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I love the flexability of homeschooling.
This year we tried something different to the usual 4 terms of 10 weeks with 2 week holidays in between, from the first week of Feb until a week before Christmas. We usually start in January because the girls are over Christmas and are getting bored to distraction and work until the end of November with the term holidays throughout plus extras here and there. I found that after about 5 or 6 weeks of school the girls get tired and real learning tapered away and was labourious. Also 2 weeks of holidays was just too long. It is crazy to do it just because everyone else does it that way. Homeschooling is about finding what works for your family. I decided to try something different (because I could!) and cut the times in half. Five weeks of work with a week off. It worked very well for the first half of the year, but for the second half, clashed with other things that came up… life! We had a surprise visit from Grandma and Grandpa (and Mack the dog) a few months ago, so an impromptu holiday resulted. Dave was studying in two Semester blocks, so he had time off when we didn’t and vice versa. We also had a visit from Nanna and had to go down to Perth for a few reasons too.
I’m planning to try to follow the terms next year. Dave is studying again, so we should line up better with his holidays. I don’ t know if we’ll make it all the way through the year, but we’ll see how it goes and change it if it isn’t working, just like everything else in life!
The girls finished all their work early this year because I wrote out the remaining work in a list and said work through it at your own pace and when you’re finished it’s holidays. Now I wrote out about 12 days worth of work and they did it in 2 days! So holidays started a couple of weeks earlier than I expected! This year I wrote out their work in a diary a week at a time at the beginning and extended it to the 5 week term at a time toward the end of the year. This year we also worked from a diary type book where I’d written out the whole years worth of work and when we had a break (like I mentioned above) we stopped and picked up where we left off. There was no “behind” or “catch up” to a certain date. Each page of the book is numbered, not dated. It took a lot of pressure off of the kids and me. We’ll be sticking to this from now on, after all, life is not a competition, it’s a journey.