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Homeschool Burnout !
Posted on March 25, 2008
Filed Under Activity, Free |
Sometimes, even with the best intentions, you need to stop and give yourself some space in your home educating routine. This is a home educating idea I use occasionally when we are extremely busy, during holiday periods, or when we have homeschool burnout!
Home Educating in an Hour!!
I choose to cover 6 subjects for 10 minutes each - one quick hour of home educating, then on to other things. It may not sound like much, but you will be surprised about how much a regular 10 minutes of a subject adds up.
The key to this is to make the hour as fun as possible. I use an oven timer for each ten minute slot - and make sure there is a big change between subjects - one hour of sitting at the table doing different worksheets would be fairly miserable. I usually arrange it so that when the timer goes off, we need to jump up and move around - to the sofa, or PC - whatever will give us a feeling of being hurried. If you have several children you will need to find subjects they can do together (exercise, read-aloud) - and overlap the others (while one is on the PC, you can work with the other)
Of course, this does need some planning to work smoothly. I usually begin by deciding which subjects to cover in the hour, then finding an easy way of studying them in 10 mins -examples are :
- Maths -
- have some ten minute maths worksheets ready. A good place to find some is The Math worksheet site - remember to print out a several days worth. We also like Cross Numbers -these sometimes take my younger child longer than ten minutes so he gets to use practice using a calculator!
- Languages -
- this would be a good time to play a language game, or look over some flashcards. We like to work out of our visual mnemonics book. See how many new words you can learn each day - Learn it Lists will provide you with 10 foreign words a day (free).
- Art -
- Drawing or painting (but have the materials ready). Either work on the same picture for 10 minutes each day (watercolours are good for this), or try drawing the same picture each day (an animal?) but with a ‘focus’ word (small, angry, red, funny, invisible). If you are feeling really desperate, then just have some coloring pages ready.
- Working in a journal -
- This is an ideal use of Doing the Days . See my post on journaling
- Exercise
- A quick burst of activity. Try skipping or dancing - or learning to juggle! This is a good one to put in just before the last activity - to keep everyone interested!
- History and Geography
- one possible way to cover these in 10 minutes is by doing quizes. I set things up like Mastermind - each child rushes to the chair and answers three questions - then it is the next childs turn. I usually just make up questions based on what we have been doing, but you may like a quiz book.
- Science -
- OK - I have to be feeling brave to attempt this in 10 minutes, but its a good use of those 101 science experiments for kids books you see everywhere.
- Story time
- Read 10 minutes of your current read-aloud book.
- Educational PC Game
- Watching an educational video clip or DVD -
- Discovery video clips are about 10 minutes long.
- Music practice
One thing you will need to consider is what happens at the end of 10 minutes if everyone wants to do more on that subject. Do you stick with it (because everyone is interested?), or do you move on? In approaching this, I usually stick with the subject until interest wanes. By re-arranging the order of the subjects every day, we usually end up covering at least several of them!
I don’t usually use this method for long (a week or two) - but sometimes it gives us a well needed change of pace. We don’t normally have a very structured routine, so this helps us try something new. It gives me an opportunity to evaluate what is important to us and plan where to go next. I think if you have a very structured routine, this idea would keep things ticking over for you while you take a break. I like that by focusing on 6 subjects, for only 10 minutes, you really have to think about what you are trying to achieve with your children.
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I really like this idea Julie, I’m more than willing to give it a try.
I think I will plan it in advance, then use it on days where we need to either chill out more, but feel I need to do something, or are busy and I want to get some ‘work’ done.
CJ x