A Week in the Life: Adventure Homeschool Family
What does the week of a homeschool family look like? Well that will all depend on the family. Actually you’d probably get almost as many different answers as families you ask. We tend to be a diverse bunch!
But you’re here because you’d like some adventure in your life, and maybe because you resonate with our sort of laid back style over here. So before I lay out what our week looks like, let’s take a minute to talk about our style of home education, because this plays a HUGE roll in how we’ve come to this current schedule.
How We Got Here: Our Homeschool Style
If you looked in on our week a few years ago, you probably wouldn’t even recognize us. Being parents who came out of public and private schools, we only knew the typical school model for education. I knew there was something else out there, but I didn’t quite know where to find it. Over time, with research and meeting other homeschool families I started to figure out what it was that really jived with what we wanted for our kiddos and family life. (Side note, this is an ever evolving process. A perk of homeschool is that you can always change, at any time to better suit your family.)
For one, our homeschool IS a part of our family life, and our family life is a part of our homeschool. We believe that education is what naturally happens as a result of experiences. And so we put our children in the way of experiences that will help them grow and learn (think unschooling/child-led learning). In addition, I really resonated with some aspects of the Charlotte Mason (CM) method of homeschool, and so we do the majority of our non-experiential learning through “living books” (think books that are regular stories that you can relate to… not text books).
CM is also where our practice of nature study came from, and the entire reason I realized that we could use adventuring as a whole aspect of our lives and education. One other practice popular in the CM world that we adopted and love, is “morning time” (also called circle time and morning basket. You can learn more about our morning time here). Lastly, we have followed a few formal curriculums over the years, but generally I prefer to make up our own (except for math… that is one subject I INSIST on outsourcing!).
So with those things in mind, here is a typical week for us when we are not roadschooling:
Monday
The first day of our “school” week, Monday is the day we set aside as our most important day. I am NOT a procrastinator, and for the sake of keeping anxiety at bay like to front-end load my work. And so Mondays are the day we most focus on accomplishing what I’d like for us to cover for the week. We spend about an hour, sometimes more, in morning time, and then we all split up to accomplish our own personal work. This includes individual study, study with mom, and chores. Usually the kids aren’t finished until after lunch-time, but once they are done they get a little bit of screen time and the rest of the day free to do as they like. (At the moment, the three older kids go to a class in the afternoon for an hour or two on M/W).
Tuesday
Free day. Sometimes we will use Tuesdays to get ahead on our work if we know we would like to adventure somewhere on one of our typical “school” days. This can also be a catch up day if anyone did not finish their work from the day before. If we’re feeling up to it, sometimes we’ll find a short hike, playground, or regular play date for the afternoon. Or grocery shopping. Because, you know, responsibilities.
Wednesday
The second of our three major school days, the flow is the same as on Monday. We hope to finish our work a little earlier than usual on Wednesdays because our public school friends have a half day, and we go to church at night, so we need to eat dinner earlier.
Thursday
Adventure day! This is the day I typically plan our bigger adventures, and so I make sure nothing else is on the schedule in case we want to linger for a while, or have a long drive (I’ve been known to drive 2 hours for a good time). However, if we plan a big adventure for Friday, then Thursday becomes a regular day like Monday and Wednesday. We like to keep our schedule flexible so we can more easily schedule adventures with friends, or work around the weather (HAH! Weather in San Diego? Well… yeah, sometimes. But that includes snow and tide charts).
Friday
Our final regular school day. Yes you’ve read that right, we only do our “formal” schooling three days a week. The fun thing about our Friday morning time is that we can incorporate any interesting things we found from the previous day’s aventure into our studies. Often this means researching our findings and questions using books, internet, or TV. For example, after noticing an orb weaver web, we spent a morning looking up spiders and learning about their lives and how they make their webs. The kids recorded their findings in their nature journals.
Saturday
If needed, we will do work on a Saturday, but that’s usually for the weeks that we did a LOT of adventuring and completely neglected our indoor studies. Saturday is typically a day for friends, fun, errands, and cubing competitions or any other sports or clubs the kids might be in at the time.
Sunday
God’s day!
So there it is! Our week summed up. If you want a deeper look into what we study, or how I manage homeschool with 5 kids and a variety of ages, you can find that here. In the meantime, let me know in the comments what you think and what questions you have!
