Day in the life - guest post with Kym

Join me in welcoming Kym to my blog today.   I've had the privilege of getting to know this kind, knowledgeable over the past few years through the TOS board.   Share my delight in spending a week in Kym's home.  :)

Describing a typical homeschool day is rather difficult, since each day has a routine of its own. Instead, I'd like to have you join me on a quick tour of a typical homeschool week for me and my two high school age students. My 17 year old son will graduate this year, and my 14 year old daughter is a freshman. They both do a majority of their schoolwork independently, so I don't have to spend a great deal of time actively teaching. My job is more to keep us all on track and to do all the grading and record-keeping. The mornings all start in the same way. I get up with my husband when he leaves for work, and supply us both with a morning coffee. Then I have almost two hours to enjoy my coffee, do my morning Bible reading, and get started with my email, blog, lesson planning, and whatever else I need to do during that quiet before everyone else is awake.  I make sure the kids are up and started on schoolwork by 9am, but for the most part I allow them to decide what they need to work on. My son prefers to start with math. This year, that's a Consumer Math course. My daughter has been choosing to start with Literature lately, because she can stay in bed and read the novel! Good thinking! Once or twice a week, I sit with each of them and work on Grammar. And once a week - on a day when my adult son is working a morning shift at his job, we get together to view a DVD lesson from the Student Writing Intensive. On Mondays, I take my daughter to her guitar lesson right after lunch; and on Tuesdays both kids attend a co-op gym class in the afternoon. Then on Tuesday evenings, there is Civil Air Patrol for the boy, and chorus rehearsals for the girl and for me. Needless to say, Tuesday is a very light day for academics! We generally are able to stay close to home the rest of the week, but the times that we are working on school independently or together vary. Now, I am supposed to be on top of the grading and record-keeping, but that's often a moving target as well. Somehow it doesn't seem to work out that well for me to ask the kids to bring me all their work every day, so I check their work in bits and pieces along the way, and every now and again I will have to tell them to "bring me all your science (or whatever) so I can catch up with the grading!" Of course, almost every day winds up with interruptions or challenges along the way. My kids are not the only ones getting distracted by social media and technology - it certainly happens to me as well! In addition, there are days when I need to make an extra trip to town to run errands or get to appointments, and there are extra things on the to-do list. For example, every other week I direct a worship team at church. My husband and daughter are both on the team as well, and lately my son has started playing with us as well. That means that I need to make time during a weekday or two to pull together my set list and prepare all the music, and we all need to get to the practice. It's something we all enjoy very much, and we're very involved in the life of our church in other ways as well. Because we're homeschooling we can adjust our schedule to make that work. Another way we adjust our schedule almost every week is to allow the kids to sleep just a little later on Monday mornings. You see, they work on Sunday evenings as scorekeepers for their dad's hockey league. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to stay out that late every week if they had to be on a schoolbus early Monday morning! In a way, that sums up our everyday experience with homeschooling. It gives us so much room for flexibility and individual attention to everything from curriculum to daily scheduling to family vacations.

Kym is in the middle of her 18th year of homeschooling her four kids, two of whom have graduated. She and her husband of 28 years are Canadians transplanted to Maryland. Kym loves coffee, history, and homeschooling, and you can join her for coffee break at her blog, Homeschool Coffee Break.