Homeschooling Year One - Kindergarten / Pre-Kindergarten: Daily Schedule and Routine

When I started to think about homeschooling, I wanted to know what a typical day was like and so I asked google. Doesn't everyone ask the collective wisdom of the internet for answers to their questions these days? I was frustrated that I couldn't seem to get a satisfactory answer. I think it is because every family that homeschools finds their own routine. Each family has a blend of unique personalities and ages. The number of children differs. The ages of those children differ. The discrepancy in ages differs. The style of homeschooling differs as does geography, physical space, family obligations, extracurricular activities, and so on. And, from day to day, week to week, and season to season, schedules morph and change as well.

"Fine, fine..." I grumbled to myself. I understood all that, but I still wanted to read some examples. And so, in our homeschooling infancy, this is how the rhythm of our days has been running.

My children wake up at the crack of dawn. I used to set my alarm for the dark and wake with them, but as they grew and became more independent I abandoned that. Now we set out a simple breakfasty snack for them to serve themselves and allow them their daily phone time in the wee hours of the morning. (They play on outdated iphones repurposed for their use and filled with mostly educational content.) I come downstairs sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 am at which point the children have been on their own for about an hour. 8:00 is my self-imposed hard limit.

I spend the next 30-45 minutes feeding the children a more nutritious second round of breakfast, fixing Ava's hair, drinking some tea, etc. Our homeschooling day begins at approximately 8:30 am.

Disclaimer: These times are approximate.

8:30-8:50 am: Circle Time. Welcome song, calendar work, weather graphing, and the song, word and poem of the day...

8:50-9:00 am: PE Break. We do something active to shake out the wiggles from sitting through circle and help get ready for the next chunk of sitting we'll be doing shortly. Lately we've been getting to know our bodies. We discussed all the major muscle groups of our legs and stretched each area followed by exercises that work those muscles. Then we did a similar group of activities for the arms. Next we'll move to the core. We talked about how muscles get stronger when you use them. Other times we'll explore movement types like running, skipping, jumping, leaping, galloping, etc. We might play a quick beanbag game or have an indoor race. I plan this activity in the PE Break section of the planner.

9:00-10:30 am: Writing journals followed by RightStart Math Level A lesson. I teach these to both children together expecting slightly more of Michael and slightly less of Ava due to the one year age difference.

10:30-11:00 am: Light healthy snack break accompanied by discussion of the nutrition components of our breakfast and snack. I'm pushing nutrition right now in the hope that it will help a little with the picky eating that runs rampant in our household. I'd say it is actually helping and so we will push on...

11:00 am-12:30 pm: Now the children alternate. First Ava does All About Reading: Pre-Reading with me while Michael chooses an activity box to play with on the nearby circle. He knows he needs to play independently and quietly while I work with Ava. He'll often sneak over and listen while we sing our letter of the day song and read the letter of the day poems from the reader simply because he enjoys those parts of her lesson. Then Ava plays quietly nearby while we do Michael's All About Spelling Level One lesson and All About Reading Level 2 lesson. He has chosen to do his spelling on the computer because his spelling skills far outstrip his ability to actually write the letters.

12:30-2:00 pm: Lunch/television/free time break.

2:00 - 4:30 pm: This time varies depending on the day. Some days we have a play date with friends. Other days we'll do another lesson (arts/crafts; science; social studies; music; etc). Sometimes they simply have free choice time and play.

That is our "typical" schedule. Of course, things vary. Monday mornings we have gymnastics at 9:30 and so we do that and then shift the rest of the schedule backwards once we get home. Wednesday mornings my amazing mother takes the children to Story Hour at the library and keeps them through lunch. Then we do some lessons when I pick them up after lunch. So although we have a routine for "home days", there is a lot of variation during the week.

But, that gives you an idea of how things are structured at the moment. I'm positive it will all continue to morph and change over time.

Homeschooling Year One - Kindergarten / Pre-Kindergarten: Daily Planning and Logging

The children are at gymnastics camp this week. Three hours every morning. It is blissful. As much as I've been enjoying homeschooling I've also rather desperately missed having some quiet morning hours to myself. I'm an introvert. Quiet alone time is something of a necessity. Without it, I feel increasingly... stretched thin. And so, I'm grabbing the opportunity provided to me by gymnastics camp to share some things with you. :-)

Homeschooling, is obviously my current obsession. I believe that it will eventually fall into a routine that will return balance to my life, but that's the nature of starting something new. So expect something of a homeschooling focus to the blog for a bit.

A while back I created a homeschooling planner. Prior to beginning to actually use it I decided that I needed to switch from something bound to a mini binder. I just like binders. I reworked some of the formatting from the original version and popped it into a binder. Also, the original planner only included weekly plan sheets and I decided I really did need daily ones. I ordered the binder from Amazon because even office supply stores didn't have a mini 3-ring binder around here. I used Microsoft Publisher and created the pages from scratch. I print them out two-sided in landscape mode, trim off the extra length, and punch holes.

I have sections for record keeping (attendance and logs), the current month's daily plans, past month's plans, state standards checklists, etc. I decided that our school year would run from July to June to mimic public schools. We started homeschooling in June, so I used June as a test run for the planner. At the end of June I sat down and tweaked my lesson plan format and I'm now using a slightly modified version of the daily plan sheet and logging chart.

Here's our daily plan sheet. (This is just a screenshot of the print preview in Publisher.)

