Des – we will take the 8 weeks of June and July off and start up at the beginning of August. (We make sure kids camps for church/scouts are in June and July, so August is free for school.) Then it is pretty much 6 weeks on and 1 off for the rest of the year, with a bit longer than 1 week off at Christmas.
Wings2fly – I do our overall plans during the summer, pre-read books (including the high schooler’s science textbook), make literature lists for each child to choose from all year, put our history book list in roughly chronological order so we know what to read first, second, third, etc, and make sure I know how each area will work. For example I know Fix It Grammar has 1 day per week of me directly teaching the kids, but the rest is pretty independent. I decide how often we will do science, history, etc. I make sure I have chosen artists and composers for the year.
Then at each week long break on the 7th week a lot of what I need to do is just look at what’s next in the books we are using (get an idea of the upcoming math topics, see if a child needs to choose a new literature book from their list, etc. I also will need to gather books for science for the 6th grade and under crowd because this year we’re doing a living book based year for science. We will have 1-2 main topics per 6 weeks, so on week 7 I gather books from my shelves or the library for the next 6 weeks’ topics, pick science experiments, and put the books on a shelf to pull from for 6 weeks. That’s it. I’m very much a ‘do the next thing’ planner. If they did lesson 13 in math last week they move to lesson 14 this week. If we finished reading book #2 in our history list last 6 weeks we pull book #3 off our shelf.
