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We are beginning our HOD journey with Preparing in just over a week. For the past year, we have worked on a three day week, with the occasional extra bit thrown in on every second Friday. We live rurally, and we use Thursday as our day for town. This coincides with getting together with other home schoolers for activities (sometimes swimming lessons), and also music lessons for my oldest. I also now do a bible study with a fellow home school mum. Every second Friday, during term time, we take part in a home school group in another small town (we have been attending this for the past four years) and my oldest has for the past two years been taking part in doing an IEW course. This year, my younger DD will be doing some form of writing activity with others of a similar age/ability. It is also a possibility that the older children will do some form of science together this year as well, although these plans have not been completely worked out.

So this leaves us seven days a fortnight where we are at home and able to work completely on HOD. Is that enough. I do think we will still finish a level per school year, but it will mean less holidays, but I think we will still end up with a similar amount of holidays as those in public school.

But, I hit a snag in my logic, when adding in LHFHG for my oldest son, as it is a five day a week program. Would it be easy enough to add an extra bit of work each day to enable us to move through a little quicker. I am thinking maybe an extra box or two a day, just so that we keep moving through at a slightly quicker pace, or would adding in Saturdays for DS work better. Any advice would be welcome. I do want to keep him moving through the guides on a yearly basis but I am open to extending it a little beyond a year for each of the guides before Preparing.

I would just do LHFHG on the days you are home to do it! I'm not sure about the rest, but remember you have the ultimate flexibility when homeschooling. You could add in every other week schooling in summer, or half days a couple days a week during extended breaks, or take a shorter summer break, school and hit it hard when it's too cold/hot to be out and break when it's nice out. I think you could add two weeks to the end and two weeks to the beginning of your school year and get farther along that way as opposed to adding more per day just to finish in a year. The days are so nicely balanced, and the flow is so smooth, I just hate doing anything to mess that up!

I think you could just keep doing LHFHG on the days you are home without adding extra boxes or Saturdays. If your homeschool groups are like ours, they take longer holiday breaks than we normally do. For instance, our co-op stops at the end of April, but we continue schooling through May and part of June so those months we can do 5 days since we don't have co-op to worry about. So you would probably pick up some extra at home days throughout the year just through the difference in the schedule. Also, depending on your kid in LHFHG age, you could do LHFHG, BLHFHG, and BHFHG for 4 days a week and just continue on to the next guide when you are done. That would basically add about a year (so 4 years to do those 3 guides) and then you could just do 1 guide a year from Preparing on up.

Thanks for that.

Samuel's Mommy, you're right, we will be starting school in a week or so and then we will will probably get right through February before we start our Friday co-op. I think I will possibly do a few extra days through our smaller holiday breaks, just so that our summer break still can remain the same length.

I have been talking to my oldest daughter today and she has decided she wants more holidays, so we are going to split the eighth day of the fortnight over the Thursday and Saturday, more on the Saturday as we will likely have more time, but it will still leave us free to do something family orientated on a Saturday afternoon. It is good it is only every second week. I like the way she thinks.