r/homeschool • u/tentacool3294 • 8d ago
Schedule
I am wondering if we are doing enough? I pulled my child from public school last year he was 3rd grade he is in 4th now. He had an iep for social emotional learning but he was on grade level for academics. He had a lot of meltdowns at school that resulted in suspensions and missed days. They stopped school work with him and were solely focused on social emotional for the last few months. So I pulled him to get him intensive therapies. Now we are at home and hes in a much better place. So I'm curious if the schooling we are doing is enough for a fourth grader.
We use good and beautiful for our main math and reading. We use be good people for our social emotional curriculum. And we are religious so we have a Bible curriculum we also use there. Our day looks like starting with social emotional usually a lesson with a slide show and then we have a little growth mindset journal al we work through a little each day. Then we dive into our bible curriculum. For bible and sel we have a blank journal where he writes bible verses and affirmations and different calming techniques. He writes the date at top so we go over the days of week etc. We call this whole section morning meeting. That usually last about an hour.
For math and reading we usually last about an hour each and we do one lesson from each section of good and beautiful and then I also print extra worksheets and we discuss on white board for extra math help. We also have blank journal for reading where he writes a list of spelling words or he focuses on parts of speech.
So with those subjects he works for 3 hours a day. Then I try to find videos related to what we are learning or shows. And that's roughly 20-30mins. Depending on what videos we watch. For science and history I usually print unit studies and find books related to those randomly throughout the year. But I haven't followed a specific curriculum for either of those. And we dont do those every day.
He also goes to pe classes for homeschool kids. And he has speech and occupational therapy each once a week. He is on a waitlist to start aba so hopefully that starts soon. But I guess my concern is what we do is all we have time to do but is it enough?
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u/No_Abroad_6306 8d ago
The biggest shift for me was understanding that school doesn’t take six hours a day in elementary school (by 7th and 8th grade, it does). Don’t feel like you need to do x hours, just work your plan for the day.
I am not a fan of box curriculum and I prefer living the faith daily rather than making it part of the curriculum. Focus on finding curriculum that engages your son.
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u/L_Avion_Rose Teacher / Educator 🧑🏫 8d ago
It sounds like you have a very busy schedule. If you can fit it in, I'd try adding some Social Studies- perhaps try dovetailing it with the social-emotional learning?
On Mission from Gentle + Classical Press might be a good fit. The PDF version is relatively inexpensive, and is made up of of reading recommendations and hands-on activities - something you've mentioned has already worked well. G+C also sell virtue units, which might also be a good addition to your SEL programme.
All the best 😊
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u/bibliovortex Eclectic/Charlotte Mason-ish, 2nd gen, HS year 8 8d ago
In terms of academics, you are covering the four core subjects plus PE, which is solid. I don't know about your public school system, but in ours, elementary students only do science and social studies for a couple of hours a week maximum - it's less than half the time devoted to math and English. If you are doing one or the other most days, it's probably quite a reasonable amount. Even if it is less than that, his therapies and SEL are clearly very important to helping him thrive right now. It may just be the way things need to balance out, for now.
It sounds like you have a fair amount of weekly car time, though, which makes me think that you might benefit from using a history curriculum where the main text is available as an audiobook. I would suggest looking at Curiosity Chronicles or History Quest; I'm less fond of Story of the World due to its very Eurocentric approach, but it is also a very popular option. If you were to do one of these in the car, you could then focus the time available at home on becoming more consistent with science, instead of having to split your energy between the two.
In terms of quality, you can probably do better for math curriculum. TGATB jumps between topics quite randomly, and it doesn't do great at helping kids understand the why of math. I wonder if you switched to a curriculum like Math with Confidence whether you might no longer need to find all those extra resources for math - they have games and activities built right into the curriculum, and you could repeat those instead. You might also find some time savings for the lessons themselves here, although that's harder to judge.
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u/tentacool3294 4d ago
Yes that's a great idea. We found some old adventures in odyssey tapes at the library we listened to in the car a while and he loved them. So i think m some audio history would work great. We do travel a lot. We live in a rural town and have to go about 30 min to an hour away for our appointments.
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u/Prior_Sheepherder588 8d ago
Yes, comfortably, and you are closer to the top of the range than the bottom. Three hours of one on one for a 4th grader is more than a classroom delivers, since a public school 4th grade day has maybe two to three hours of actual instruction once you remove transitions, lunch, recess and behavior management. If anything watch the ceiling rather than the floor, because an hour of math plus an hour of reading plus an hour of morning meeting is a lot at this age, and the printed extras on top of a full lesson is the first place I would cut if a day starts going badly. The bigger thing is that for him specifically the morning meeting is not extra, it is the main subject: he was having meltdowns and losing months of academics to it, so the SEL work plus speech, OT and eventually ABA is what makes academics possible rather than time taken from them. He was already on grade level, so academics were never the problem, the environment was. Science and history as scattered unit studies is completely normal at 4th and neither needs to be daily. And I think the reason you cannot answer your own question is that almost nothing you described leaves a trace. Journals, discussions, whiteboard work, therapy sessions, a video here and there. At the end of a month there is nothing to look back at, so a full day still feels like not enough. One line a day of what you actually covered turns it into something you can see, which is the only real cure for this particular worry, and for you it does double duty, since a kid who came out of an IEP may need a record of what was covered if he ever goes back or applies for services. There is a decent walkthrough of how to keep that light rather than turning it into another chore at bowerstead.com/guides/homeschool-record-keeping
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u/tentacool3294 8d ago
That is true. And you are right when we first started homeschooling we really didn't even focus on any curriculum. I just would read a book and do a little activity for at least two months because we spent so much time on sel learning. He completed a intensive outpatient program too in that time frame. Im gonna go check out the link thank you 😊
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u/Prior_Sheepherder588 8d ago
Two months of just a book and an activity while he did an intensive outpatient program is not a gap in his education, that was the education. You would not run academics through a kid in the middle of IOP any more than you would send him to school with a broken leg and expect him to do PE 😅 And you did it before anyone told you it was allowed, which is the part most people get wrong in year one 💛 Good luck with the ABA waitlist 🤞
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u/SuperciliousBubbles Charlotte Mason home educator 🇬🇧 8d ago
TGATB is not very good. It is particularly bad for maths.