heartofdakota.com

With all the posts about schedules, I wanted to ask this question. How do you schedule your homeschooling during the busy holiday season? Do you take a couple of weeks off as they do in public schools or do you only take a couple days off? Do you follow a full schedule or lighten it up a bit?

We are schooling on a 4-day per week schedule, taking Friday-Sunday off each week. My husband is a truck driver and gone during the week. On Fridays, we run errands, go to the library, and get supplies. Often have to travel 80 miles, one way, to buy supplies for the homestead. One the weekend, Daddy is home for 24-36 hours before having to leave again to make his next delivery. His time home is precious to us and so we never school when he is home.

With the holidays, I am finding that the kids do better when kept on their schedule. Our son is especially needing the consistency of staying on schedule. We get the schoolwork done by lunchtime, then during the afternoon, the kids help make holiday decorations, cards, and gifts. Sometimes, we are able to involve their studies into the holiday preps. At Thanksgiving, for example, we made some of the foods using recipes from the Colonial period so that the kids could see what food was like at that time. Some are now a part of our regular diet.

How are you working through the homeschool holiday schedule in your family?

We take 3 weeks off at Christmas, starting Friday! Yahoooooo!

One year I tried taking off pretty much from Thanksgiving through DD2's birthday (Jan 5th)... we still were doing "fun" stuff, like lapbooks from movies we watched or books we read, going places, etc. We also took a week long vacation during that time. My kids were BEGGING for school before Christmas and we started back Dec 26!

So now, we school as normal throughout. Meaning if we choose to do something different from HOD, lapbooks, field trips, vacations, etc. we do and if we choose to do half days we do and if we do full days we do. It's all variable, but it doesn't change based on the time of year. We DEFINITELY do not keep public schools schedule.

Of course I only have one who is old enough really to realize what day of the week it is and "complain" if we do school on a Saturday, haha. So they don't really complain.

It's almost like in Little House on the Prairie when Laura doesn't realize it's Christmas until Christmas Eve when they hang up their stockings or her birthday until someone gives her a gift... that is pretty much my kids.

Well, school is out here for the year, but it is summer. We finished earlier than I would have liked but that was due to having surgery last week and I decided I would take the down time now after it to recover properly so we plan to get back into it mid January. We will probably start off slow for the first couple of weeks and hopefully by then we'll ready to crank back into it.

I am planning to do some New Zealand History with the blossoms over the break, nothing strenuous, just some reading time.

My plan is to take off Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after. We will work Thursday and Friday. Then we will take off New Years Eve and New Years Day. I didn't want to take two whole weeks off, but I think it is good to give some time off.

We "took off" after Thanksgiving, and we will resume when Daddy goes back to work, which is Jan 2. BUT--taking off means we still do math, DITHOR, phonics for the littles, sometimes LHFHG, and our Christmas Around the World study that I kind of put together from various sources that we're doing. So... we are still in the routine of school, but it's something different than normal too. I also got some Christmas related books for this genre for DITHOR (mystery). They are probably lighter than she would normally do for DITHOR, but it's been really, really fun.

We will be taking the week of Christmas off. After a few years of doing a couple weeks off for Christmas I have found that my kiddos do better with only one week at a time. Not to mention mama who gets lost in the glory of no school and catching up on the forgotten house chores and ends up forgetting to get back to school

We are taking three weeks off..starting Monday. My little will do daily crafts and baking with me. My older is working in his Grandpa's wood shop building things, so he will be busy. Somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we always lose our schedule. So, last year, I took off a longer period at Christmas, and then we came back with a new schedule. That worked great! For some reason, my oldest likes to have a revamp of his schedule in January.

And...I have three whole weeks to catch up on all the things I have fallen behind in.

We normally take a couple of weeks off. We're expecting company later this week, so I've decided to take the whole week off, and likely will not get back into school until sometime after the 1st of the year because of more company coming after Christmas. So I think we're looking at 3 weeks this year. I plan to just have the kids spend lots of time reading, and we're probably going to try to get some math snuck in as well. Overall, though, we're all ready for a break right now.

One of the things I love about breaks is it gives me a chance to see how much my kids are learning, and it often rekindles their hunger for it. They will start math discussions, for instance, while setting the table. They wonder if we have 6 people in our family and then Grandma comes to visit, how many plates do I need this week? Then Grandma goes home and the other Grandma and Grandpa come, how many do we need then? What about this recipe calling for 2/3 cup of sugar and then I need to double it? Or they're picking up on things we've studied in History when they see something on TV, or read a book and start telling me how it fits with what we've studied in school. They're learning without realizing it, and cementing the things they have learned. One year they wanted to write out their own Christmas program to put on for Grandpa and Grandma. Good grief, this stuff is better than school!

We're a couple of weeks into break and I'm finding myself itching to get back into school! I can't wait! Our company (mother-in-law) decided to stay longer than I'd realized she planned-2 weeks-and then my side of the family wants to come after that, so we're still looking at a long Christmas break! Then we just found out we'll be needing to take an out-of-state trip late in January and I'm positively fretting about all this time off from school...

My oldest is in public school so we keep fairly close to the public school schedule.