Saturday, July 13, 2013

How we get through all our work so fast in any given day.

With three kids and a home to care for time management is very key. I have already wrote a post about the rhythm of our family daily but this one is more just focused on how we cover our actual lessons. I have 3 kids at 3 very different levels. They are 12th,4th, and preschool. So as you can see not real easy to always teach one thing to all 3 at the same time. How ever there are days we do that very thing. Thank Goodness my oldest is nearly 100% independent learner. I can pretty much give him is schedule of daily work and unless he has a technical issue I don't need to worry about him again until I go back at the end of the day to check his work.

My younger two I do combine history, science, art, music, and story time.Coming up with a system that works for you and your family is the key. I know a good bit of homeschool families who use the workbox system. It is a great system and most kids do really well with it. However to me personally I found it to take up a lot of time, money ,and space. I took the same general idea of the workbox system and made a binder/folder system. Everything we need for the week is in a binder and each binder has a daily work folder. I also place in the binder any books we will need you can buy binders with pockets or just add in a folder with pockets to hold the books. There is also a weekly to do list for each binder. For example lets say History. When she first opens it up first she would see her weekly to do list that has everything she will do each day for history. Then the next thing is her daily work folder. If she has worksheets , research , ect that would be placed in this folder. Then she has her book folder. Inside this folder are any books to be read independently or with me that week for history. We do Unit Studies for history and science so she tends to have a good bit of smaller living books to read each week. Last she would find any printed out reading material. She also has a morning independent binder. There are five folders inside this binder all labelled a day of the work week on it. Inside each folder I place her morning independent work. This is creative writing prompt, cursive, voc, reading comp, math practice, and spelling. Each binder is also numbered so that she knows when one is finished to start what she can on the other.

Pretty much our day goes in this order.
Binder 1- independent work-writing, cursive, voc, reading comp, math practice, spelling,
Binder 2- science
Binder 3- history
Binder 4 - geography
Binder 5 - religion/foreign language ( we alternate)
Last is math which is done online.
Reading is done at family reading time at 8:00p.m.
Art, music, home ec. , crafts are done after all book work is finished.

Time usually spent looks like this.
 Binder 1 -40mins
Binder 2- 45mins-hr
Binder 3- 45mins-hr
Binder 4- 30 mins
Binder 5- 30 mins
Math 40 mins
Reading 30-40 mins

On Avg we spend 5 hrs a day doing book work. That does not count any art, music, home ec., crafts. We usually will spend another hr or so depending on the project in these areas.Having a system like this set up has cut back on the time spent getting materials, or children asking what is next. It also allows for them to become more independent workers.

No comments:

Post a Comment