year round schooling – how long are your breaks?

I’m beginning to think we must take too much time off!  My friend uses Ambleside, and only has a few weeks off per year, less than 5 I’d say.  If you follow SCM 3 12-week terms, you need 36 weeks of schooling.  So 52-36=16 weeks off.  Our public schools gets around 10 weeks off in the summer, then spring break + lots of other holidays.  So we do three terms (we don’t have a day or week off in the 12 weeks unless it’s a birthday or major holiday), and have about 3 weeks off in between two of them, and then a really long break (now) for our summer, about 8 weeks.  We still do math and reading for several of those weeks off, but not other subjects.  My state requires we do 1000 hours, and we easily get that done (and more) in those 36 weeks of school.  Maybe I’m missing something though, if so please let me know!:)

amama5 – I l LOVE how that schedule looks! I’m going to kick that around for a week or two…you may get a pm from me. 😉

Also, i think we must live in the same state.  lol

We school year round with  about 2 weeks off around Christmas – New Years.  We take a week off for Thanksgiving – but we usually go on a few educational field trips – so that counts as schooling for us.  We always take birthdays off (4 in total – we don’t take mama and papa’s birthday off).  We take about 1 week off in August when we visit relatives on Long Island and we take two weeks off at some other point to go on vacation.  And when we feel burnt, we may take a day or two off here and there.  So I would think we take off somewhere between 8 – 10 weeks off during the year.  We are super flexible, and we always take breaks for “spring days”.  Public Schools get “snow days”, we get “spring days” !!  Kids Love them!  School is canceled due to nice weather!

I agree with the Spring days.  When we first started homeschooling my husband promised the boys they would get all the same days off as the PS, including snow days.  (Unfortunately, he didn’t consult me before making this promise.)  Then he wanted them to have the same March break as their PS friends.  I had to sit him down and explain that we couldn’t take a week off in mid March if we were going away for vacation the last week of March, first week of April.  Thankfully he understood.  I also explained that if there is a blizzard outside, we might as well be using the time to catch up on extra work rather than have them sitting around wanting to play video games or watch tv all day because they are bored.  Save the days off for the good days when we can really enjoy it!  He also understands my reasoning to keep some math and copy work going through the summer, especially for the sake of my older ds who has difficulty with both.  I don’t want two and a half moths of no school undoing all the great strides he’s made this year. 

I really enjoy reading other people’s schedules.  I am trying to find the perfect fit for us.  Where I work part-time (M-F mornings) I really need to keep my days shorter and one of the ways of doing this is to school fewer hours more days of the year. 

Laura.bora, that’s exactly how I feel!  I purposefully scheduled our year around nice weather, we are off from mid April until June, and again in Sept.  We aren’t pool people, so we might as well be schooling in the heat of summer!  Why not mama and papa’s bdays off too?  Just kidding, we all know that would put us behind quickly!

4myboys, no we only “school” 2.5-3 hours a day too, but the rest of the day/year is filled with school that doesn’t seem like school:)  Educational computer time, free reading, trips to the zoo, mom’s read alouds, gymanstics, art classes, etc.   

3littlegirls, it is a small world:)  Feel free to PM me, although we’ve only done one official year of that schedule so far, but we really enjoyed it.  Right now they had one completely school free week, and we started back with fun math/extra practice yesterday, and still reading lots.