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Reality check for 13-yr-olds
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I spent a lot of time over the Christmas break organizing and planning the next semester. My 13-year-olds are in revolt though, claiming that I’m asking way too much of them and there is no way they will ever get it all done…unless they wake up at 5:00 every morning and work until bedtime. They’re a wee bit melodramatic, but I do want to make sure I’m not over-scheduling them. Is the following a fair amount of work to require? Too much? Not enough?
Monday 9:00-11:00 – Family Work
Composer
Artist
Poetry
Logic
Computer Coding
Fairy Tale
Geography
Nature Study
Then we go to co-op for 3 hours.
Tuesday – Friday 9:00 to 10:30 Family Work
Scriptures/Devotional
History spine
Foreign Language
Then alternating days of Shakespeare and dictation
From 10:30 to noon is independent work. They have time after lunch to finish as well. Time estimates in (). I’ve tried to be generaous with guesstimates….I think they can get a lot of it done much faster.
Scripture (20 to 30)
Science (25)
Math – 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks (60)
History readings – currently 4 pages a day in 2 books (30)
Written (or typed) narration (15)
Copywork – alternate print and cursive (5 to 10)
Lightning Lit (30)
Science book – 4 to 6 pages in a biography or living book (15)
Read for fun/book of their choice (30)
Piano (30)
Am I the meanest mom ever? Or is this about right for their ages? Thanks!
Nope, it looks very reasonable to me with the exception of Math. I’d shorten that to 30-45 minutes max. Their job is their education. It’s supposed to be more work and harder work from here on out. It’s a shift at this level, but an important one.
What grade is this? This looks like a nice full schedule to me, but I do not have a 13 yo.
If it is any consolation, my 4th grader was complaining about our new schedule, since we were light in December. I thought it looked reasonable and we eased into it by starting mid-week and allowing extra time. By Monday it was working okay. I did decide to alternate two family subjects though. You know your children best to know what they need and are capable of. Give some allowances the first week to get used to it. You should be able to tell in about a week if something may need to be changed.
We may do too little but my 13yo has about 2.5 hrs of work a day. There are a lot of things like poetry, art, Shakespeate, etc that we alternate so we are not doing all of them every day.
Nebby
LookIng again at your list, I will say there are some things you include that I don’t include in my count of what is school time like instrument practice and free reading. If I included those my # of hrs would go up.
Nebby
I think it looks reasonable, although a bit heavier than my 12YO’s schedule.
The only thing that caught my eye was two lessons of TT. After some trial and error with my son, we settled on 30 minutes/day (regardless of how many problems that may be.) If he gets an exceptionally difficult problem that takes him 15 of the 30 minutes, that’s OK.
Next year I plan to move up to 40 minutes/day, but I don’t think he could ever complete two lessons in that amount of time. (Right now he’s doing Pre-Algebra.)
One thing I do with all the reading my DS has to do is I’ve scheduled every day from 12-12:30 as “independent reading” time. I generally use that time to get lunch ready while the kids do some of their reading, but sometimes I’ll read aloud to some of the kids (sometimes even my 12YO. If there is a book he’s really struggling to get through, 20-30 minutes of reading it with me helps to get him back on track.)
My 8YO has been listening to audio books during that time, since chapter books are still a little challenging for him.
Another comment on the subject of the length of math. I’m guessing you’re asking them to do 2 lessons a day in order to catch up or advance more quickly…fair point and I attempted the same with one of my boys when we first started. (and take this FWIW because my boy is just 10) I found that when I scheduled 2 lessons a day, I had a revolt. But when I positioned it as wanting us to complete 8-9 lessons a week, he took it better. Some days he’d do 2/day, others 1/day and before long he came up with the idea that when we had no big plans for the weekend, he’d save a few lessons for the weekend.
On this – I’ll tell you that this “weekend idea”…opened up a whole new world for me and I now look at work required in a week as including the option of Saturday. My boys are so in tune with the amount of homework that public schooled kids end up having on the weekends that they seem pretty okay with doing some of their “regular” workload on the weekends. They figure it’s better than all the “big project work” that their peers have sent home… (even when my boys were in p.s. for grade one and two we had instances where “projects” were sent home that sometimes had us sitting at a table with 2 hours of work on a Saturday or Sunday…they have never forgotten that and as such doing weekend work is no big deal to them). Long story short, we’ve now got the option of shortening our day – and they feel Monday to Friday is more do’able…we used to really need 4 hours a day, it’s easily now 2.5-3 because we do some of it on Saturday.
I totally realize though that this might cause an even LARGER revolt in some families, LOL!
Thank you all! Yes, Angelina, the 2 lessons of math is catch-up. Due to a lot of illness and miltary moves my husband is feeling that they need to be ahead of where they are, so it’s 2 lessons until they’re ‘caught up’. Right now it takes them around 20 minutes per lesson and they generally get 90% or higher. Once the lessons are harder or dad approves, they’ll go down to one lesson a day.
It’s good to know we’re not too far off target. I think the biggest problem is that they are being asked to work as big boys and they want the little boy schedule. That and they dawdle. I was hoping that by giving them the work they were expected to do and a timeframe to get it done by, they’d realize that by getting it done quickly they’d have more free time. But they treat the ‘be done by the time dad gets home’ as ‘let’s goof off, draw pictures, look at comics, etc until the last minute then get it all done real quick.’ It’s their time and I guess I need to let them manage it but it sure drives me crazy, especially when they complain how it takes ALL DAY to get it done. Well, if they’d just plug in they’d be done by 3 or sooner! *heaving a big sigh while letting my kids learn to be independent*
Looks a lot like my 11-12 yo’s day. Just the double math is different. Could you move some things to afternoon or after dinner so they don’t feel like it’s ‘school’? For example, my olders get a lot of music practice, handicrafts, and independent reading in their ‘free’ time.
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