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A Day in the Life

A couple of my friends have either started the endeavour of homeschooling. I know a few of you out there are actually thinking about it, but haven't decided to do it yet.  I wanted to share a day in our life as a homeschool family.

7:00 AM Wake up but don't get out of bed, read scripture, pray, meditate
7:15 or so Hannah comes in and asks if she can watch TV. I okay PBS Kids And go back to my quiet time
8:30 get out of bed, and start on a hot cooked breakfast if I haven't been pestered into telling Hannah to get a bowl of cereal.
8:45 still working on getting breakfast going and say good bye to Joel (he doesn't eat breakfast)
9:00 Dinosaur Train goes off as well as the TV. (She's watched The Cat in The Hat, Super Why and Dinosaur Train) And we eat breakfast together.
9:15 I say a little prayer and start our lessons. This is what occurs every day and it takes about an hour and half depending on how long the chapter is and how much feed back I get about Hannah's hatred of school.


  • Read the Bible lesson for the week
  • Explore the Bible lesson through drawing, building, acting, or misc activity
  • Work on letter recognition via Writing Road to Reading
  • Read a chapter from a novel (currently we're reading The Long Winter from Laura Ingels Wilder)

11:00 We might do something together in the kitchen, watch a movie together, put together a puzzle, play online at PBSkids.org, go outside and play if the weather is nice.
11:30 I'll make something for lunch
12:30-1:30 Quiet Time
1:30 I start doing chores around the house.  Hannah normally will go outside and play if she hasn't already done so or she will be engrossed in something from quiet time.
3:30 Hannah starts watching PBSkids again for Fetch with Ruff Ruffman, Word Girl, Electric Company, Wild Kratts. 
5:30 The TV goes back off and dinner is served.
6:00 We have some family time
7:00 Hannah goes to bed for the night.
7-10 Decompress, time with Joel, watch some television.


You know, I think I might need to rethink the amount of TV time I allow myself. We add in science projects as her interest comes up. She's just coming of the age that we are going to have a more structured time together, so as the year has gone by I've added more and more structured class time to our day.  We've tried to push back class to after quiet time and neither of us did well with it.  In the summer, we start school sooner so that we can go to the pool in the morning.  We take field trips on a regular basis.  And we only have school days four days a week. 

That's our typical homeschooling day.  Because there is just the two of us, I think it is a simple rhythm.  If there were more of us, then that would be a different story.  We move our class around other events that pop up, I'm extremely flexible about things.  I feel like it's my responsibility to help her get answers to her questions, and in that case, our school time never really stops.

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