Sunday, October 23, 2011

A "Typical" Day at Sancta Familia Academy

As any homeschooling family will quickly point out - no two days are the same.  Yet there is a rhythm to our days so I'll just give you a quick summary of what we do each day using future posts to flesh out the details.

To Organize our day, I use my version of "Workboxes" the rainbow boxes you see above.  I haven't read Sue Patrick's book yet but read what other homeschoolers were doing and adapted the system to meet our needs.  I printed some nifty tags here which I laminated and at the beginning of the day the tags start on the Workboxes and at the end of the day they end up on our "look what we did" schedule (we use sticky tack or Velcro to make them stick). 
I love that I always know what we've done and what we have to do to finish our school day in case I'm interrupted while teaching a lesson.

Since Miriam and William are too young to work independently for a long period of time - we do the lessons together and I use learning videos and books on tape for the times I'm attending to Luke. 
Or they have play time which is an important part of learning :-) 

Generally each day we
"Get ready for school"
and either go to Mass (Tuesdays and Thursday when it works out) or begin with a Prayer

Circle Time and Religion - Saint of the Day, Religion Lesson, Bible Story
Phonics and Writing
Math

The stressful part of the day ;-)

Music/Art/Language (Sign language, Latin and Spanish Vocabulary words)
Science

Physical Education
Reading Story Time
Clean-up

We also go for a walk/bike ride or play outside,

have a snack, eat lunch and have nap time to break up the day as needed.

On Wednesday we like to go to our Library for Story Hour


We can finish the planned learning in about 2 hours or so each day.   Most subjects last about 15 minutes but can take anywhere from 10-30 minutes depending on the attention span of the children and what I have planned.  That's our "typical day" and the kids love it so far. 

2 comments:

  1. Patty, this was very interesting to me! Thank you for sharing. I would be interested in you fleshing out a few things in future posts- otherwise, I have some questions for you that your post brought to mind. Thanks from a discerning family with no homeschool background. ;-)

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  2. Angie, I'd love to hear your questions! I purposefully kept this post simple as an overview to guide my future posts - there's so much I've learned on our homeschooling journey and I have so much more to learn as we go along - it's a lot of fun and I love that I can adapt things to our family's learning/ living style and needs. There are a lot of great resources on the internet especially in the blogosphere :-)

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