What Schedule?

This week on the “Not “ Back-to-School blog hop I had a peek into the life of many homeschoolers. and I have to say some made me green with envy. The beautiful routines and schedules are to die for. It makes me wonder where did I go wrong, why can’t I do that. Then I turn green with something else, remembering the days we tried to follow a schedule…
I have to admit laid back is the style here. Lists are not my thing, when I had one it sucked the fun out of the whole day. I fought to stay on task while the kids just fought. That was the first 6 months of our first year, then they were out the door and in the trash, the list of course!
Having a laid back style has worked for us so far and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon. We do, however have points throughout the day that sort of serve as a routine…

                       School starts at 8:30
                         Lunch is at 11:30
         group is after lunch (while Lady Bells naps)
                           day ends at 4:00

Anything between these times depends on how everyone is doing on any given day. The two older ones have independent work which we call self work and they also have time with me. Lady Jey is just starting into self work so sometimes I am still helping her through this time. Lady Bells works with me for 30 minutes and then has a notebook that is full of fun tot-school things for her to do, she can do these are have free play with anything in the school room.
The order that we do the subjects depends on the “feel” of the day, sometimes math with Prince can get tedious so if he is in a “good” mood we do math early if he isn’t we wait till dad comes home to get it done in this case school doesn’t end at 4.  I say we end at 4 but if it is a good day for everyone we can end as early as 1:00.
To keep myself on track and to make sure I am getting everything done, I made a list of everything I am to do with each child. I put this into a laminated pouch and as it gets done we check it off. It sort of looks something like this… nothing fancy!

                             

This list only includes the things that I work on with each child, they have other things that they work on individually which is stored in their weekly workboxes (my spin on the workbox).
So that is our schedule, for the Day in the life of… Castle Academy!