"Why in the world would a parent subject their children to that?...Poor, poor children!" A "concerned" parent...
The more I homeschool, the more I think it is nothing but wisdom to school year round. This will not look the same for every family, but basically, there are lots of breaks throughout the school year. They may take a break every 4 weeks from school or even more allowing the parent to be refreshed and the student as well. A lot of parents and teachers feel that so much education is lost when they break for 3 months in the summer.
Think of all the days in the fall that are wasted reviewing topics that didn't need to be forgotten!
One pro is that students are able to move through their curriculum at a faster pace because they can cut out the review time and months off. Is it necessary for the child to move at a faster pace? No, but if they are able, there is no harm in it. There is, however, possible harm of not moving fast enough. Children who get bored in school, do poorly and typically exhibit behavioral issues.
It doesn't always mean that the family is moving at a faster pace. They may be taking their time in unit studies or projects or just any area that the child loves and truly diving in and letting the education really soak in. It also could be that a family has a child that needs to work at a slower pace to truly master the material, so there is a real need for having more days to teach and less time off in order to not forget. Not every year rounder takes frequent breaks, but what is great is they have the luxury of that if they so choose.
I haven't done this yet, but this year we started much earlier and I may move into year round schooling even as soon as next year. My kids will not like this because I haven't done this from the beginning, but just like anything else, they will adjust.
The benefits seem to far outweigh the cons. Cons being your kids fuss at you, you don't have 3 months to order your next years curriculum and of course, the disdain you get from people when you inform them of your choices. However, lost learning is never a good thing and wasted months on review can be so frustrating.
I would love to hear from you if you have schooled year round. What did your schedule look like? How did your children handle it? How did you as the teacher dodge the "burned out" factor? Since I am seriously considering this, I would love to know anything you can tell me.
I totally agree! My daughter just finished her first year of home/virtual school in June. Although the virtual school doesn't start up again until late in August, I don't want her to lose all the ground we've covered (even in terms of habits) so we are still working on handwriting and math specifically while we do more of these "enrichment units". We are also still taking a summer "vacation". But she'll have a "travel journal"
ReplyDeleteto keep and we'll be stopping at parks and museums etc along the way for which I have specific learning goals. I use the virtual schools "vacations" as continued time to learn by planning mini unit studies that coincide with these "breaks". I always keep a journal and evidence of her work. Then, if we need to just take a couple of days for down time, we always can. For more info on the kinds of activities we do, check out pinchxeverything.blogspot.com. Once there, take a look at any of the articles about field trips, kitchen learning and History. Those are the activities we did this year to round out our learning. For ideas for travel journals for different modalities try http://pinchxeverything.blogspot.com/2012/06/learning-travel-journals.html
It sounds like you have an excellent, well thought out plan! Thank you for sharing and for letting us know about your site :)! Keep up the good work with your children!!
ReplyDeleteOur year round school consists of 6 weeks on, 1 week off, 4 days a week. Which just happens to coincide with 4th of July week off, Thanksgiving week off, and we take the two weeks at Christmas with 3 weeks before the break and three weeks after starting back with our regular schedule after that. We do another 6 week split in June to take a week off for Vacation Bible School. The kids love the 3 day weekends (and so do I!!), which is how I got them to do year round in the first place. The week off allows me to plan for the next 6 weeks and order curriculum if I need to. It also gives them something to brag about to their public school friends. (Not that I encourage that, of course! : )
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great schedule! Thanks for sharing. :)
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