Planning 2008-2009: The Calendar
The current plan is to do a year-round school calendar. I like the idea of manageable chunks of time spent in studies, with a week of break for catching up on housework, hobbies, and planning. While we have nothing to tie us to a traditional school calendar, I will not voluntarily sign up for one. I do have a longer break period scheduled for May — that time when the hint of summer is in the air, everyone is restless, planning for the next year beckons, and the parks are pleasant and still sparsely occupied, but why take a break during the sweltering heat of July and August, when you’ll just be inside the air-conditioned house anyway?
My first sketches tried to fit a six-week-on, one-week-off rotation, with Christmas and Easter (rather than Spring) breaks in addition to the May break. I just couldn’t get it to work smoothly. It just seemed like biblical numbers. How poetic and metaphoric to labor for six weeks and have a Sabbath rest. Wait, Sabbath is the Lord’s Day and starts each week. I felt like I was trying to fit a triangle peg into a square hole. It could work, but only awkwardly. Oh well, I don’t really need the facade of a biblical metaphor to justify year-round schooling, and I would rather have the substance than the robes and outward showiness of piety. So, on a whim, I tried five-weeks-on and one-week-off, with the breaks tweaked a bit; I don’t really feel tied to a certain number of school weeks anyway.
My goal is to make consistent progress and to actually accomplish what I set out to do. So, a realistic schedule is more important than hitting some arbitrary number of weeks someone else says we “should” school. I perceive myself to be in a swing-back position on the homeschool-schedule pendulum, trying to hit the golden mean between over-achieving burn-out (where most newbies begin — but I’m no newbie) and laxity (where the veterans generally end up — but I’m no veteran, either).
So, this is my proposed school-year calendar. It has six five-week terms, six weeks total of between-term breaks, two holiday terms (where we’ll go to review-mode on the mandatory subjects and focus on the holiday), and one month-long break. We’ll try out the format for this non-essential Kindergarten year and see how it goes.
