{31 Days To organize the "hidden" areas of your home} Day 7~ The School Schedule

This post will probably only apply to those of us that homeschool but I suppose it could be applied to a daily family schedule as well. I have been homeschooling my children for 19 years and have several more to go- my youngest is 8. One thing that helps tremendously is to have a plan and to organize our school day. I use the Charlotte Mason style of educating so I like to keep our lessons short but also vary the lessons from day to day. I have learned, from experience, that having a general starting hour gets our day off to a productive start. With Abigail, we start around 9am. Abi is more productive in the morning whereas Britni was a different student and we adjusted our start time a little later during her more productive time of the day. I struggled with this for years and then realized that one of the benefits of homeschooling was that we could start and end at whatever time was best for us. We start our day with "morning time". I use this first 20 minutes or so of our school day to do our Bible time, work on our poetry memorization, and singing our folk-songs or Hymns. From here on I vary the subjects from ones that are mentally more intense, like math, to those that are less intensive, like picture study. This is a Charlotte Mason method that I have seen work first hand. Math is a tougher subject for Abi so when she is done using the mental effort to focus for the days lesson, she is revived by doing something less draining, like listening to a story from the Burgess Bird book. I always end our day with what I call "free reads". These are chapter books that we are reading for fun and not part of our required days work.This has always been an incentive for our girls to get the required work done so we can get to the fun part of the day.  Another thing I do to keep our school days productive and on schedule is to keep all the books we need for regular daily work in one place. For the past two years I have taken the month of July off and use it as my planning month.(I decide what I am going to use for school earlier in the year but I put my lesson plans together for the year in July.) I move last years books off the shelf and put the new years books on- all ready and waiting for us when we start school in August. Your day doesn't have to be scheduled by the minute but if you are struggling to get things done, having a general starting and stopping time, along with a basic subject plan, helps you get things accomplished.