Changes Are A Good Thing

When you realize a change is needed and follow through with it, it's a good thing. We finally made a change in our daily schedule.

When I first started home educating my son, I was one for a set time and schedule. Once my husband left for work at 7:00, I would spend the next hour cleaning the kitchen up and straightening the master bedroom and bath. 

At 8:00 I would start the waking up process of Jamie and laying out the school books. Let me tell you, trying to wake that boy up is like trying to get a statue to move. We would start our school work at 8:45 and then we would work for the four and half hours that are required by the state.

Once the school work was finished, we would go on with our other chores and hobbies.When we lived in Montana, we kept up with a similar schedule, only we started our school at 9:00 and worked for the allotted hours that I calculated that we needed for the year.

As the years went on, I noticed that my son had inherited the "night owl" gene from me. Because of this, I made some changes in our scheduling and bedtime. Over the years the grumpies moved in and started affecting our days. Over the past year the bedtime stayed at 10 and the getting up time moved to a later time on most days. Teens need at least 9 hours of continuous sleep but 10 hours are perfect. Enough sleep was something my son missed.

Since our "early to bed, early to rise" has become a "later to bed, later to rise", I have been able to move all the school work to the afternoon and do all the cleaning in the morning. With the cleaning time being moved to the mornings, I am able to focus on school work without the looming idea of needing to clean something.

This change has been perfect for us. We both can sit with a clear mind and focus on what needs to be completed. It also has helped with the lolly gagging that went on in the past. A BIG plus.

When I think back to when I taught school, I remember precious children having a hard time keeping their eyes open during class and those that had a hard time focusing. It makes me wonder what they could have been able to do, if they had the right amount of sleep.

Scheduling school work to fit our family's need is a freedom of home educating that I love.