The Best Change in our Homeschool…Fun Fridays!
As you start getting back into your groove this new year, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed starting back with all the homeschool things. Between traveling, Christmas and New Year festivities, and so forth, settling back into your homeschool routine can be quite the challenge. Might I suggest looking at your schedule and seeing if including a Fun Friday is in order. Adding this into your week may just bless you in more ways than one. At the beginning of this school year, I made this switch and I haven’t looked back. Learn why and get some Fun Friday ideas below.
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The History
If you’ve been around my channel since the early years, when my oldest kids were still in elementary school, my homeschool week consisted of four days of school and one day to participate in field trips, schedule appointments, or tackle things that normally wouldn’t fit into a normal homeschool day. It made homeschooling back then so manageable. That fifth day also served as a catch-all day in case something came up earlier in the week that interrupted our usual rhythm. It gave me a day to place those life to-dos but didn’t require me to figure out how to work them into our normal schooldays. And although my kiddos were younger back then, our school days were pretty full. Even more so now with having two highschoolers, a middle schooler and my youngest in her last year of elementary school. When I look back at those days, I see the huge blessing a four-day schedule provided.
No matter what season of homeschool you are in, whether it be elementary students with toddlers and babies, or high schoolers about to graduate, one thing is for sure, our homeschool schedules can be full. It can be hard to get to those things you’d like to do but that you don’t have time to do. And if you try to fit it all in, you may be schooling eight hours or more and aren’t we trying to get away from that type of public school schedule. I mean come-on, who can do school until 5 o’clock at night. Not me!
As my children have grown older, the four-day school week has become very difficult to continue and, if I’m quite honest, isn't very feasible with the curriculums we are using. Once my oldest daughter hit seventh grade, we started using a different curriculum that was formatted as one-hundred eight lessons for completion. So in order for my children to benefit from the materials we use in our homeschool, this required a five-day school week so that we could still complete all the assignments. This also ensured that we could continue our adventures and vacations as usual. Obviously, there are weeks where we have only done school for four days, but that is not the norm and so I plan on a five-day week schedule. This is the schedule that we’ve used for the past few years.
The Change
These past few years, although wonderful, were very busy and left little time to do extra things as a family in our homeschool. I found myself longing for the days when I was able to do four-day school weeks. After some much needed reflection over this past summer (2022), I decided that I could find a happy medium.
Now we didn’t completely change back to a four-day school week schedule. However we did change how we go about our school day on the fifth day of the week. For us, Fridays are a different type of homeschool day. Friday is still a school day for all my kids, but we don’t do everything we would typically do in a normal school day. Although we typically do “Fun Fridays” on Fridays because it works best for our schedule, that doesn’t mean that it always lands on a Friday. If I need to adjust that day to a different day of the week, due to some unforeseen interruptions, doctors appointments, and so forth, then I move our lighter school day to that day, making Friday a normal school day.
Now let me make this disclaimer: That little word “fun” placed in front of Friday does not mean that the other days of the week are not fun. My children and I love everything we are utilizing in our homeschool and we are very content and happy with the curriculums we are using.
The “Fun” Day
Fun Fridays are a lighter day and each one is different and unique from the other. We usually start with morning basket (like always), but what's included during that time varies. We tone down the reading, and I skip out on teaching history or science. Those two subjects usually alternate days during our morning basket time throughout the week. Then, we include something different from what we would normally do during our morning basket time. We might do a special unit study that relates to a holiday, tackle a seasonal craft (and that takes a lot for me as I’m not the craftiest person), or some other fun activity.
After our gathered time, my older two kids will do their lessons which require a five-day weekly schedule. They typically have quizzes and tests on the fifth day of lessons so they handle those within 20 to 30 minutes, but if they have a regular lesson they are able to finish their work in maybe two hours or less. On Fridays, all my children skip out on Language Arts and Math, which they don’t complain about. So my younger children only have some reading time and handwriting. This allows Fridays to be very open allowing us to do different things.
Fun Fridays not only give my kids a lighter school day, it also allows me to tackle a few things that I don’t normally fit in the other four days. I like to get my highschool grading done on Fridays and we also tackle our memory work tests for grammar and geography using the cards from the Good and the Beautiful. This schedule has also helped to balance out my younger kids' lesson lengths. My younger two use the Good and Beautiful for many of their subjects and they are only one hundred twenty lessons, so having a lighter school day allows for them to stay on track during the school year preventing early completion before the end of the year.
As I mentioned already, each Fun Friday is different from the other. It depends on what I want to include, what time of year it is, and so forth. There are a few things we take advantage of with a lighter Friday. Here is a list of some of the activities we like to include:
Seasonal bundles
Field trips
Book club gatherings
These are just some of the things we do on Fun Fridays, but what’s nice is we aren’t limited to just these things. We have flexibility and freedom to do things we want to include in our homeschool day that enrich our time together. I hope this helps give you a picture into our Fun Fridays. I’ve talked about this in two recent YouTube videos that are linked below, so if you’d like more information, be sure to check them out!
Until next time!
Love,
Ashlee
