Year round schooling ???

[bakerbottoms]

How does it work? How many breaks do you take? I'm looking into MFW kindergarten which says its year round. How do you school year round?

[abunchoflemons]

From what I know. You don't get like 3 months in summer all at once. It might be few weeks in each season off & kids are in school in summer. There are pros like less info they learn lost because no extended points of no school.

[Sha-nanagins]

Don't know about homeschool - we love our summer break! But the Charter school where my sister teaches follows a year round schedule. They break the year into 4 quarters - 9 weeks of school, followed by 3 weeks of vacation, making sure that Christmas falls during on the the vacation cycles. In addition, they have 1 -2 days off for regular holidays - Labor Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving Day & Friday, Good Friday, etc.

[iris0110]

I don't do MFW but we school year round. We are not really rigidly scheduled so we just take breaks whenever we want. If we have something serious going on like medical testing (my oldest has special needs so lots of medical stuff) we may take a week off, or like next week we are taking the week off so we can go to Sea World before most kids get out of school for summer. We like that we can travel when places are not so busy. We go to places like the zoo and museum during the week and vacation during the off season. We also take breaks during the year when we seem to be reaching a burnout. Sometimes Tharen will have a week off but Kearnan will keep working. Then of course we have holidays we take off like Halloween and Christmas. We also only work 4 days a week, M-Th so I can clean on Friday. My kids are able to work through their curriculum more quickly than their public schooled peers (at least Kearnan has) and we don't have the backsliding over the long summer break. My boys don't even start and finish their curric at the same time right now, Tharen is half way through his 1st grade curric and Kearnan is 28lessons into his 5th grade curric. It works well for us.

[grahamcracker]

as pp stated you will have so many weeks in school followed by 3 or so off. Pros as pp stated are better retention in what was learned. As well as teachers don't have to spend as much time at the beginning of the year reviewing what was lost over the summer break. Usually with year round schools classes are able to be smaller. Also, if you like vacationing as a family you are able to go off season instead of just during the summer so less crowds and cheaper. We loved year round.

[JennTheMomma]

We school year round. I don't have set breaks, but they are usually only a few days at a time, maybe a week.

[RainandRedemption]

We plan on schooling year round, but not really with scheduled breaks. We live in the south and will probably take a couple weeks off in the fall and spring when it's not so hot, and a little nicer to do things outside... but mostly we are just going to do school until we need a break. If we need a day or two off, or a week off, I want to have the flexibility to do that in order to keep it low pressure and fun. If we start HSing and realize ds works better with a day off in the middle of the week, we'll continue like that.

I also think a schedule sounds nice, like schooling for 9 weeks, take 3 weeks off, or however the schools and more scheduled moms do it I know better than to try such a schedule at our house though It wouldn't work for us.

[tibeca]

I think people sometimes see school as just being working on workbooks and not so much the "unschooling" way. I believe in workbooks (and am not an unschooler), but also see the value in things like planting our garden, planning and going on vacations, cleaning and organizing our house, planning parties, celebrating holidays, etc.

We will be year round schooling. With what I currently see working, we do school 4 days out of the week (working on workbooks/reading, etc) for 3 weeks and then take a week off. We are only doing prek/k right now, but we get SO much out of the time off (like planting our garden) that I see it working well in the future. Prior to planting our garden we did a one week unit on different kinds of plants (trees, flowers, vegetables, fruit), how the sun helps them grow, etc. That made the actual planting a part of the unit, as we got to experience what we had been studying. We also periodically go out to the garden to examine how things are growing, look for pests, etc. Anytime we find something noteworthy, we bring out our plants unit and add to it.

[FernHollow]

We are planning on year round schooling from here on out. I have a 2nd grader, kindergartener and 2 preschoolers. Last year I was so frustrated to see how much we had lost after summer vacation! Our school program does not take an excessive amount of time each day so it is not a big deal to have the kids work on it Mon-Fri year round even if we are busy. DD has struggled a little with math this year and we are finally making some progress, so I really don't want to lose that. We are flexible around taking a day off for a field trip, birthday, holiday, etc. but I fully intend that we will work through the summer. We did take 2 weeks off when we moved in Nov and then a week off in January due to a big ice storm and power outage.