It's the Most Wonderful Time

No, I'm not talking about vacation time or free time (not that I even know what free time is), what I'm talking about is Back to School time. This year, we didn't have a great summer filled with wonderful memories, great vacations, time at the pool, or relaxing moments in the backyard.  We actually had a pretty stressful summer that actually went by too quickly.  I barely had time to do the things that needed to be done, let alone have time to do the fun things we wanted to do this summer.  Anyway, because of the terribleness of our summer, this year, Back to School time means back to a routine, back to business, and interestingly enough it has also led to more things getting done, and less stress.

Right now we're on our third week of school, and things have gone along rather smoothly.  The key has been making sure that we all get to bed early and get up early.  This way we have been able to get our school work completed before 3:00 p.m.  Makes a lot of sense, right?  I mean most schools operate this way.  The students go to school for six hours and are usually done by 3:00 p.m.  So I figured, why not?  Why not try doing things this way.

This was actually a new idea to us because as a homeschooling family, not only do we decide how we will be educating our children, we also get to set our own daily schedule.  And when you don't have someone telling you that the children have to be in school at a specific time in the morning, it's easy to start the school work later and later each day, until you push the start time all the way to noon, and end up with a hectic afternoon schedule with tired, grumpy children trying to focus on their work while all the other children in the neighborhood are back from school.

Setting a homeschool start time early in the morning has been one of the best decisions we have made for our homeschool this year, and even though we don't get to ship our children off to school for six hours a day, Back to School time has been the most wonderful time for us.