of the way, take out that homeschool planner. It’s time to personalize it!
- The first one is the 12 weeks of school and 4 weeks of break. This system found in a few schools is quite intriguing and self-explanatory. You take 1 month of break every 3 months of school. That’s how semester’s work in college. You can also tweak it a little, such as, if you want a big summer and Christmas break, maybe take two weeks off in the other 2 breaks. Go ahead! Make your own choice.
- The second one is what most people follow. The 3 weeks school and 1-week break system. You might think, this system makes you take classes all year round, but that’s not true. With 3 weeks of school a month, you finish your 36 weeks of school very steadily, but by taking 1 week off every month, that still leaves you with 4 weeks of extra break which you can take whenever you want.
- The last one is the 4 days of school and 3 days break per week. Can you imagine? 4 days of school per week! It doesn’t get better than this. With 3 days of break a week, you still have 7 weeks of extra break. Seems like you won’t miss your big summer break after all.
I think you’ve got a pretty good idea of how flexible your time is when you are homeschooling. . However, make sure to prioritize your 36 weeks of school first. If I were you, I would take 4 days of class in 3 days which would give me 6 months of the break! Maybe I would visit Bora Bora in those 6 months.
How To Utilize Your Break
If you were in school, you would spend your time in after-school activities, like gymnastics, swimming, dancing etcetera. Now that you’re on your own, you can spend those times wisely.
Remember when you’re on school days, how you have thought about the activities you would do if you were not in school? Well, this is your time. You are not in school. Take a list of all those activities you wanted to do and include them in your break weeks. Would you go on family holidays? Would you read Harry Potter again? Write that down on your fancy home planner and not on your phone. Phones will distract you whenever you look at them. Besides, I think planners have more character to them and keep your mind off from becoming the mini version of the Milky Way with lots of ideas scattered all over.
One last thing to remember is not to over plan. Leave out some days just to breathe. When I plan way ahead of my schedule, I end up not following it because it’s too organized and most of us prefer the thrust of finishing up just under the wire. I suggest making the schedule of the day you’re on, for example, don’t make the routine for Sunday unless you’re on Sunday.
How to feel less lonely?
This is the scariest part of homeschooling, feeling left out. To avoid feeling lonely, you have to know that schools are not the only place for making friends, and memories. In our busy lives, we almost forgot there are other places to be than school, work, and home. There are parks and arcades when you can make as many memories as schools. So go out there and compete with fellow people. You are going to make much more interesting memories other than making fun of your professors.
Some Additional Tips
An organized room resembles an organized mind. If you have an additional room in your house, start by planning how to turn it into a study room with fancy stationers and lighting. If you are a nature lover, pick a place where you are closest to nature, turn the room into something that will make your brain go full-on study mode.
Lastly, try to follow a disciplined routine. In my experience, instead of being someone who would go to bed at 6 a.m. and wake up at 3 p.m., waking up at 5 a.m. and watching sunlight slowly take over the night sky is something exceptional. It triggers a rare emotion in us, the kind that makes us want to stand up and try to be a good human being that day. It keeps us happy and hopeful. Let’s end this writing on that note.