The Johnson Crew!

Good morning friends thank you for joining me here today if you're new here my name is Sarah and I have four kids that were homeschooling they are 10 8 6 and 3 and I'm so thrilled that you are joining me for this topic today if you are trying to figure out what kind of homeschool schedule and routine you want to have hopefully this video will be helpful to you today I want to share with you how we do our homeschool week and why we chose to do a four day school week instead of five

And what that kind of looks like so stay tuned so go ahead and tell me in the comments below how old your kids are and what your current homeschool weekly schedule looks like it's so nice to get to know each other that way and I just love the discussions that we can have in the comments so definitely take advantage of this awesome homeschooling community that we have here if you are new here my channel is all about homeschooling and life as a family of six if that interests you go ahead

And hit that subscribe button down below and go ahead and do me a big favor and hit that like button for me all right let's get into it so let me give you a little back story right it always comes with that so we have been homeschooling since the beginning of time back when my first child was a preschooler we started homeschooling and so we have had many different schedules and routines throughout the years you know as our kids grow and are in different grades different age levels we're gonna have different schedules to match that we've been kind of changing things throughout the years

And just making tweaks here and there for what's going to work best for us and I think that's what's so nice and freeing about homeschooling is that you are in control not the government of your home school and you can make that schedule and so maybe you and or your husband have a weird work schedule and you know the typical Monday through Friday doesn't work for you that's what's so great is that you can literally make it whatever days you need it to be to work best for your schedule you could do school at night time instead of the morning you know what I mean like you can change it up to fit into your schedule

And I do love that over here my husband has a wedding photography business and I help to manage that and so he is shooting on a lot of Saturdays sometimes his weddings are on Fridays but he has a lot of Saturdays that he's shooting um and so it is nice for us to like maybe change things up here and there and have a family day on a random weekday without missing out on schoolwork so we can really shift things around to make it work for our schedule that was a tangent let's go back to the back story

So uh way back when when we started homeschooling you know when your kid is preschool aged they really don't need a lot of formal school time they are mostly learning through play which is fantastic so we typically did like maybe three days a week of like formal school work and even that was really short like 30 minutes maybe more but not a whole lot it just doesn't take a lot of time and even into kindergarten three days a week can work well if you need it to with my first I think we did four days a week

And then as I had more kids and I was already homeschooling the older ones like three days a week was kind of the most I could muster up but we've made that work and it's worked well and so we stuck to like that four day schedule through second grade but then when my oldest hit third grade I was like oh this is like a big deal like third grade real school like harder more difficult schooling longer assignments that you're gonna have to do so in my mind I was like I think we need to to do a five day a week school schedule especially with the types of curriculums that we were using at the time like it just needed to be five days

At least is what I thought and so we did that we did that for his whole third grade year and through half of the fourth grade year so by the time we got to like February of his fourth grade year which was just this past February 2022. I was so burnt out um I think that happens to most homeschool moms right like February is such a like dead winter time where you're you don't have the excitement of Christmas anymore and you're looking at all your curriculum that you have left to accomplish

And you're like this is going to be a rough couple of months so that's kind of where I was and then I watched a video from Christy over at one blessed mess if you haven't been to her channel before I'll leave a link to it below but I love her and her channel is awesome she has great homeschooling information and tips and advice and she had a video about a fun school Friday and I know I've heard other homeschoolers doing this before but it just hit me at the exact right time you know how that happens sometimes where you hear the same advice over

And then finally it's the right time for you to hear it and it finally hits just right that was that moment and I'm listening to that going yes yep that's what we need that's going to be the solution to my burnout oh so right then and there I go and I look at our weekly schedule and I'm like how can we tweak this so that we can have this fun school Friday I want this I need this in our homeschool um I just wasn't really happy with the homeschool atmosphere we had going on at the time it just felt like we were just doing book work

And really not leaving room for the one thing that I think is so cool about homeschooling which is pursuing your own interests and so I'm sitting there going yeah we we need this time we need this extra day to get away from worksheets and really just pursue whatever it is that they're interested in so that's kind of where it started so my solution to that was to look at their curriculum and figure out which days they could double up different subjects so that we could still accomplish the same amount of schoolwork in a week

But have that Friday off and so I sat down with the kids and was like hey here's this idea we could have this fun school Friday but it's going to require you to do a little bit of extra work each day leading up to that day what do you think and they were all about it they were like yeah we can do an extra lesson in order to have a fun day so they were on board which is half the battle right so we went ahead

