Homeschool schedules (can you see the light bulb on top of my head?)

Wow, I just had the most AMAZING idea ever. Well, not really, but it seems amazing to me at the moment. Maybe its divine inspiration but it just dawned on me while reading This Reading Mama's awesome blog posts, that I could schedule our homeschool days to include things like sight words, art projects, hands on math, games, etc. ON SPECIFIC DAYS rather than just trying to wing it through the week.

Light bulb going off here! 

Since we started in September, I've been struggling with the boys' willingness to do worksheets every day of the week and have been scourging the internet to find games and other hands on ideas to teach what's in the kindergarten curriculum. (By the way, there are a million great resources out there and maybe one day I'll do a resources post for the small amount of readers I do have.)  The only thing we've managed to get a handle on consistently are the phonics and math worksheets which I've tried to split up throughout the week, but some days the boys just don't want to sit and do worksheets.  What boys do, right?

Hard at work on math worksheets

Maybe it's because I have information overload, but had it not been for all the other great homeschool families and homeschool blogs out there, I might have missed that my kids need to learn things like sight words, nursery rhymes, and even their address and phone numbers!!!  Yikes!  So I've been trying to incorporate those things into our weeks but with no real structure.  Up until a few minutes ago, it was really kind of overwhelming, but now I have a PLAN!

My thoughts are that we really only need to do worksheets one or two days out of the week.  The other days can be hands on learning, like math and phonics games or outside play.  I'm thinking that I will also set one day aside for sight words instead of trying to do EVERYTHING every day of our school week.  This might give me more flexibility for our science and history lessons too although I am considering ditching the worksheet writing for science and just using the curriculum as a guide. I mean, the boys are still learning how to read and write!  Part of the pressure of using the workbooks was because of the fact that we PAID for them, but its just stressing me out.  I will maybe even set our computer time to one day a week, but the boys love their educational computer games so I may not limit them as much.  

We have a few constants to schedule around, piano lessons on Mondays and our homeschool co-op on Thursdays, so I will attempt to get a solid schedule implemented.  We do bible, phonics and math every day in some type of form.  Tomorrow will be our third week at the co-op and so far, the boys are loving it.  They are currently taking art and science.

I would LOVE to know if you have a similar schedule for your little ones.  

Last week's homeschool co-op day

The boys working on a canvas painting after learning about LINES

Excited about their balloon launch race after science class

My kids LOVE these games.  I love that they reinforce what we are learning at home and it gives them some video game time (because they don't get their Nintendo DS' during the homeschool week.  

Till next time,