Sonoran Desert Homeschooling Family

by Adina
(Maricopa, AZ, USA)

During the "official" school year, we have school Tuesday through Friday.

At around 8am, our daughter (8) gets up has breakfast, does her morning chores, and has free time to play.
I get up at 9(-ish) and stumble to the coffee.
By 10, I'm awake and it's time to wake hubby.

At 11am, we begin school. Our daily topics are:
Bible or Apologetics
Math
History/Social Studies
Reading (Friday book reports due)
Spelling
Science/Art/Music
Foreign Language

We spend anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes on a subject, but normally school is over in under 2 hours.

We have lunch around 1pm, while Hubby gets ready for work. Once he's out the door, we work on a few household chores, run errands, or work on a project (crochet, home-made plant dye, a craft, or whatever).

(For a long time, I felt bad about starting so late. We tend to be night owls, though, so it's hard to start earlier. Anyway, Hubby works a later shift and gets home at midnight, and I work from home and tend to get going after our daughter goes to bed at 9, until Hubby gets home. We're not settling down until 2am, so there's absolutely no getting up at the crack of dawn! Still, we're done before all the public school neighbor kids get home, so there's plenty of time before they all end up at our house around 4pm!)

Now that it's summer, we've trimmed back the areas of study to just Bible/Apologetics, Math (mostly review), Reading, and Writing. School is over sooner, but the extra time allows time for other kinds of thinking and learning - our daughter recently discovered the fun of strategy-based and puzzle video games, and also enjoys the challenges of the Tycoon-themed PC games.