Year-Round Homeschooling: Pros, Cons, and How-tos

Ever considered year-round homeschooling?

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it means that instead of having a long summer break, you schedule short breaks throughout the school year and educate your kids all year round.

For some families, it is truly a blessing. It provides them with the flexibility they are looking for with a homeschool schedule.

For others, it just isn’t a fit. It may not suit their living style or doesn’t work with their curriculum of choice.

Let’s take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly (Well, maybe not ugly. Let’s switch that to How-tos.) of year-round homeschooling.

Year-Round Homeschooling

Pros

There are definitely some wonderful advantages to year-round homeschooling.

• There is less risk of burnout. If you have breaks scheduled more frequently throughout the year, your children are less likely to get tired of school.
• You can schedule school around holidays, vacations, and other events. If you want to take a week off before Easter, you can do that. If you want to be available for an important homeschooling convention, you can take that week off too.
• There’s the potential for reduced loss of learning. Kids can forget a lot over 3 months. Some families would rather eliminate that issue by taking shorter breaks more frequently.
• It allows more freedom for travel. If yours is the type of family who likes to get out and explore the world, you can schedule trips more easily with a year-round schedule.
• You can do fun field trips on your time off. You can spend your weeks off doing those field trips that you might not otherwise do when you are busy with a regular homeschool schedule.
• Your kids can explore interests, talents and hobbies on the weeks off. Those vacation days are the perfect time to allow your kids to do fun projects that they are interested in.

Cons

Year-round homeschooling is not for everyone. Here are some possible disadvantages to using it.

• There may be conflicts with the schedules of other people in your lives. If you belong to a homeschool co-op, you might need to follow their schedule. If your family and/or friends schedule major activities in the summer, it might conflict with those events.
• It might not work with some curriculum. Some prepackaged curriculums works best with a traditional schedule. Some online learning works on a set schedule as well.
• The weather might be too hot in the summer. If you live in a warmer climate, it might be an uncomfortable atmosphere in the summer for doing school, especially if you don’t have air conditioning.
• Some children lose learning very easily. Even a short, 4-day weekend can cause children with retention issues to forget what they learned the week before. The recurrent breaks of year-round homeschooling would mean that you would have to spend time reviewing the first day after every break. That could be more time consuming than just reviewing once after a summer break.

How to Schedule Year-Round Homeschooling

It’s probably a good idea to plan out your whole year when using a year-round schedule. You might want to use Cozi or Google Calendar for this. Decide ahead of time how many days or weeks you want your children to be homeschooling. 180 days or 36 weeks is traditional. However, you can have 200 days if you like or even 175. You want to avoid having either too many or too few days for learning. Keep in mind that your state may also have certain minimum requirements.

Here are some possible schedules for year-round homeschooling.

• 3 weeks on and 1 week off
• 6 weeks on and 2 weeks off
• 9 weeks on and 3 weeks off
• 12 weeks on and 4 weeks off

Of course, you can alter these slightly to accommodate special needs or events like having a baby or holidays.

What are YOUR thoughts on year-round homeschooling? I’d love to hear about them below.

Many blessings,