Strategy 5 for Saving Time in Your Homeschool

Time is precious. And nobody knows that better than a parent watching your kid grow up so fast, right in front of your eyes! The fact is, by choosing to homeschool, you’ve chosen to take back your kid’s childhood and to spend a lot more of it with them!

I applaud you for that! And I want to help you yet again today with one more way to take even more of your time back, so that you can give your child an excellent education without spending all day, every day in the books!

My final tip (for this week, anyway), is this:

✅ Rearrange Your Schedule. I can feel some of you pushing back on me already! Rearrange my carefully laid out, well-planned schedule?! I totally get it. I used to lay out our entire year’s schedule, painstakingly and intentionally (only to have it derailed within a few weeks).

But what if an unconventional schedule (or slightly altered schedule) would serve you and your child better? What if it would give you more family time, more time for extracurriculars, and more time for skill and interest development?

Rearranging your schedule can be as small OR as comprehensive of a change as you want it to be, so it’s worth considering what, if any, benefits you could reap by making some changes here.

Here are some ideas worth considering:

• Consider a timed school day. In other words, decide that you’re working the hours you decide on (say, 10 AM – 2 PM), and when the clock strikes 2 PM, then schoolwork stops for the day. Anything that didn’t get done either carries over to the next day, or you decide if it was really critical in the first place; perhaps it can be condensed or even skipped without any major consequences.
  

• Consider incentives for completing work quickly. There was a season of time in our homeschool when, at the beginning of each week, I gave each kid a checklist of what work they needed to complete that week. For example:

• Science – Lessons 12, 13, 14, 15, and Chapter Test

• Math – Lessons 14, 15, Chapter Review, Test, Lesson 16

• Etc.

• If they completed their entire checklist before the end of the day Thursday, they could have Friday off. (Or if they completed it early Friday, they got off early for the afternoon).
  
  Of course, you know your kids, and you know if this incentive would be helpful for them, or if they would just rush everything to say it was done when they really weren’t comprehending. (It worked great for my oldest two but wasn’t as helpful for the younger kids). Who knows? It might work great for you! If not, feel free to move on. 🙂
  

• Consider a block or an UltraBlock schedule. Who says you need to cover every subject every day? In a traditional schedule, you allot small portions of your school day to each subject, covering all of the subjects every single day.
  
  You might be familiar with an alternative to this called a “block schedule,” which many schools have begun doing. In a block schedule, you alternate which subjects get done on each day. You spend larger chunks of time on each subject but do it fewer days than in a traditional schedule. The advantage to this is that you eliminate some of the time in transition between subjects, and you can try to capitalize on momentum. The disadvantage of this—in a school setting, in particular—is that students get antsy sitting at desks, listening to a teacher go on and on about the value of x.
  
  But your kids aren’t in school. And if they’re sitting at desks, that’s up to you. When a kid is learning and working at her own pace, that’s a game changer. And it becomes much easier to build on momentum when there are no tethers to a traditional classroom environment.
  
  Thus, we adopted (or created?) our own type of schedule. I call it the UltraBlock Schedule, and it is basically a block schedule on steroids! Lol. I suspected that if we could build momentum in just one or two subjects at a time, we could get more done faster than if we were constantly moving and switching between subjects.
  
  Think about it. There is time lost every time you switch to a new subject. Put some books away. Get out new books. Turn to the right section in the book. Try to remember what you were doing yesterday (or before the weekend). Ah, okay, we’ve got it. Now, let’s begin.
  
  In an UltraBlock approach, we eliminate that lost time by eliminating the transitions altogether. When we begin a grade level, we choose one subject to focus on with another “relief” subject for those days when you really do just need a break from the first subject. So, for example, we might spend a month or two on nothing but math with a little bit of science. Or nothing but English with a little bit of history. We knock out the first subject, then move our focus to another. Knock that out, then to the next. Until we’re done with the grade level.
  
  But how do you plan your schedule for a whole year this way? It is definitely more of an art than a science, which I know is more than some of you want to take on. However, a general rule of thumb is to think about your overall subject count. If you were doing one lesson of each subject a day, how many lessons would you be doing?
  
  For example, if you have science, math, English, reading, and history, then that’s five subjects, and in a traditional schedule, you would be doing a total of five lessons a day. So in theory, our loose goal would be to do five lessons a day in whichever subject we are focusing on (or four lessons with one from the relief subject, something like that). If you have smaller subjects that don’t take nearly as much time (like spelling), then just account for that in your plans. Perhaps even go ahead and do one lesson of the smaller subject daily to start the day out (or to wrap it up), and hit your focus subject hard otherwise.
  
  UltraBlock isn’t for everybody. I know it’s extreme, and it has its ups and downs (especially when your child picks all his favorite subjects first and then gets to the end of the year and has nothing left but his least favorite). But it might be worth exploring how a block or your own version of the UltraBlock might work for you!
  

• Consider a 4-day school week. We have done 4-day weeks for the entirety of our homeschooling journey (12 years and counting), with the exception of weeks when we may have worked an extra day in anticipation of a break (vacation or holidays coming up).
  
  It came about because when we started homeschooling (and for the following ten years), my employer was closed on Mondays. Well, I didn’t want to spend my day off doing school, so I gave the kids that day off as well.
  
  The result? We’ve found that the kids can get plenty done in those four days that they can have the other day off, either for resting and having fun, helping with house chores, or participating in other activities we may want to plan.
  
  In most years, we still complete the grade level within an expected timeframe. However, we don’t take a traditional summer break, so if we haven’t finished everything by the end of May, it’s no big deal; we can take some extra time and finish. 
  

• Consider a soft version of year-round school. When I was a kid, that term might as well have been profanity. “Year-round school?! Oh, the humanity!” I’m not talking about actually doing school every week, year-round. But if you’re finding that your days need some relief, but then that’s putting the squeeze on your overall schedule for the year, then perhaps some version of year-round school could help alleviate some of that. If you get to May, find a good stopping point in your subjects (ends of chapters or units), and take four weeks off, you can start back up in July and pick things up where you left off.  Who says you have to start the new grade level in August when the schools start? (I can count more years that we didn’t start in August than those that we did!) 🙂

 I’ve shared with you this week just a few of the strategies I’ve used to simplify our homeschool—and they work! Our oldest graduated high school in December as a young 16-year-old. To be honest, I didn’t do everything perfectly along the way. I wasn’t even sure everything I was doing was going to work. I took some risks here and there, thought outside of the box, and did what I believed was right at each stage of the game. Here we are, 12 years later, and she’s excelling in her college courses, working on earning her bachelor’s degree. Let me tell you, for all the doubts I had before, I know now that it’s all been worth it!!!

I want to help you succeed in your journey as well. If you’re looking for more ways to streamline your homeschooling while ensuring your child thrives academically, I’ve put together a resource that will make this process so much easier.

🎯 Check out Homeschool Crash Course, a self-paced video series to guide you through the ups and downs of homeschooling. For a limited time, you can grab it at its currently discounted price!

👉 Click here to get instant access!

Let’s make homeschooling simpler and more enjoyable—for both you and your child.

Because our kids deserve better,

Amy