Schedule for year-round schooling

[TNmom4]

I'm considering schooling year-round. We ended the last week of April and have had the month of May off. Does anyone school year-round? What does your schedule look like? When do you "start" and "finish"? How do you use your guides when schooling year-round? Thanks!

[StephanieU]

Each year is different for us. It largely is affected by our summer plans. For example, this year we have four weeks of things in June, so we will start back in July, hopefully at "normal" speed for a few weeks. Then we will probably be busy the last week of July and a few weeks in August. Then we will go "full" speed at the end of August when the school year starts here (for public and private schools).

The nice thing about schooling year round is you can take time off as you want to. In order ot make sure we are on schedule, sometime int he summer/early fall I make a goal sheet of where I want to be in terms of units. This is the minimum place we should be at to finish the guide the end of April. We can do school in May, but I do like to take it off from most things. So for my oldest going in to RtR, Here is what I have:
End of April - Unit 35
End of March - Unit 30
End of February - Unit 26
End of January - Unit 22
End of December - Unit 20
End of November - Unit 17
End of October - Unit 13
End of September - Unit 9
End of August - Unit 5

I know that if we are close (within 1-2 units) of that goal, we are fine. Some months have 5 weeks, so that either gives us a week off or a week to catch up. I schedule 3 weeks in November and 2 in December, giving us time to have a break at the holidays. And I know at the end of the year (March and April), my daughter can catch up a unit or two since her guide is only 4 days a unit. She can do a 5th day of the guide each week if we want to.

[The2youngs]

We school year-round, but each year looks a bit different from one to the next. In general, we school 6 weeks on, 1 week off, pretty much from August to May. We take an extra week off at Christmas, but any longer than two weeks and my kids (and I!) kinda go bonkers from lack of routine. The summers we school sporadically, doing half days or taking off for things like vacation and VBS.

This year, we finished up our school year a week and a half ago, so we'll take two weeks off and then start our "summer school" (which really just means "fun" math, independent bible studies, one subject per kid that needs some additional "boosting", and then something like art or nature walks that we can throw in when we want to.) All in all, it's like 1.5 hours of brainwork a day and then the rest of the day is at their disposal. We'll then jump into our new HOD guides in July when it's a thousand degrees outside (hello, central CA!) and we'll finish our semester extra early in December and have a substantially longer break than usual because we're transitioning to ministry overseas so we'll be saying goodbyes and packing (and re-packing, I'm sure!).

We've always really enjoyed the 6-1 rotation, though, as it gives my kids something to look forward to and gives me a definite time where I can get projects taken care of around the house, doctors appointments made, etc. without disrupting our regular school days as much.

[Nealewill]

We tried it when the kids were younger but we found that it just became too much. We really enjoy our time off and need it. We usually school from August through April. If you at looking to do some school throughout the summer, you could always go half speed. I know that at times, we did try and do a few things over summer. We would usually work on math and complete a DITHOR book. I mainly did this only because I didn't want my kids to forget everything they learned. I still do a little bit of math over the summer but my kids just read what they want and I don't structure it anymore.

[MomtoJGJE]

We just basically do school when we do it and don't when we don't. It typically works out that we get a guide done in roughly a year. Unless the child needs to slow down as was the case for my now 9 year old. Sometimes we take time off from the entire guide and just do math, English, and reading so that we can skip some of those some days in the guide. It's all very fluid with very little scheduling

However, now that I will have three in semi-public school next year (charter school) and only two at home doing school it will be much easier to do school every day since we will not be able to take day trips very much.