Lesson 1: Protect your School-time (Season 3, Episode 50)

In today's episode, we will chat about one of the first lessons I learned in homeschooling along with three ways you can protect your school-time. Let's dig in!

Welcome to Season 3 of The Tips for Homeschool Science Show. This season, I am sharing 10 lessons I have learned in my ten plus years of homeschooling.  I hope that all of them will help you on your homeschooling journey!

{Disclaimer - I don't claim to know everything there is to know about homeschooling, but these ten lessons are ones that I have found important and useful in my homeschooling journey. And I trust that you will too.}

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Lesson 1 Transcripts

One of the very first lessons I learned as a homeschooler was to protect our school time.

As homeschoolers, we have so many options before us. We can have picnics, we can go for walks in the woods whenever we want, we can take advantage of discounts at popular attractions during slow times, we can sleep in, we can watch movies all day long, we can bake a medieval feast complete with roasted pig in our backyard, and so much more. The freedom we have access to is amazing!

And this can be a good thing as we can create an amazing educational experience for our students. But it can also sideline our goals if we are not careful.

Very early on in our homeschooling journey, a veteran homeschooling mom shared with me the need to protect our school time by making sure that we hit the highlights, like math and reading each day, and a bit of history and science each week.

Here are three ways I have found to make sure that we protect our school time in order to make sure that we hit the highlights, including science each week!

1. We make school-time a priority.

The first thing we do to protect our school time is to make our school-time a priority. This means that between the hours of 9 am and noon during our “school year” you can pretty much guarantee you won’t be able to get a hold of me. Why? Because this is when the core of our learning time happens.

I do my best to not schedule appointments or classes during these three hours. I usually don’t answer my phone during this time. I try not to check social media – although sometimes my phone has to go into phone-jail so I can stick to that! There’s no TV or video games before lunch in our house. And my kids are expected to be out of bed before 830 on a school day unless they are sick.

It’s not because I some kind of rigid, rule-thumping, crazy woman – it’s because I want to make our school-time a priority. It’s important to me that our children get the education I signed up to give them. And for this season, it means that we need to have a few guidelines in place to set aside a block of time for school work.

Are there days when this goes out the window? Of course – we are human! But overall, we stick to our guidelines and make school-time a priority.

2. We don’t overbook our time.

The second thing we do to protect our school time is that we avoid overbooking our time. There are days when we take off our regular school-time to go on a field trip or to meet up with friends.

These are not bad things to do. In fact, many of them are educational! But I have learned that if we take off too much of our regular school time in order to take advantage of the cool educational opportunities it ends up hurting our kids' overall progress.

It is important for them to have those amazing education experiences that the freedom of homeschooling allows us, but it is equally important that we do the work of learning the basics. It’s a delicate balance that I seek to maintain by not overbooking our time.

3. We schedule regular breaks.

And finally, we protect our school time by scheduling regular breaks. I like to schedule a break at least every six to nine weeks.

These breaks range from a day or two to a full week. Sometimes we go somewhere, like on vacation or to visit family. Sometimes we explore a part of our town. And sometimes we just spend the day doing absolutely nothing.

I have found that knowing that we have a break scheduled on the books makes it easier to protect the school-time we do have planned to do!

So go ahead, enjoy the freedom of homeschooling! Chase a rabbit trail or two. Just make sure that you make your planned school-time a priority, you don’t overbook your time, and you scheduled regular breaks during the school year.  These three things will work together to protect your school time in order to make sure to hit the highlights each week.

In a Nutshell

Enjoy the freedom of homeschooling!

Chase a rabbit trail or two.

Just make sure that you make your planned school-time a priority, you don’t overbook your time, and you scheduled regular breaks during the school year.  

Additional Resources

If you want a few more tips for how we make time for science, check out episode 30 from season 1 where I shared a few tools to help you keep on track with your science plans.

• Are you finding it hard to stay on track week after week in science? {Episode 30}