A day in the life
by sumpteretc
Sonlight continues its blog party this month with the question
Share a day in the life of your family. What does your family’s homeschool schedule look like?
A lot of home schooling families value the opportunity to sleep in, but we don’t take advantage of that opportunity. Breakfast is usually on the table at 7:30, and we start school promptly at 8:00. Tiffany takes care of Joel’s schooling, and he is usually finished by 11:00 or so. He then has an hour of educational screen time.
Elijah starts by reading a chapter of the Bible on his own, and then I read a chapter with him. He listens to a Scripture memory song and practices memorizing it. For history, he sometimes does projects on his own, reading from the encyclopedia and making notes. Right now, we are reading a missionary biography together. We then read information about a city in the 10/40 window and pray for the people there.
After history, Elijah reads a chapter or two from a book for reading practice. I usually pre-read the book and ask him several questions from the day’s reading. He does math on his own on the computer, and then we do science together. He usually has an activity sheet to fill out related to the day’s reading, and we sometimes do experiments or further Internet research.
We finish the morning with language arts–spelling, grammar, vocabulary development and creative expression. I’m fairly involved in most of this, although Elijah works independently on vocabulary development. With creative expression, it varies. Sometimes I have to stay engaged, but he’s doing better at working through this on his own. He usually is able to finish all of his work by around noon.
In the evening, I read to one of the boys while the other one bathes. Then we have family devotions, and send the boy who has already had reading to bed, while I read to the other one. And that’s a day in our lives. We sometimes have to be flexible with the schedule, but 90% of the time, we’re fixed in that routine.
Sumpteretc's Blog 
I think it’s interesting how different all of our approaches to scheduling are. How old are your kiddos that they enjoy a fixed routine?
They are 10 and 6, but we have always used a routine like this at every age.
Isn’t it great to see them learning to work more independently as they get older? Thanks for sharing!
So great that you’re both able to be involved full-time. It gets pretty crazy around here anymore with sometimes three kids needing help all at once. This next year I’m going to try a new filing system for assignments to plan the whole year out, incorporate extras that I want to get to, and to help them be even more independent, although my older two do pretty well.