Benefits!

As most homeschoolers know their are many benefits of homeschooling. Today I am focusing on one of them. Schedule, it's flexible! I had the intention this year of starting in Early August and adding a curriculum each week or every other week until we had them all incorporated into our days. We did start our math on August 5th and were consistent for three weekdays. Then we got a call that one of Rob's Aunt's passed away suddenly. She was the one I called during my first miscarriage. She was the one that we talked to about Rob's Mom's cancer. She was the one we talked to about the family drama was it important or silly? She was gone in an instant. We didn't even have to talk about it, we knew we were going to the funeral. I started to pack the math and then decided not to, most likely we would not have time and we had started early. It worked perfectly for us to stop and pick it up again on Monday the 22nd when we had been home over a week. We were able to take a week plus off part for travel and part for travel recuperation. Yeah for no stress!
The second level of flexibility is in the day to day. The day we called our first day of school was August 22nd. Since the public schools were starting we decided to go ahead and start that day also. Joy and I put the schedule up Math, Recess and Cleaning floors/dusting were our morning activities. Then I got the call, the one I always dread, someone would like to view your home in about 2 hours time. Okay, one little tweak to the schedule dusting and floors moved up math moved back and recess is definitely going to be at the park! Done a little mad woman and grumpy child cleaning and we never missed a beat!
The third aspect of the scheduling is the actual daily schedule. We have this schedule for our school days:



My daughter and I meet each morning to go over the schedule and decide in what order our day shall happen. The green are the every day items. The yellow are the someday items (the ones on rings indicate something from that ring happens daily but the actual activity varies). The pink are the fun extras. No two days are alike, and she gets to choose which she wants to do when. The problem we ran into the last 2 days was afternoon I don't wannas. So today I put the important you have to items in the morning. That and we have a meeting this afternoon that I am unsure of the length of so I am avoiding accidentally not having time for an important subject.
That is flexibility at it's best... we decide which days we homeschool, we decide which hours we homeschool and we decide which order we homeschool. It's a great plan for those without a plan!