Strategy 4 for Saving Time in Your Homeschool
We’re making tons of progress this week with adding tools to our toolbelts for saving time in our homeschool! I hope you’re enjoying this series of posts/emails. I’m excited to share the next strategy with you, so let’s get right to it!
This one is easy peasy.
✅ Condense "extra" school days. Many curriculum providers build in extra days to account for a certain number of school days—oftentimes, the “golden number” is 180, which lines up fairly well with what many public schools do, and it may help you align with any specific state regulations you have.
However, that doesn’t leave much room for out-of-the-books learning, does it?
I’ll let you in on a secret: Even in the richest of curriculum, there is likely some fluff built in that you can get rid of, thus reclaiming that time back into your schedule.
But how do you find what you can condense or cut?
If you happen to use BJU Press Homeschool like we do, then this is going to make a lot of sense right away! However, I suspect that many curriculum providers do similar setups, so hopefully, you will be able to translate this easily to whichever curriculum you use.
Early on in our homeschool journey, I made a habit of pulling out the curriculum-issued lesson plans for each subject at the beginning of the year—for us, this document was called a “Video Lesson Guide (VLG)” for our online courses, but for a parent-led course, it might be called a “Lesson Plan Overview” or something similar. Basically, it’s a list of lessons and numbered “days” that shows what we would do for that subject on each day of the school year. For full courses, it would hit at or close to 180 days; for half-year courses, it would hit close to 90 days.
I pulled that document out, I got a pen, and I went to work, looking vigilantly for where I could slash days entirely or combine multiple days into one.
Here are the things I looked for:
Work days. Our curriculum provider is thoughtful and comprehensive, and they build in “work days” for each subject throughout the year. Work days have no lesson or assignment, other than to use the time to work on previously assigned work. I slash these days. If we need extra time on a paper or assignment, we will take it. But if we get to that point and don’t need it, we aren’t taking a day “off” from that subject just because.
Review days. Our curriculum includes chapter reviews and cumulative reviews for most of our subjects at the end of each chapter. Depending on the course, those review days might be standalone days, and the test day is frequently its own day.
Secret #1 (option A): If the chapter review is listed as a separate day from the test day, combine them! Let your child do the chapter review, check it to make sure she has the material down, and let her take the test. Boom. Two days on the calendar just got combined into one, and it probably didn’t take much longer than a regular lesson would have.
Secret #1 (option B): Combine the chapter review at the end of the lesson on the day before, then combine the test and the cumulative review into the next day.
Secret #2: We nix the cumulative reviews. Entirely. So far, we haven’t missed them! (And we’ve got a 16-year-old kid in college now, so I think we’re going to be okay).Combine similar lessons into one. With Reading in particular, I find lots of opportunities to do this. For example, if the lesson plan spreads out one story over three days, I might squeeze them into two days. If we are doing videos for the course, we might do the full lesson for the first day of the story (with the video), then perhaps skip the video for the next two lessons but cover the reading content and worksheets in one day. In a math or English course, if I see on the lesson plan that it says “[Topic]” on one day and the next day says, “More on [Topic],” then I’m likely combining those lessons into one. I appreciate reinforcement lessons, but I find that if my child gets it in the first round, then the reinforcement lesson isn’t always necessary.
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In conclusion, I basically look for places where I think we can move faster and get more done in a shorter amount of time than planned. This approach helped my daughter stay on track throughout her homeschooling for early graduation without either of us feeling (too) overwhelmed!
I trust you’re finding these tips helpful, especially here at the mid-year mark for many of you! If you’d like to give yourself a leg up in your homeschool journey, I invite you to check out my Homeschool Crash Course. You can gain immediate access to my many strategies and tips, all pre-recorded on videos for you to watch at your convenience! Click here to get started today.
Your TIME is so valuable in managing your homeschool! And your kid’s time is precious, too. You don’t want to spend all of your days with noses in the books! It’s time to take back the time that may have gotten away from you, and make the most of this beautiful homeschool journey together!
Because our kids deserve better…
Amy
