Good morning to all of my long time friends, homeschoolers, and new readers! It’s a brand new year, and schools a foot! And I’m so excited to start up again aren’t you? No? Okay, me neither.
Despite my welcome picture here it’s a cold, dreary day, and no one wants to do school. Including the teacher. My husband didn’t want to go to work either. Everyone wanted to stay in jammies and have a snow day.
We always take a nice long break over December. Partially because I LOVE Christmas and I prefer to spend our days making cookies, doing fun crafts, reading books, sledding, and otherwise just relaxing. I need a break and so does my family. It’s amazing, incredible, wonderful, relaxing, and just plain needed.
But man sakes alive it’s hard to come back!
The craziness of our homeschool days, sports, and various extra curricular activities seem like they all come rushing back in at one time.
But as I lay in bed thinking of excuses of why we should start school tomorrow instead, I begin thinking about June. Warm summer days, relaxing at the pool, lemonade stands, reading on the deck, and oh the delicious BBQ…
And we’ll be watching it all from inside while we’re doing school. No wait, that can’t be right! My mental thoughts came to a screeching halt! If we take off a day now, we’ll have to make it up in our summer break and that’s no bueno.
As a good homeschool mama I had planned to get to bed early Sunday night and get up early, do a devotion, then prepare a heavenly feast for our first day back at school after the long winter break.
Except that like a bad homeschool mama I ended up watching season 4 of Downton Abbey last night to get caught up, and stayed up way too late! Which meant that I got up late. Which meant the kids ate cereal, and we didn’t start school until about…gasp…10:30 am! So much for my plans to start the year off right.
But sometimes we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, make a cup of very strong coffee (or in my case tea), and as that famous footwear company says “Just do it!”. So that’s what I did. I drug myself out of bed, hopped in the shower, ate some cereal, and got right back up into the homeschooling saddle.
Surprisingly the kids weren’t all that reluctant, it was mostly me. I think they started getting bored over the long break. But they would never admit it in a million years.
So here we are back in the schoolroom, and back in the swing of things even if we don’t feel like it. You know why?
Because learning is important. (That’s my politically correct answer.)
And because we definitely don’t want to be doing school in June when summer is calling! (That’s my real reason.)
And guess what starting school at 10:30am resulted in? We finished at 3:30 instead of 2:00-ish. No biggie, no stress, no problem. Tomorrow’s a new day!
Dealing with homeschool blah’s at your house too? Check out my post on How to Beat the Homeschool Blahs!
Welcome back I hope you have a great new year!
Morning Erica! 10:30am is our regular start time. Monkey is a 12-hour sleeper even still at age 9. So the 9pm bedtime gives us an 8:30-9:30am wake-up (I get so much done in the morning!) and with breakfast, tidy-up and devotions 10:30am is normal. We usually finish between 4-5pm. The ski hill opens this week and we’ll be adding a daily hour there too – we call it gym class… Yesterday’s great success was Roman Numerals. Its great to start off the year with an academic success on a new topic.
Erica,
I want to encourage you to stay the course:)))God has given us precious time (though yesterday I didn’t see a lot of precious!). I believe the enemy wants to derail us, rattle us and push on our weaknesses. Praying you find strength in Him today as you very publicly homeschool with all these readers “watching”. Thank you for your honesty in “getting back in the saddle” and the challenges of it all. Praying you rest at His feet today in your heart.
Thank you!
Oh, I have started plenty of days at 10:30 in the morning. Sometimes, when my kids sleep in and are totally unmotivated to eat their breakfast in a relatively quick fashion. I hope you have a great first week back. 🙂
This. I needed this. Here I am waiting for our “away” student to arrive so we can start (I homeschool not only my 2 girls but another child) and I’m already feeling tense about the late hour. We are having a discussion today about the importance of pushing forward so that when the weather turns nice (not the -3* it is right now) we can enjoy it and not be frantically trying to finish schoolwork or make up days. I needed the reminder so that I can impress it upon them as well. Thanks!
Good Morning Erica!
One thing that my kids were worried about with homeschooling was about not having “snow days” like they do in public school. (Go figure!) So, our house rule is that if the school district has a snow day then we too have a snow day! Many days they don’t even think to check the TV but we had a big storm so they remembered to check and Monday and today resulted in a snow day… (I was glad too 🙂 Have a good week!
Good reminder! And thanks for being transparent with us all 🙂 Too often we start at 10:00 or 10:30 but we really try to get started earlier. My goal for this “New Year” is to begin more promptly so that we can end our day a little sooner.
Okay, this post makes me feel better! We didn’t get started on time today or yesterday, either! I did go to bed early and the children got up ready to go; I’m just dealing with a cold that’s slowed me down on everything! I, too, appreciate your honesty! 🙂
I have always been envious how early you end your day with four children and have wondered if you consistently do the discussion questions included with the various subjects? What is your secret for finishing so early?
I do and it takes up a lot of time. I’ve slacked off a little this year and permit no discussion from time to time.
PS We consistently start at 8:00 a.m. Sometimes I do run late and we start at 8:15. I fall off the wagon during “recess” and sometimes it is over an hour.
Hi Christine,
Our day takes around 4.5-5 hours depending on the day, and that includes lunch. I’m not sure how to explain how we time it. I kind of move between kids and they’re usually working on similar subjects at the same time depending on how long it takes them, they all work at different paces.
Here is a post I did on teaching multiple grades: http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2013/01/homeschooling-teaching-multiple-grade-levels.html
And here’s one on our schedule:
http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2012/08/our-daily-homeschool-schedule.html
And here are some I’ve done on specific daily schedules for our current grades:
http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/category/daily-schedule
hope that helps some! :o)
We are thinking of homeschooling next year (hence why I’m following your blog!) and to be honest until I saw this it didn’t really occur to me that this was an issue so I’m glad I have awareness that just like with “regular” school, it can be hard to get back into the swing of things. Especially when we are the teacher!
After being off for 2 weeks it was hard for us to get started back, too! I actually just posted a video about curing homeschool burnout and how to break out of a homeschool rut on my Youtube channel….perhaps you’ll find it useful as well. Thanks Erica for yet another great post! http://youtu.be/hDxroHJJ4sw