Homeschooling schedule

How does one homeschool and have a schedule? Not only does one have to homeschool the children but there are all of the normal household duties to be performed also. The house has to be cleaned, shopping to be done, bills, banking, business to be done, doctors appointments, gardening, house repairs, cars to be serviced and repaired etc. etc. etc. When children are small they can't be left at home and so the homeschooling mum has to take the children with her on all of these many chores.

I am going to discuss in this post how I managed to homeschool, successfully in my opinion, and have a schedule, but I am first going to give a brief history of the evolution of my homeschooling methods to a style that suited me, and the children.

When I first started homeschooling I began with school text books and we sat down every morning to do 'school'. It wasn't long before I found that homeschooling using school text books was exhausting, for me, and totally irrelevant for my son and so I switched to a more natural learning style of homeschooling by following my son's interests and facilitating those interests - i.e child led learning. That year I received two visits from moderators, the second being very negative (I later received a letter from a moderator, from another district, telling me that the Education Department had instructed moderators to get all homeschooled children back into school, thus explaining the negative visit).  Following the second (or negative) visit from the moderator, I tried homeschooling my way and the way that I felt that the Department wanted me to homeschool. I then went into a period of extreme guilt, frustration, fear, anxiety and exhaustion as I was doing neither method very well and I felt completely at a loss as to how to go about homeschooling and try and run a house and care for two pre-school children. It was then that I realised that I had to homeschool MY way and that I just couldn't please everyone, with the Department being the last on the list of those to please. These were MY kids and they were going to be raised learning about the things that our family valued and not what the state values. (I have a degree in cultural heritage, in which I studied the psychology of society and how our imaginations are worked on to make us believe that we belong to a state, nation, empire etc. which I will discuss in further blogs)

So how did I develop a schedule that worked for me?

I tended towards having a major theme that we studied for a year. The example that I will use here is one year's theme with my daughter. Together we started an ebay business. We would go to auctions and bid on and buy items that we then sold on ebay. We would go to the auction previews and tick off the items that we thought would be interesting to buy. Then we would go home and research the items to see how much the same, or similar, items sold for in the past. We researched how to tell fakes, how things such as Millifiori paperweights were made. We learnt about glass, china, Wembley ware, Carlton Ware, enamel ware etc. etc. etc. (She has a fabulous Crinoline Lady china, and hand painted Australian bone china collection now). We then would go to the auction and bid on the items that we thought that we could make a profit on. Then we would come home and list the items on ebay, providing descriptions, photos, price, postage, packaging etc. etc. etc. We also bought items form op shops that we resold and sometimes we bought things that were on sale in the stores and sold for a profit on ebay.

We had many themes over the years including Galileo, which turned into time (if you think time is simple, think again) which turned into light and heat. We had a year on law, the difference between law and rules, we looked at laws that pirates had, and then the kids made up rules of their bedrooms. What we found was that none of these subjects are as simple as they look and they became fascinating journeys of discovery. So these themes could be worked on quite naturally throughout the year.


We also had a weekly schedule. The children also attended Art classes once a week, recorder classes once a week, sign language classes once a week, table tennis classes once a week, jungle gym once a week, and then a monthly schedule in which I conducted a history walk, once a month we weeded Ellis Brook, and once a month we went to the Zoo.

This schedule, I found, left lots of room to attend to all of those 'other' things that us mums and dads have to do.