And that next week tried it out and it was such a breath of fresh air like it was exactly what I needed to revive our homeschool revive my homeschool spirit and get us back to a place where we were enjoying it again and so what does that fun school day look like let's talk about that for a minute so let me show you what our four day a week schedule looks like for this year so my oldest is now in fifth grade and his schedule has five English lessons that he needs to get done a week

And five history lessons that he needs to get done a week so he just has one day where he gets two histories done and one day where he gets two englishes done and then the other two days he actually doesn't have anything else that he needs to double up because we only do spelling three days a week week we only do math three days a week and we only do science two days a week so actually squeezing everything into just four days was pretty simple for his schedule

Now this is going to vary depending on what type of curriculum you're using but this has worked pretty well for us if you are curious what different types of curriculums we're using I'll leave links below to the videos where I shared our different choices that we're using for this year I guess you could call us eclectic homeschoolers if you want to put a brand on it uh but basically we mix and match a lot of different curriculums all into one year because I'd just have fomo

And I need to try all the different curriculum so we mix and match but I'll leave links to those videos below so you can check that out and then for my third grade daughter she is using the good and the Beautiful for language arts and that is already set up to be a four day a week school schedule so that worked out beautifully for us and again we only do science two days a week week and math three days a week so she doesn't have to double up anything

And then I just have a first grader and a preschooler so they don't have to double up anything so this schedule actually works super well it was pretty easy to tweak our five-day schedule and put it into four days today's video is sponsored by creativefabrica.com and I wanted to say a huge thank you to them for sponsoring this video and I want to share with you a little bit about their website real quick because I think it could be a huge resource in your home school they have an area of the website that is very similar to Teachers Pay Teachers they've got all these resources that you can access

But what's really great is they have a teacher Club Card which gives you access to more than ten thousand digital teaching resources for just 2.99 for the whole year so you can get access to all of their teaching resources for just three dollars a year it's kind of a no-brainer so with this subscription you're allowed to download up to five digital downloads per week and 260 per year there's no obligations you can cancel at any time and if you have resources that you'd like to sell on their website the fees are paid out 100 to the teachers

And they have new resources that are being added daily I really love being able to use this site for being able to find themed resources so during that different holidays you can go on there and get themed worksheets that are really cute and just make school work really fun for the kids so I have a special link for Creative fabrica.com Down Below in the description box for you so definitely go and check them out and hopefully those resources can be super helpful in your home school

Okay so what does this magical fun school day look like I will tell you it varies every single week in my mind when I first wanted to do this I wanted to have a day where they could just tell me what it is they're interested in and we can look that up we can watch videos on YouTube or go to the library and pick out books um maybe it's an art project that we never fit into our normal school day so let's do an art project or a baking project or a science experiment things like that that maybe we wouldn't be doing throughout our normal school week

But we have this special day set aside where yeah we have the time to do any of those things that you want to do so sometimes it looks like that other weeks we like to go out and see the world go on field trips go to a museum Children's Museum Zoo Wildlife Center wherever and I really like to get together with another homeschooling family to do those kinds of fun things so they can be hanging out with their friends and I can be hanging out with my friends

So that is a really fun way to spend that day and then it's also just nice to have a fifth day just kind of baked into the equation that you could have off if you need to have it off maybe we have doctor's appointments or the car needs to get fixed or we need to do some major cleaning because somebody's coming to visit or maybe somebody is here visiting we've got family from out of town friends from out of town maybe we are going back home to Virginia to visit family

So it's just nice to have that extra day in our schedule where it's not like I'm then having to figure out how to make up that school work that we've missed we've already done it and we've got this extra day where if we need to be visiting with other people we've got that time so I really love having that flexibility of that fifth day and also that is not a fun school Friday for us it's really a floating fun school day it could be any day of the week whatever works best for you know whatever it is we're trying to go do or depending on what the rest of the week looks like especially if we're trying to get together with someone else then

Maybe we need to be then maybe we need to base that day off of what's best for them so it's just nice to have that day floating and we can put it wherever it fits best into our schedule so if you have been thinking that trying to do homeschool five days a week is just overwhelming and too hard and you just don't have time for it um good news you could do it in four days you you can and what's great is you're in control if you've already started your school year with a five day a week school schedule you can make the tweaks

And changes and change that into a four day a week school schedule whenever you're ready like you get to decide that so you do not have to wait until the next year to implement this you can do it whenever you feel like you're ready so this has been a huge blessing to our home school I'm very thankful that we made the switch and I love this schedule now the kids love the schedule and it really helps keep us all from getting burnt out so hopefully that is all helpful to you

And will be super helpful in your home school I hope that you are having an amazing school year so far and I'll catch you in the next video thanks so much for joining me today happy schooling foreign