A Day in the Life with the Classical Method

State/Country: Oklahoma/ USA

Children's Ages: 7 & 10

Homeschooling Method: Classical-ish

Curriculum: Sonlight, Teaching Textbooks, Various random curriculums used in co-op

Favorite Field Trips: We mostly just do field trips for fun and get out any education we can through the play/enjoyment of the location. We love to go to the zoo, science museum, nature centers at various parks we visit, etc

A day in the life:

My day starts sometime between 6:30-7:30 AM (depends on when hubby gets up for work, I will get up to eat breakfast with him and he goes in at varying times through the week). After hubby is off to work I spend a portion of the early hours drinking my coffee & looking at Facebook. Pretty big time waste, but I haven’t managed to stop the habit. 😉

My 7 year old usually wakes around 7:30 AM and has free time, which he usually spends on watching videos or playing games, but he also enjoys making things and playing with kinetic sand & the like. My 10 year old enjoys sleep, and she also usually is up later reading in bed, so she wakes whenever she has had enough sleep or if she manages to get up with her alarm (she chooses to set it & sometimes chooses to get back in bed!). If she is not up by 9:15 AM, I will wake her for breakfast. I have a daily alarm set on my phone for this as well as for when to start school, so that I don’t get so preoccupied with my stuff & let the day slip by.

The mornings are usually a juggling act. On an ideal day, I will have completed my school work (I am going back to school for nursing and currently taking prereqs that were not a part of the psych degree program I completed in my younger years) and have done my workout (my fitness efforts usually consist of a dollarworkoutclub.com workout during the day & run 3x a week after hubby is home) by mid-morning. Doesn’t always happen like that- especially when I have a big Chemistry test, I spend nearly the whole day studying!! But we flex our school around my school and catch up where we need to when we can. (Yay for homeschool flexibility!!)

We start school work at 9:45 AM Tuesday through Friday. We do a full day of homeschool co-op on Mondays, and I will detail that toward the end. We use Sonlight’s 4 day curriculum for our core work (literature, language arts, history/geography) and Teaching Textbooks for my 10 year old’s math. My 7 year old is still on Math U See but will move to TT next year for 3rd grade.

I let the kids pick the order they do their subjects.  I give several choices each time. If I have a lot going on with schoolwork myself, then their choices will be all the items they can complete independently with minimal help from me (reading, math, co-op work, etc). Whenever I have my work completed, I will add in the subjects that I am actively involved in (which at the current moment is read-aloud time and some history. Sonlight is pretty heavy on the literature side so we spend a lot of time reading aloud. I do love it but sometimes it is hard to fit in.

After each subject is completed, my children have worked a deal with me to where they get 10 minutes of free time to spend how they please. They must set a timer for this time. I think this helps with motivation and focus on most days.

We break for lunch around 12/12:30 PM (they are usually complaining about starving around 11 AM) and then pick school back up around 1 PM. In the afternoon it is much the same- completing the subjects that were not done in the morning. Typically the afternoon is when I read to the kids & do the more hands-on items if there are any to be done that day but I know I am doing really good if I can get it in before lunch.  If there is nice weather, we really enjoy reading outside.

On an ideal day we are done with all school work by 4/4:30 PM. My 7 year old is usually done by 2 PM, but sometimes spends time playing instead of getting his work done, so his day can end later as well. I sometimes fret about how late they are doing school when all the neighborhood children are playing outside but I remind myself that we do start our day much later than they do and have lots of free time spent between subjects and at lunch (not to mention all the procrastination that is spread throughout the day!). My kids could buckle down and finish school in 4 hours if they let no time go to waste (probably 2 hours for my 7 year old!) but they have yet to get that kind of motivation!

When asked about their favorite homeschool subject, my 7 year old said he most enjoys read a-loud time (literature from our Sonlight curriculum). In co-op, his favorite is his Lego class. My 10 year old said that she most enjoys her math (teaching textbooks 5).  In co-op, her favorite is her homeschool musical class (she got the lead part in their play and has done an awesome job memorizing her lines).

Our homeschool co-op is a very well run co-op that meets once a week on Monday in a church. It is structured much like a junior high/high school with 6 hours where the kids pick their classes & change every hour. There is a wide offering of educational classes as well as fun extra curricular items. The parents of the homeschool students volunteer to teach/assist in the classes offered. I currently teach 3 high school classes and one elementary class. This year in co-op my 7 year old is taking history as well as 2 science classes and spelling, so I don’t teach those items at home (just make sure any co-op work is completed for the following week when we go back). He also is in a Lego building class and PE class so there is some fun mixed in with the learning. My 10 year old has fun classes such as homeschool musical (where they put on singing productions & plays), jazz (dance), & sewing. She is also taking a grammar/handwriting class (cursive), science, & literature class. If I had to pick again, I wouldn’t have put her in the lit class as we already read soooo many books with our curriculum, & I wasn’t willing to sacrifice those books, so she is doing both.  This year they have read David Copperfield, Sherlock Holmes, and several other challenging books! Luckily she is a good/fast reader, but she does end up spending a lot of her nighttime reading on school books instead of being able to pick what she reads.

I think that pretty much sums up how we school! Every year things seem to change a little bit here & there as I refine this and that or we deal with new curriculum/subjects.  We tend to start later in the year (September usually) and end later in the year (varies but has been as late as July) while also taking a lot of time through the year for vacations (or moving!) so we just go until we finish the curriculum and take a longer break then. I love the flexibility of homeschooling!