A Day with Sonlight

I am not a scheduler. I have a basic daily routine that I follow, but definitely not a down-to-the-minute schedule. My goal is to be finished with school by lunchtime every day and to stick to my plan as closely as possible.

Getting the Day Started
Our day starts at 7 AM, when the children and I start to wake. We all have our morning routines and have learned to stay out of each other’s way. My older children attack their morning chores which include sweeping the floor, clearing and wiping down the dining room table, emptying the dishwasher and shining the bathroom sinks and mirrors. I use the time to check my email and read my favorite blogs.

Lately my children have really been managing their time well and have started doing their school work before the “official” start of our school time.

Couch Work

Sometime between 9:00 and 9:30 we sit down on the couch for school. We begin with religion, move on to history and geography, then science. My children call this time “couch work” because we are seated comfortably on the couch!

Because Sonlight is so flexible, I have combined my 7 year old and my 9 year old into one core. This means that I read history and science once each, saving me quite a bit of time. I don’t set a time limit for each subject – we start reading, work through the Instructors Guide and we stop when we’ve finished the day’s assignments.

Sometime around 11:00 we are finished reading and take a snack break.

Seat Work

When snacks are finished (not much more than 15 minutes) we start seat work. The children grab their workbooks and school binders and set up shop on the dining room table. I grab a small white board, teachers manuals for math and my working binder. If any child needs to watch a Math U See lesson, we usually watch it during snack time.

I let my children choose the order in which they complete their seat work. They both choose to get their math done first, so while they work, I clean up the kitchen. I am just steps away from them if they need me, but I can get a lot of work done. When they are finished with an assignment, they pile it up at my place at the table.

When I am finished with the kitchen, someone is usually finished or nearly finished with math. That child goes first with spelling, dictation and other language arts assignments that need my assistance. I learned a couple of years ago that it’s nearly impossible to give different spelling tests to two children at the same time! Not that I didn’t make a valiant effort for a while, though.

While I work with one child, the other moves on to handwriting and vocabulary work. Then we switch. While the children work, I’m also correcting math pages and checking other assignments. In writing this all out, it seems confusing, but in real life there is a rhythm and flow to our system and we’re very casual about it all.

Seat work complete, the children move to the computer for typing and Rosetta Stone Spanish and I make lunch. If all goes well, it’s about 12:30.

Thursday mornings my daughter has piano lessons. The teacher comes to our house, so the disruption is minimal.

And that’s our day! Very simple and very flexible. Afternoons for the children means playtime with their other homeschooled friends. At 5:00 the National Anthem plays on our military base, cuing them to come in for chore time. If their chores are done properly and we have no other commitments, they may go back out to play until dinner. During the Fall, my son has soccer practice twice a week and all year he has a Cub Scout meeting once a week. My daughter belongs to a Girl Scout troop made up of all homeschoolers which means twice a month in the early afternoons. She also takes a ballet class with her homeschooled friends one afternoon a week.

The Four Day Week

Sonlight offers the choice of either following a 4 Day or 5 Day schedule. Both schedules are included with their Instructor Guides, so you can change your mind at any time once you’ve started your school year.

I have chosen to only do school on Monday through Thursday. I reserve Fridays for all those great, extra projects that I would normally let fall through the cracks. We work on art projects, history lapbooks, update our time line, or do any science experiments in the schedule. What we tackle on any Friday really just depends on our moods and goals for the week. Last week we watched the PBS movie “Cathedrals” to go along with this week’s study of Gothic architecture! Another perk to the 4 day week is that if anything causes us to fall behind in our work, Friday is built-in make up day.

The most important thing I’ve learned when scheduling our days is to carefully guard our mornings. No matter how attractive the distractions, I have learned to say “no” to anything that will routinely take us away from our school time. However, I still remain flexible to those irresistible opportunities that may come our way. The occasional field trip or appointment is fine. The important thing is that being away from home on weekday mornings is the exception, not the rule. Remaining firm but flexible has helped to keep us focused on school, which keeps us on schedule. That keeps us all, me especially, from becoming too stressed out.

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You can read more about Lorri and her non-scheduled, flexible days at The Mac and Cheese Chronicles.

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