Homeschool Q&A: Friday Fun-day

A pencil is scratching on paper, and numbers are being muttered under her breath.  Occasionally she stops and asks me to clarify what she's supposed to be doing, but as I sit here waiting for my girl to finish a practice math test, I think this is as good a time as any to work on a homeschool-related post.

When I write about homeschooling, I occasionally get some good questions in the comments that inspire a whole other blog post, and that is what is happening today.  Q&A posts are in the works for the next week or two.  If you are ever curious about how I do something homeschool-related (or not homeschool-related, for that matter), now's your chance to ask!  I will try to answer with a corresponding post in a prompt(ish) manner.

Here's the first question.

 So I think you mentioned that Fridays are fun, does that mean you generally do the more academic subject 4 days a week? 

Yes, I decided last year that we would assign one day a week to be our "fun day"!  The way this came about is a long story.  When I first started schooling my kids it took a lot of time to get our schoolwork done - for no other reason than that Wyatt and I weren't used to sitting down to do lessons.  It took me a while to get into a daily rhythm I could stick to, and it took my kids a while to learn to focus and finish their lessons quickly.  For the first year or two, it was all we could do to get through the basics, and I had no energy left for some more enriching and fun subjects.  

Then the next year we joined a co-op, which we did for two years.  With co-op taking up a whole day of the week, not to mention some of the things we had to do to get ready for co-op during the week, and we still didn't have much energy left for the "extra" subjects I really wanted to include.  Things like music appreciation, Shakespeare, in-depth nature study, and science experiments happened very rarely, if at all.  

I am very attracted to the Charlotte Mason and classical models of education (though I would describe our style as eclectic), and in both of those there is an emphasis on giving your children beautiful things to ponder, a "feast", if you will.  We had no time for that sort of thing for the first several years of our homeschool, and it's one thing I was very dissatisfied with.

Last year, when we decided to quit our co-op, I realized that this was my chance to organize our homeschool in my own way, and I immediately remembered once hearing about doing a "Friday Fun-day".  The truth is, it is still difficult to work in the beautiful extras on the same days that we are knee-deep in the "essential" subjects, especially when I have three (soon to be four) kids who need my help with some or all of their lessons.  If we are going to have any time for what I deem "the fun stuff", I need to be really intentional about making it happen, and Friday Fun-day is the way I am doing that.

The way we make this work is by planning out our core subjects so that they can be accomplished in only a four-day work week during the school year.  So I sat down with our math and reading and writing curricula at the start of the year to figure out how I needed to make that happen.  For math, we had some wiggle room built into the number of lessons, so as long as we did four lessons per week, we'd be on track to finish in May.  For our reading/phonics the curriculum only required two or three lessons a week.  For writing/language arts, the curriculum we use has such short lessons, it is not a burden to double up one day a week to leave our Fridays free.  And history and science we accomplish in 2-4 days a week anyway, depending on what we are studying.

Our Friday Fun-days are then free to get a little creative!  Our favorite things to do are:

-Go on a nature hike. I have a ton of fun nature study resources, and this is our chance to use them.  I mentioned some of our favorite nature study resources in this post.

-Do some music/composer study.  I started out on this by using Kristi Hill's free music appreciation lessons - she has several on her website and in the archives of her blog posts, if you are willing to dig a little, and you can also sign up for her free "Music Lesson Monday" emails, which we have used on Fridays.  We do "musical sketching", as Kristi recommends, and then read the information or story that goes along with the piece of music. My kids have learned to recognize different pieces of classic music from these lessons, and we actually signed up for one of her courses this spring.  My kids seem to really enjoy it.

-Do an art/drawing tutorial.  We like Art For Kids Hub on YouTube, and I have recently found some more nature-study focused tutorials for us to work through this spring.  I have at least one art-oriented child, and learning to draw and paint is something she really wants to do.  Friday Fun-days leaves us some space for that.

-Science experiments. When we do science during the week, it's mainly reading and notebooking activities, and we save the science experiments for Fridays!  We went through Apologia Botany last fall, and this spring we are working through a few concepts from Building Foundations Of Scientific Understanding, which has really simple but effective science activities and experiment ideas.

-History read-alouds.  This is something we have managed to incorporate during the week, but if I want to catch up, Friday is the day to do it!  There are so many great historical chapter books and picture books, which I think is the best way to spark an interest in history for kids! 

-See friends. It's important for homeschool kids to have opportunities to see their friends too, as every homeschool mom everywhere is reminded of by family members, grocery store clerks, and every random passerby (I'm not even really kidding).  So we see friends frequently, and though we are pretty flexible with our schedule, playdates especially fit well on Fridays.  If we can turn the visit into a field trip, even better!

Is having a weekly fun-day something we will do forever?  Unfortunately, if my own homeschool experience is any guide, probably not.  I know that when I was a homeschool student, as I got into my high school years my workload increased, and it would have certainly been more difficult to set aside a day each week for hands-on learning and extras.  Which is all the more reason why I want to make time for a fun-day right now.  Setting aside a day dedicated to subjects we may not normally include is one way I can keep our homeschool fun, give my kids opportunities to explore new things, and create memories with them that I hope will produce warm, fond feelings when they think back on it someday.  

I'm going to hang onto our fun-days as long as I can!