Daily Schedule Quirks

A holiday weekend makes me think about and shake my head at our homeschooling schedule. When we started homeschooling back in August I told the kids they needed to be out in the cabin by 9 am. That was my way of imposing some sort of structure on their lives, and I thought they would need that to get them up and going some days. In over 3 months of homeschooling, Aurora has only been late twice (she slept in, and I didn't wake her up), and Denver hasn't been late once. Besides a rare comment about our "time" it is all intrinsic for the kids: they get themselves up, they get themselves breakfast and they head out to the cabin and start working, sometimes well before 9:00.

Denver sets his alarm for 7 am on "school days." I've tried to convince him to get up later when he gets to bed late, but he has a very strong need to be "regular", so the alarm goes off every morning and he lays in bed and reads for an hour before he wanders downstairs and grabs some cereal, toast or oatmeal for breakfast. If I am already out in the cabin working he'll come out and join me; otherwise, he'll hang out in the house reading until 8:30 or 9:00 when he makes a mad dash to get to the computer before Aurora.

Aurora wakes up early too and often she'll get breakfast and eat in bed (aaaargh! I'm trying to break her of that habit!) while reading. Other times she's obviously wiped out and sleeps till almost 9:00, particularly when she had 3-4 hours of sports practices the evening before (basketball, climb, kayak, more basketball....). The darkness doesn't make it easy to get up in the morning either, since it is dark out till after 9:00, and before it's over it will be dark till 10 or later.

The kids choose which subjects they want to do in what order, and I only vaguely know what their preferences are since that's their business, and they get all their work done every day: math, reading, writing, Russian, typing and drawing are daily activities, with science and social studies assigned on a looser weekly schedule, again, at their option to get it done when they want. It only becomes a problem completing it if we have an unexpected day off, in which case they generally double up assignments the next day or get it done over the weekend.