This week I decided that we need to do school backwards.

For as long as I have taught my kids, I have had basically the same daily routine:

Morning: Bible (I read while kids do their handwriting), math, spelling/phonics, grammar/reading

Afternoon: science and history.

Math & spelling/phonics and handwriting are all individual subjects. Everything else we do together.  This worked for us for years, for the most part.  We would do our “together work” after lunch each day.  It did work for us, but it doesn’t any more.  Once lunch time rolls around, these boys want nothing more than to jump on their bikes and ride, ride, ride. They don’t want to do school again afterward, and since the afternoon was always the more “non-essential” work, I tended to let it slide at times. Too many times.

Then I thought, why not do all of our group work in the mornings, and then the afternoon would BE essential work! We couldn’t get lazy about math!  (Hey don’t judge… in my brain, it makes sense.) So I re-arranged our days. I flipped our schedule around.  Now, first thing in the morning we still do Bible, but while I read their Bible story they are coloring something related to their history  lesson. Since we are studying roughly the same period in history as we are reading in the Bible, this works for us really well.  And since I want to keep the tie between history and Scripture at the forefront, it has been WONDERFUL. 

As we discuss our Bible story, we also discuss what they are working on, linking the two and making them think about it more.  Then we naturally move into our history lesson, where I read our history story from Synge’s On the Shores of the Great Sea and they continue to work on the same assignment as they listen and we discuss it.  Then we do deeper work with the topic, and tie it back to the Bible story we read too.  I think I love this.

I also instituted something I am calling Writer’s Workshop. It’s not a class or a curriculum, it is just what I call our writing/grammar time.  Now, on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, the boys and I are doing writing as a subject. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do grammar together.  I am using the Institute for Excellence in Writing’s methods, so to begin with we are learning how to create a keyword outline and write a paragraph using that.

So far we have one assignment completed, Turtles and Tortoises, which used a paragraph of source text from my ABC’s of Nature Study book.  It was different for them, but I think that as we go into this more each week, it will become easier for them.  To make it easier on me, I am borrowing the parent/teacher DVDs from my homeschool group’s lending library for a couple of weeks so that I can go through them and actually learn how to teach it.

What changes have you made to your homeschool days lately? And if you do school through the summer, do you change things as the weather gets warmer?