Taking Breaks- Homeschool

Burn out comes like a thief in the night to homeschooling households...And  not just the Momma's.  It really can wear the whole household down.

As homeschool newbies many years ago, we thought we must emulate the "school" environment.... Those first years we ran our schedule according to that of the local government school district... Only problem with that was that Hubby wasn't necessarily having days off when that particular district had days off, so we were doing school when he was  home.  The other problem was Momma-Burn out, back then we had babies... 4 of them in five short years, but we still were of the mind set that we had to follow some schedule dictated by the local school body....   Soon all those babies were of school age, our days were even more packed with tons of learning, important building block type learning.  That left me, the teacher, with no spare time for little things like grocery shopping.

Another consequence was that we were filling Hubby's precious Saturday off time with the basic household chores and errands, which left no time for other family activities... We were all burning out, we had to make some adjustments. 

Enter the 4 day school week.  We've found that we can school 4 days a week and still have plenty of weeks for vacations and breaks.  Most prepared curriculum have about 170 lessons, which equates to 34 weeks @ 5 days a week.  The 4 day school week, equals 42 1/2 weeks.  We still can take a nice long break in December and about 6 weeks in the summer {which is July and part of August}  and still have a week or so to spare for a vacation at another time during the school year.  We always take off school; days that Hubby has off from work.   

Friday's are favourite days around here.   The children and I do lounge a bit on Friday mornings,  then we do a thorough cleaning of the house, {change the beds, deep clean the bathrooms etc}, we sometimes do errands, like grocery shopping.  Mostly it's just a quiet day at home.  I might do some sewing, baking or scrapbooking.  The children mostly spend time in the activities they enjoy. 

Really we are just thankful that God showed us that we don't need to be duplicating anybody else's schedule.  Our home is much more calm and relaxed these days, thanks to the 4 day week.