I write in the day and the date at the top. I enjoy keeping track of our total number of homeschooling days. (1 through... ?) Writing them in by hand, allows for days missed due to things like gymnastics camp, visitors from out of town, doctor's appointments, etc. without having to scratch out days and dates that I had pre-printed. Circle time, handwriting/writing, math, and our reading program are consistent. I just pick up and continue from where we left off the day before and so it was silly for me to hand write the same thing out day after day. I just went ahead and typed those up as "ongoing". The sections that are blank are the sections where our lessons vary from day to day.

All the way on the right, you'll notice a section for "minutes". That's where I write in the amount of time we spent in each area for the purposes of logging. The state of Missouri has annual requirements for homeschoolers and so this is my method of keeping track. During the day, as I refer to my planner I'll make notes about which subjects we did during that day and the amount of time we spent doing it. At the end of the day I tally up the times and transfer them to the Learning Log.

So far, this system is working well for us. It looks like a lot of work, but in practice, it is taking no more than 15 minutes a day. The sections we do daily require no time at all because they are ongoing. At the end of the day I sit down for 5-10 minutes and think about our plans for the next day. I try to rotate in other "subjects" at least once a week. I try to do something science focused, social studies focused, arts/crafts focused, and so on once a week and so I'll write those in.

The ongoing lessons do require some maintenance work. The short version is that at the end of an ongoing lesson (math, reading, spelling) I preview the next day's lesson and prepare any materials that need to be prepped right then. It takes no more than 5-10 minutes and the children take a short break while I get that done. So, at the end of the math lesson I preview the next lesson and gather any manipulatives I might need that I don't already have on hand. At the end of a reading lesson I preview the lesson for the next day. Those lessons often involve cutting something out, so I'll go ahead and do that and place the cut out words in an envelope of the binder ready to go for the next day. The children tend to get a drink, go to the bathroom, sit down at their computer for a few minutes, or play with something while I spend those 5-10 minutes prepping the next day's lesson. Then I call them back to the table for the next thing.

I have a monthly calendar at the beginning of the lesson plan section that helps me keep track of special things I need to remember. For example, in June, arts and crafts included making something for Father's Day. The monthly calendar helps me remember to include those types of events in my lesson planning. So that's planning and logging. I'll post on how we organize/store all the materials for each subject and more on the math, reading, and writing programs we're using. For now, however, this post is long enough.

Wow. Completely unpremeditated hiatus. Updates...

So. There's the little matter of the entirely unplanned four month hiatus from blogging and I can't promise that things will get better any time soon. I did spontaneously decide to pop in and let you all know that I am fine. Still here. No sudden accident or illness to blame. Life just got ahead of me.

I shifted into preparing for homeschooling mode. The end of the school year was coming for me and I knew I wanted to begin homeschooling mid-May. I needed to prepare a schoolroom and get a curriculum ready to go. To be honest, I had also pushed a little too hard on the blogging front and burned out.

So, updates... let me think.

Ava was discharged from speech therapy. Discharged. Really, who would have thought that about two years after beginning to receive services that she would no longer qualify? She still has speech errors, but her remaining errors are now in the "age appropriate zone". Honestly, it was ok with me. Next year she will be at home with me, and we will begin incorporating speech work into our homeschooling schedule.

I have a school room. It is a mess, but I love it. It has been recently repainted a cheerful yellow thanks to the hard work of my husband. The old ceiling fan with its three dim bulbs has been replaced with a fancy light fixture that closely resembles a giant spider on the ceiling, but provides tons of light (Eight 60 watt bulbs from one light fixture - let there be light!) Soon there will be new curtains that will provide a cheerful splash of color. There's shelving for storage, a table for school work, a desk for me and a computer station cobbled together from bits and pieces of old computers for the children. We have a circle shaped rug by a calendar for circle time. I will show you all pictures at some point when things are a bit less messy and I'm a bit more organized.

I reworked my homeschool planner a little and it is working super well for me. Again, I will try to provide pictures at some point for anyone who is interested. After about 6 weeks of full-time homeschooling we're falling into something of a predictable routine. We begin our morning at about 8:30 am with circle time. During the approximately 20 minutes of circle time we sing a welcome song (a completely dorky song I made up, but we all like it), do calendar work, graph the weather, and learn a word, poem, and song of the day. After circle time we complete two pages of our writing journals (again, pictures and sharing to come later...). Their writing journals have a handwriting page on the left and a writing prompt with space to draw a picture and write a sentence or two underneath on the right. Then we do a math lesson (RightStart Math Level A).

At that point we are about two hours in and we all need a break. We have a small nutritious snack and then come back to the school room for reading/spelling. The children take turns now. Ava goes first with her All About Reading Pre-Reading lesson which I supplement with some great alphabet songs I got from Scholastic. Then Michael does an All About Spelling Level 1 lesson and an All About Reading Level 2 lesson. I cannot say enough good things about the All About Reading and All About Spelling programs and I hope to find the time to share more about them in the future.

After reading we take an extended break for lunch and free time. I admit it. I often throw in a little television here. After our lunch/sanity break, depending on the day of the week, we meet up with some friends for play or do bonus lessons in science, social studies, art music, etc.

I squeeze in lesson planning and the creation of new materials here and there. I'm also still trying to whip the school room into a completely organized state that doesn't involve huge piles of random supplies piled up on level surfaces and in corners. Notice, this new schedule leaves no time left over for blogging. I will try to work on it. I'd love to share our homeschooling adventures and materials with those who would find them useful. I'd also love to finally wrap up the newest speech kit and maybe even find time to create more.

But for now, hello. :-) Don't worry about us. We are fine over here. I hope all of you are enjoying your summer as well.