“Not Typical” Homeschool Days

by Liesl - Homeschool Den

In the blogging world, many of us write about a typical or ideal homeschool day. Those are the days that are filled with accomplishments and a schedule of subjects with the kids skipping merrily (or not so merrily) through the day. Sometimes we write about the struggle of it all (but leaving the impression that we get through all the subjects “on the schedule.”).

But we are not as apt to write about the not typical days. I’m not necessarily talking about the days that get hi-jacked by errands or a field trip. I’m talking about the days that start out as “typical” and then wind up taking their own rabbit trail along this homeschool journey.

Since we’ve had two back-to-back days like that, I wanted to write about those…

Yesterday, we started out with math and then went straight into science (we’re doing a unit on electricity and circuits)… but our hands-on projects lasted 3 1/2 hours! By the time we wrapped that up, we were out of time for the day!

This morning, because we hadn’t done our writing workshop for two days, we decided to start with writing. We are working on poetry, but I also brought out the Writing Scary Stories worksheets. The kids have the option writing either a poem, a scary story or working on their own writing project.

We set the timer for 35 minutes of writing time today…

I wrote a poem about my Mom (She died in Oct. 2001). After I shared what I had written, the kids had a lot of questions. Our conversation ranged from discussion about the events of Sept 11, 2001 to the Cold War… then back to the Civil War. We went on to pull out the family history stuff I have — both photos and our written family stories.

I had mentioned that some of our relatives had fought for the Union. I mentioned that we had a photo of their Great (x3) Grandfather from the end of the Civil War. The kids insisted that we go look at those. Of course, then I shared story after story about relatives long gone.

Once again, time got away from us. We really only had time for math and one other (abbreviated) subject before the end of the day!

We might have an “ideal” schedule (like I talked about this post – Homeschool Schedule and Transitions), but often our days are far from this!

A day like yesterday and a day like today when we spend hours engrossed in a subject are really valuable too… even if they don’t help check off our schedule of “homeschool to-do’s.” These were days of immersed, engaged learning. 🙂