activities & priorities

Every family is so different! Some have all elementary and younger, others only middle and high school, while yet others span the ages from teens with a job outside the home down to having another baby and every age in between (that would be me!). There are lots of things that play into it too, for example we have one child with serious medical needs. He has more appointments than you would believe (and we just scheduled his 19th surgery. He’s only 5.).

Here is how it works for my family:

Children under age 8 have no outside activities period. Children from age 8-11 can participate in Cub Scouts or Activity Day Girls one night a week. This is at our church at the exact same day/time. Youth ages 12-18 can participate in youth group at our church (exact same day/time as the Cubs/Activity Days). So we are out of the house 1 evening per week for those children at the same place and time.

Beyond that: Kids can take piano. We have a teacher that comes to our home once a week in the afternoon.

High school age children can participate in a sport (ONE per year). Our oldest daughter is 16, 11th grade. She started running track with the local public high school in 9th grade. I hate the 2-3 month season, it’s practices and meets 6 days a week.

OR High school age children who are interested in a career can shadow people in that field if they set it up. My 16 year old shadows several veterinarians in one practice once a week, started this summer when she turned 16.

OR High school age children can also choose to get a job. (They generally won’t choose all 3 of these options because one tends to preclude the others.) My 16 year old is now working part time as of last month. She probably won’t be able to run track this year because of working. Or she’ll have to choose not to work. And the shadowing can only happen if she doesn’t have work on her shadowing day, so that is now occasional instead of every week.

As a family we don’t do a co-op. We do have a book club I started 8ish years ago with a couple other families that meets once a month.

Prioritizing:

Mornings are for school until you have a job. Then you can choose to work in the morning and do school in the afternoon or evening. At that age it is time to learn to balance things, try your wings, fail, and try again.

Afternoons are for medical care and rest.

Evenings are family time.

Medical appointments happen when they happen. I try to be selective when we have the option but sometimes we just don’t have an option. We have some specialists that only have office hours two days a week and do surgeries the other days, for example. So we are limited to those two days. (Ex: this week is an eye doctor appointment with the developmental opthomologist who did my son’s double eye surgery a year ago. He is only in the office twice a week so we too a Thursday morning appointment even though I would prefer an afternoon. It took 2 months to get that opening.)  Kids who are NOT at the medical appointment generally do their school work at home with dad, big sister, grandma, or whoever is watching them.

Every family is so different, and I know even for my family it depends on our “season of life”. What we do now is not like it was when my kido’s were younger amd who knows what the future will hold.

We do not do coops, I don’t want to loose a day a school at home, but in our area that is uncommon. I would say 90% of the homeschool famililies I know locally do coops some two coops/week.

We do participate in a weekly indepth Bible Study. It has a fantastic homeschool (and younger children) program, so my kids are studying the same thing I am but at their own level. It is only two hours/week and they also have time to visit with their friends during it, which is fun and they also help with setting up for the day (and other things), which has been great volunteer practice.

We participate in a choir program one hour/week and through that we do a once/month outreach at the local assisted living facility. It has been a lot of fun and a great opportunity.

My kids also do piano and swim. It sounds like a lot but everything is really close to our home so very little driving time involved, which helps a lot!

I keep before lunch and early afternoon for school, afternoon is for other activities (not daily, only twice/week once for piano once for choir) and some evenings are swimteam or swim lessons.

I am a homebody by nature but find getting out is good for the kids and me. Not too much, still plenty of free time at home, but we like some outside activities 🙂

We have some church activities (mainly confirmation on Sundays and youth group once a month).  We also have a coop that meets about 12 times for the year (every other week for 2 of our 3 terms).  It’s CM, so we also get some of our subjects covered there, which I love!  So even when we have coop, we are still getting in several lessons.  I also attend a CM book club once a month.

That’s it for us.  We have plenty of time for community events as they come up.  Since we aren’t burnt out on activities, we can actually enjoy these!