For those who school 4 days a week..?

[momof3kids]

Hi,
Just wondering what your schedule for the year looks like when you do school 4 days/week? We have been doing Beyond and LHTH 4 days a week, we started mid July last year, and we were exactly half way through at Christmas break. We have been doing 6 weeks on, then taking 1 week off, with 2 at Christmas. ( we do 4 days a week because I work one day.. dh said he would do their school if needed...but hasn't really needed to yet ) It is working good for us...but since my oldest is on the young side of the guides, I wouldn't mind stretching a little further. We were planning on taking a month or so off around June or July...But looking at the calendar, he will finish Beyond the first week in July...so, somehow I really didn't stretch it any further..
Do you take longer breaks throughout the year??...also, do you take a longer break in the summer? even if they are not finished with their guide? Seems like it may be hard to pick up where you left off after a long break of a month or so.
My second son will finish LHTH in May.. so I was planning on just starting him at a slow pace in LHFHG whenever he finishes.

So, just wondering maybe I need to plan our year out a little differently..? Honestly with this being our first year, we just kind of starting with 6 week on/ 1 week off to see how it went... it seemed to work so I didn't plan much beyond that I thought we were doing good, just moving along!

It would be nice to make some sort of plan though...especially running Bigger and Little Hearts next year
Thanks for any thoughts on how you make it work!

[MelInKansas]

I probably end up taking more "breaks" or individual days off occasionally. I think we took 3 weeks off for Christmas. Still it seems like we cannot finish a guide in 1 year's time, but partially that's because my oldest DD has not been ready to move on that quickly either. So if your children are going along at a good clip, you are schooling 4 days a week, and you finish the guide in a year, great! If you finish it in less than a year and want to move on to the next guide and your child is ready, great. If at some point you get really bogged down with the work, or life events happen that make it hard to do school, or whatever, you won't need to worry about slowing down or taking off because you will have "extra" time as LHFHG to MtMM is only 8 guides (and technically K-8th is 9 years).

Sorry that's probably not helpful. I school 4 days a week, we take off when we need to, but we do some in the summer. That being said, we have taken as much as a month off mid-guide and not had any problem getting back into it afterwards. I do try to finish a unit if I know we are taking a longer break, because remembering things like the memory verse and spelling words might be difficult. Plus the units wrap up so nicely with the Bible reading in Beyond, and the others have nice History chunks in each unit. Otherwise it is really not a problem to take some time off in the middle of a guide and pick it back up. I think one summer (maybe my oldest's with Beyond) we took off the whole summer with her having 8 units to go in Beyond and it was like an old friend when we came back. Of course she was just that much older and more mature which helped too.

Blessings,

[momof3kids]

Good to know we can take our long break even without being finished with the guide. Sometimes I really have to step back and remember that hs'ing is not like ps, and we don't really have to follow their year or schedule... and can take our breaks whenever we want.
I just didn't know if it is difficult to pick it back up after some time off, so good to know it has worked for you!

[Samuel'sMommy]

If you do the younger guides (LHFHG - PHFHG) at 4 days a week they will take 42.5 weeks. LHTH is more like 41 weeks. So when I plan my year, I print out a 1 page calendar that shows the whole school year. I know that there are 52 weeks in the year so I can take roughly 10 weeks or 50 days off not counting the 5th day of each week that we actually do school. Does that make sense? Then I pencil in breaks I know we want to take - time at Thanksgiving, a couple weeks at Christmas, Spring Break, and a month in the summer. DH is a state employee and gets numerous holidays off so I pencil those in as days off but if we have sick days or something comes up and we need to make up some days then we have been known to use some of them as makeup days. Then, I figure out how many days/weeks I have left and write it at the top of the page. That becomes my numbers of days we can skip for unexpected reasons - sickness, unexpected company, etc - before we have to start making up days by doing school on DH's holidays or shortening breaks, etc. We aren't super strict about the schedule, but in our state we have to complete 180 days of school for the year so that helps keep me on track. Hope that helps!

[my3sons]

We have always taken a long summer break. My oldest ds has always done a guide a year and will graduate a year early. This fits him well. My middle and youngest sons have had a more varied schedule. For awhile, Riley was on a January to December schedule, finishing a guide in this time with a big summer break in the middle. Lately, I've gone to rotating my two youngest sons between half-speed and full-speed. This has worked well for many reasons. Typically, at the start of a new guide, I go half-speed with that child, and the other child is then full-speed as they are in the middle of their guide about then. So, at the start of last school year, Riley was full-speed PHFHG and Emmett was half-speed LHFHG. Then midway, Riley began half-speed CTC and Emmett switched to full-speed LHFHG and finished it. We then took our summer break. At the start of this school year, Emmett was half-speed Beyond and Riley was full-speed CTC. Last week, Riley finished CTC and began RTR half-speed, and Emmett switched to full-speed Beyond. In this way, as they are on the young age range of the guides, they are taking about 3 years to do 2 guides. Next year, Riley will be in sixth grade and finish out RTR. He will be on a guide a year plan from Sept. to May, just like oldest brother, at that point. My goal is to try to have Emmett doing RTR in sixth grade as well, however, we will see what God has planned for us. This kind of flexibility is one of the many things I truly love about HOD. I hope that this can help as you think through what will work best for your family!

In Christ,
Julie