Changing gear

It is that time of year when I usually change gear with our homeschooling to kickstart things after our customary February slump. This year it wasn't so much a slump as a series of interruptions, but we still certainly need kickstarting. We have another 14 or so weeks of this school year to go, and now Grandma's big move is over we badly need to get back into a reasonable routine. Our week has also changed shape, in that we always used to take Thursday as a light day - on alternate Thursdays we went to our Catholic homeschool group, and on other Thursdays we usually visited Grandma. Now Grandma is almost on our doorstep we can visit any time and the homeschool group has recently folded, so we now have no regular daytime commitments (after-school is another story!). As we head into spring and summer I want to get into the habit of doing all our formal schoolwork in the mornings, leaving the afternoons free. This week I have been road-testing a barebones schedule, which seemed almost too easy! Maybe I am so used to having to slot around other commitments that when we have a run of free mornings it just falls into place.

The ebb and flow of having the girls working together seems to have ebbed again. They really are not in the same place at all as regards their needs, aptitudes and modus operandi. When they work together, even if the material is appropriate to both, they niggle each other and go at different speeds. After a bit of tweaking my experimental schedule now looks like this ...

Angel - religion and independent reading daily
Monday - maths, geography (Journey North mystery class), science (reading and notebook page)
Tuesday - French, English, history notebook page
Wednesday - maths, French, science (experiment)
Thursday - French, English, science (exercise from textbook)
Friday - maths, English, geography (reading and notebook page)

Star - maths, Latin and read aloud daily
Monday - geography (Journey North mystery class), science (reading and notebook page)
Tuesday - religion, history
Wednesday - religion, history
Thursday - religion (notebook page), nature study
Friday - geography (reading and notebook page), science experiment

When possible I will still be taking one of the girls to Mass on Tuesdays, which will mean working in the afternoon, but sometimes there is no Tuesday Mass and other times we have no transport, so in practice it only works out about half the time.

Now we are getting back into the swing of things, I will be trying to post daily notes on my Bookworm's Diary blog again from next week.