Simplifying Our Homeschool Days, One Day In

I posted on Instagram a couple of weeks ago about not being afraid to simplify if needed even if it’s the beginning of the school year. And wouldn’t you know it after one day into the new homeschool year I already had to take my own advice. Even after 19 years of homeschooling my kids, I still sometimes get overzealous and plan way too much into our days and that is exactly what I did this school year.

In case you missed it for the first time ever I am just homeschooling one kid as my other three have graduated our homeschool and moved on to other things. So it’s just Vera and me, my eighth grader. A couple of weeks ago I shared all of the curriculum that we are using this homeschool year together. As I typed it out and looked everything over it didn’t seem like a crazy amount of work. But as soon as we started on the first day of school, I saw I was in trouble, and I had planned way too much for any one specific homeschool day.

My goal is to do school from about 8:30 AM until 12 PM. In our current season, we have extracurricular activities going on in the late afternoons Monday through Friday and an activity one day of the week that causes us to have a shortened day of homeschooling. So when it comes to certain subjects, we really only have four days of the week to fit it all in.

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The problem: Morning Meeting was way too long

The first problem was with morning meeting. I had chosen several books to read during each morning meeting. Here’s what I thought we could do: Bible reading, BSF homework, catechism, Fallacy Detective, and a list of apologetics and worldview books that I planned to just read one right after another. Just typing this out I don’t know I thought this would work. It definitely was going to take too much time! I like to complete our morning meeting in no more than an hour.

The solution

I tweaked a few things and streamed, lightening it down to the following:

• 30 minutes – Bible reading
• 15 minutes – BFF homework
• 10 minutes – catechism
• 15 minutes – rotate fallacy, detective/worldview book list

For that last item on the list, I’m just rotating the Fallacy Detective and our current world view book, A Student’s Guide to Culture.

The problem: literature class time crunch

Because of our extracurricular activities, needing daily time to do work tasks and housework, and wanting school to be over at 12:30 PM every day I really needed to streamline our subjects. I absolutely love all the Compass Classroom courses that we have done, but as I looked closer at the middle school literature course that I had purchased, I saw that the time commitment each week was going to be more than I actually had time for.

The structure of the course is working through Writing & Rhetoric while reading through literature selections and watching an hour long lecture each week. I loved the idea of all of this! But with morning meeting, a math lesson, English, history, and science, the structure of this literature course was just going to be too much, and I knew I needed to make some tweaks to it.

The solution: break up the literature course and simplify it.

Instead of watching an hour long lecture each week, I decided to keep the literature choices, but spread them out a little bit more because I felt like we would need more time to read each of these books. I will be using the notes from the class as well as the discussion questions for each literature selection, but omitting the lectures.

I will also be using the notes from the class and working through Writing & Rhetoric. I have never used this curriculum before, but already I am very excited about it! I’ve shared before that, though we’ve used several different writing curriculum I’ve never found one that I really love. But so far this one seems really good for my daughter who loves creative writing. So as it is now, it takes us about 15 to 20 minutes to work through each days work and then she reads a portion of her literature selection on her own in the afternoon and/or evening.

The problem: fitting in history and science each week

This year we are using Compass Classroom’s Modernity course as as well as Apologia’s anatomy course. I love both of these courses and I definitely don’t want to drop one. But with the structure of our weeks, I was not sure how I was going to fit in history and science each week as I wrote out my lessons, it looked as if both subjects were going to be quite neglected.

The Compass Classroom history curriculum functions best doing it five days a week with one lecture each day, a quiz on Friday, and a portfolio entry on Friday.

The science curriculum suggests doing two lessons per week, finishing one chapter over the course of two weeks. This includes textbook, reading, notebook, and hands-on projects.

So you can probably tell this was really tricky to fit in into our weeks. Especially when one day has to be an abbreviated day of school.

The solution: subjects by semester

The remedy I came up with for balancing these two subjects is to commit to only one subject per semester.

Here’s what that looks like: this fall September through December I chose not every single chapter from our science curriculum, but six or seven chapters from our curriculum to go through over the course of this semester. We will do science four days per week and only focus on science this semester.

No, we won’t get through the entire book, but when I completed this curriculum many years ago with my older kids when my oldest was an eighth grader like Vera is now. I chose several chapters to go through thoroughly, not reading the book cover to cover. And it worked great!

Then, when we come back to school after Christmas break in January, we will switch from science to history. We will complete our Compass Classroom course through the end of the school year. We will not fully complete this course. But we will pick up where we left off next fall when she is a ninth grader.

Permission to simplify as needed

I’m sharing all of this to be transparent and give you a peek into our homeschool year and let you know that even after 19 years of homeschooling, we can still have an unrealistic view of what a homeschool day actually looks like at times and try to pack way too much into our days. Maybe showing you some problems and solutions can help you as well. So if you have had some bumps in the road so far this school year even though it’s still early in the year, I hope it helps!