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What constitutes a \"day\" – year round scheduling
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Hello all!
I am planning our school year and will be moving to a year round schedule, but my husband brought up a good point. He asked what constitutes a “day”? Is it when we accomplish every subject we have planned for that day whether if takes 2 hours or 6? Is it when we do only 1 subject, I can mark it off as a “school day” for attendance? How do you all count up your days to meet the 180 requirement? I’d like to have “full days” and “emergency mode” or “1/2 days”, but don’t know how to come to a consistent definition of that. Just curious what everyone else does in regards to official attendance keeping.
You should probably check with HSLDA for the laws in your state. I know some states require a certain amount of time. I have decided for us that a “school day” includes, at minimum, the 3 R’s: Reading, Writing, and Arithmatic. These are skilled subjects, versus content subjects, which need to be kept up so they can keep building basic skills. We usually include Bible and a read aloud or audio book too. This is when we are doing only basics. The exception to this is an all day field trip to the zoo or other museum and we spend at least 4 active hours there.
I think it depends on you and on the day. A day where we got basic skills accomplished (math, reading, writing) would count to me. A day where we dived into science projects and reading would count to me. A day where we read a lot of a history read aloud (think half a chapter book, taking several hours over the day) and the kids do art would count to me. A day where we go explore the museum or work on a service project in our neighborhood would count, depending on how long we spent, because we also always read aloud and often my kids are found writing or creating things too.
We don’t count days here, but in my state we aren’t asked to. We are given an hour guideline for the year (900 hours). Consider that if you do year round school 5 days per week for 48 weeks (taking 4 weeks off in the year) you’ve got 240 days of school to cover the same 180 days of material. That is an extra 60 days – 2 months! Often for us it is more a matter of looking at completing a course. Did my child finish PreAlgebra in the 240 days? Great, done with math for that year. Did they get through the science textbook/experiments/studies we had planned? Great, done.
It also varies by the age of the child. My 1st grader’s 900 hours will look different than my 9th grader’s 900 hours. I also keep in mind that the 900 hours public school children spend in the classroom has a large portion spent not actually learning because they are dealing with changing classrooms, announcements, disruptions by other students, etc. So I don’t expect 900 focused hours.
I was confused about this, too. Especially when we have pur 180 days done, but haven’t finished our SCM History, which has only 180 lessons!
So this year, I’m counting a day as when we accomplish what I’d like us to. AND, just for fun, I am keeping track of our non-book school work by the hour, with 5 hours equalling one day.
So, Good News Club (like Awana or something) counts as two hours (1 hr class, 1 hr organized gym time). Field trips count as however many hours we aren’t home. My husband’s cousin comes to the house and gives us an art lesson, about an hour long, so there’s another hour. Watching the DSO concerts are as many hours as the concert is.
I found that while we’ve only done 90 days of planned school work, we have 33 days of school that we accomplished by living our lives (swimming lessons, art class, concerts, field trips, etc.)!!
So we’re 33 days behind in history and science!!!! This is causing me stress, so I am trying to just tell myself that it’s ok – public school teachers have to skip things, too. But I still am bothered by it.
I am hoping to use this info next year and plan to do about 30 days less of bookwork, so that I don’t have the stress of feeling behind.
I’m so glad to be reading that others are having these same questions. We school year round, three 60 day terms. I schedule our subjects and plan out each term. When we accomplish the list for the day we have completed a day of school. Our state requires 180 days and also has an amount of hours required for a ‘day’. I don’t keep track of the hours because the amount of formal schoolwork done by a first grader may not equal the required hours, but if I add on Awana, karate, nature walks, housework, etc… he gets more than the hours required.
I wonder if there is a better way to plan, especially with summer coming up and that always increases my desire to unschool (not hardcore unschooling – just enough to lighten up for the summer)
Interested to read more ideas.
Thanks everyone for your input. I looked up the laws in my state (Texas) and don’t see a requirement of days or hours that need to be tracked. Are there any other Texans who can verify that for me or am I missing something?
If that is the case, I’ll probably call a “day” when we get everything we have planned done and a “1/2 day” when we just accomplish reading, writing, and math. Or have outings that can be school related.
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