One Month In: A High School Update

I am now half way through the fifth week of the school year, and so it seems like an appropriate time to look back at the first month of 10th grade at talk about what worked and what didn't.

I'm also linking up with the October Let's Homeschool Highschool Bloghop, so check out all the other posts at the bottom of the page.

 

My main complaint about the first four weeks of school is that I did not get as much done as I would have liked in some subjects (history and math). This is something that I need to just not worry about. There were various personal struggles going on over this period of time that contributed to that, and those are not things within my control. What I can do is focus on scheduling, and getting things done in a timely manner to keep that from happening again.

 One little kink that I have come to is that I have been having trouble completing that amount of school work I have to do in the time I have to do it in. Here is an example of why. On an average Tuesday, I would have this to do (to see what curriculum I'm referring to, click the 10th Grade Curriculum button in the header):

One History lesson: This might include reading 20 pages from my textbook, and then summarizing or outlining it. It would take about an hour. Other lessons might be as little as 30 min, or as long as two hours.

One Math lesson: Watch a short video lesson, and do about 25 problems. Generally takes between 25 and 45 minutes.

Two Spanish exercises: Each one usually involves listening to something, and then either talking or writing. This would take about 20 minutes altogether. 

One English lesson: This varies a lot, but usually takes between 15 and 45 minutes.

One Vocabulary exercise: This take five to ten minutes.

The problem lies in the large amount of variation in many of these lessons. It could take me anywhere from an hour and thirty five minutes to four hours.

I am slowly switching into an approach where instead of having a daily to do list where the lessons I need to do are listed out ( History 15, Math 33, English 68 ect.), I will do each subject for a period of time each day (1 hour History, 30 min. Math, 30 min English, ect.) In some cases, this will mean that I won't get a whole lesson done, and in other cases it might be a lesson and a half.

I am hoping that this will keep me from burning out part way through my work, and then getting behind. Maybe doing five lessons of History in a week isn't a reasonable goal. If that is my goal, and I only do four, that stresses me out, while if my goal is to do five hours of history, and I do five hours, then I will feel like I did what I needed to, whether that ended up being three lessons or six.

So, in some ways, this change is mainly for my sanity, but I have found that it can be very hard to work without it. :)