How do you do your homeschool schedule? Are you flying by the seat of your pants or do you spend hours planning it out, writing it in your planner, and hoping that it is perfect? I changed things up this year and have to say I’m loving the schedule we have. Two of our main subjects are all laid out with nothing headache-inducing or stressful about it.
Homeschool Scheduling with BookShark
*I received BookShark curriculum for our school year, and in exchange for sharing about it with you this year. Homeschool review of BookShark.*
Why is this year been so different? Because this is our first year using BookShark Reading with History and Science. They have the curriculum planned out for you to follow along with for 36 weeks, or however long it takes your family at your pace.
Each week has its own schedule, with specific instructions on using it laid out for you including the worksheets. There are optional activities scheduled in too that we have been having a lot of fun with.
How many days a week are you working on school?
A glimpse of the weekly schedule shows a four-day schedule. They say that they have planned it this way so that you can use the fifth day for other activities or topics that you and your children may be interested in.
The easy homeschool schedule provided is Day 1-4, you get to choose what days are the days that you do school, we do schedule school Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday. We need that day off in the middle of the week.
When you read through the parent instructor guide you’ll see that it isn’t written in stone, you make it work for you as we have. Who knew homeschool scheduling could be so easy right?
What Are You Suppose to Do on Those Days?
They have it all laid out:
- what book to use
- what pages in that book to read
- what worksheet numbers correspond to those pages
For example, in Science Level 1 the first three days it is book work and the corresponding worksheets, as well as optional activities that you can do together. On the fourth day, it’s hands-on experiment day, a favorite in our house.
Easy Homeschool Scheduling Curriculum
We are using Science Level 1 and Reading with History Level 1 this year. We discovered early on that we prefer to do larger chunks than tiny bits each day. Tuesday and Thursday are Science days, and Friday is for history. As well as other subjects such as math and language arts on those days as well.
If you are at all disorganized, like I tend to be, then you want to check out BookShark! When you are looking at the different subjects you can see more detailed samples of their schedule and work listed under samples. BookShark has the stress of figuring out how much to teach each week.
How Long Does BookShark Take
How long do lessons take with BookShark? For us, they don’t take that long. How long they take is going to depend on how your child sits through a lesson. The reading is going to be the longest part, and it’s not a lot!
Each grade is going to take a little longer as your child moves up through grades but overall you should expect 30 minutes to an hour per subject.
We all have to do the best that we can for our children and for ourselves no matter what kind of schedule we like to use. Maybe just flying by the seat of your pants, learning what your kids are interested in works best, and some days, that’s how it has to go here.
It doesn’t take long to go through the curriculum, at most we spend an hour and a half. That’s between the reading and the worksheets, and going over everything.
We really enjoy BookShark for the content of the curriculum and the open-and-go style that it lends to parents with everything planned out for you. Some of the subjects we have used have included:
Science for 6-8-year-olds and for 9-12-year-olds
History
Language Arts
More Resources for Homeschool Scheduling:
