Name: CHEC Rocky Mountain Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-06-12T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-06-14T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Denver, CO

This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 15 years, 7 months ago by amandajhilburn.

Viewing 7 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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October 24, 2009 at 2:14 am
amandajhilburn
Participant
I am moving this post from it’s previous area since the topic changed within the thread. I am trying to figure out how to plan for year round school.
Okay, I just looked back at my Planning Your CM Edu. book and saw where the 3 terms for your year can be divided up in different ways! Why have I not seen this already??? LOL!!
I want to have 3 weeks of school and then 1 week off. So how would that be divided into terms? There are also certain weeks during the year that I would like to have off that may not fall within the 3weeks on 1 week off schedule. How do you do this exactly????
It appears that I could have 1 week off every month with 2 extra week thrown in there to use when needed. Does that sound right?
October 24, 2009 at 3:42 am
amandajhilburn
Participant
Also….since we began this school year with one curriculum and are now using something else for everything except math, our lessons don’t match up at all with the school term or eachother. We are on week 10 of term 1 and have just started doing term 3 of Genesis-Deuteronomy, new language, spelling and science.
For example, we are on lesson 26 in Language Lessons, lesson 48 in math, lesson 98 in history, week 3 in one spelling program and lesson 11 in the other child’s spelling, etc. What do I do about that? Just keep going with everything until it is done, and then just start the next level? Should there be a point in the year that they move to the next grade level with all their subjects or does that matter? If so, then what if ,for example, they finish math a month before language? Do you just let them move on or wait until they are done with all their work for that grade level before starting new books?
I am most likely thinking about all this too much. I’m going to go to bed now and see what wisdom is posted here in the morning for me 🙂
October 24, 2009 at 11:27 am
Rachel White
Participant
Good Morning,
We also do year-round and have unusual breaks due to religious holidays. So what I did is I took a calendar and highlighted all the schooldays and circled days off. I then added up the weeks and then broke them down as evenly as possible over the year, designing the 3 terms myself.
As for lessons, I just keep going. I do plan on going through 2 math levels a year, so once we finish the first we will move forward to the third. Other than that, if we finish before the official end of the year, I don’t go into the next until the next year starts. But that’s just me; you can keep going if you want. Then when you have an end of year break, just close the book and start again where you stopped once the new year rolls around.
We still have a general idea of grade levels, mainly because other people ask so we had to decide. But their work doesn’t reflect a traditional view of grade levels. You just keep learning; it’s a sort of a continuum, not artificial lines delineating between years.
Rachel
October 24, 2009 at 3:48 pm
amandajhilburn
Participant
Thank you, Rachel. I knew someone would have some great advice for me 🙂
I am going to have to sit down with my calendar and pick my weeks off. This will be so much better than trying to “hurry up and get done” with all our subjects before the year ends. And it makes it okay for us to finish something early if we are ahead in some subjects. I feel so much more relaxed already 🙂
Thanks again!
Amanda
October 25, 2009 at 12:09 am
Rachel White
Participant
I’m so glad that I could help you feel more relaxed…that’s so important!

Rachel
October 26, 2009 at 3:52 am
live2inspire
Participant
We pretty much do as Rachel mentioned and mark off the days/weeks we wish to focus on other things. We also consider the extra time we’ll need to work our way through the year with a lighter daily load. We all enjoy learning more if we can “stop and smell the roses” without feeling so bound by a 36-week school schedule. (I’m not feeling guilty anymore if we have an Indian summer day in late October and we decide we’re spending the whole day outside. Or, if we get tons of snow and we take two days off to build an awesome snow fort. Etc….) Planning weekly or using the SCM organizer helps a great deal with this, too.
If we finish anything early in the school year and decide not to continue on with the next “term”, we do a unit study of interest, focus on a weak area, or learn more about something we didn’t hit as strongly as we would have liked during the year. With subjects that my dc work on indendently, I leave it up to them as to whether they will jump into the “next school year’s” work or wait until after Labor day. If they choose to wait, they just pick something of interest to spend their time on (new handicraft, foreign language, art medium, etc). If they instead choose to “jump in”, I insist on at least a week’s break.
Schooling year ’round has given us so much freedom. We all prefer it. Your family will find what fits comfortably for everyone and when that happens, homeschooling seems so much more a joy than a chore (I humbly give my thoughts from our experience).
Rebecca
October 26, 2009 at 4:12 pm
amandajhilburn
Participant
That sounds wonderful, Rebecca! Being able to do some unit studies or spend more time on one interest will be such a relief to me. I had just recently had a problem with trying to fit everything into our week that my children wanted to do. They had an interest in insects and wanted to stay outside “catching bugs” for a couple of weeks instead of doing their school work. I was so stressed thinking about everything that we were behind on…silly, I know. Now I feel so much better about letting them investigate, discover new things, and enjoy learning!
Year round schooling seems to help make the CM motto (Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life) so much more attainable.