Wondering what a full day of homeschooling looks like? Learn what a typical day includes for our family with a homeschooled 6th grader.
Here's what you'll learn in this article:
- Homeschooling provides wonderful flexibility to give your child breadth and depth in a variety of topics.
- Four insights into a full day of homeschooling a 6th grader using the Montessori method.
- Answers to commonly asked questions about full-day homeschooling.
- Key takeaways to help you reflect on your home school experience and make tweaks to create the experience you want.
- Where to learn more about planning and executing full-day home school.
Each Day of Home School Should Be Filled with Intentional Learning
After homeschooling for four years and navigating through several grade-level milestones, with our child in 6th grade, we feel like we’ve hit our stride and landed on routines for planning, executing, and reflecting to make the most of homeschooling. Homeschooling has become the best option to meet our child’s individual needs while also providing space for extracurricular activities and traveling.
With full-time work happening at home too, home school needed to be practical. This meant embracing a full day of learning five days a week, with each day including self-directed learning activities. Home school has become our child’s opportunity to enjoy constructive and challenging activities that help her practice new skills, grow others, and get a taste for what is to come.
It can become your child's opportunity, too.
4 Insights Into a Full Day of Middle Grade Homeschooling
The anchors of the home school day have largely stayed the same over the years, but the lessons, projects, subjects, and materials have evolved. Here are insights into what a typical day looks like now that our child is in 6th grade:
1. Learning is the Priority
Our home school day is driven by learning. This priority helps us decide what experiences are a fit for home school as opposed to being a fit for family time outside of school.
2. There is More to Learning Than a Curriculum Focused On the Basics
The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley is an eye-opening book about education and learning around the world. As this book makes clear, learning is about much more than what is included in a typical core curriculum.
3. Learning Takes a Regular Day and Makes It an Adventure
Learning is the framework for building a home school day that meets emotional, cognitive, and physical needs. Challenges keep kids engaged and helps them build the self-confidence that comes with new skills.
4. It's Important to Balance Consistency with Growth
As your child is consistently learning at this stage, growth is non-stop. Your lessons and materials will necessarily be evolving and progressing throughout the year.
At the same time, consistency is an important aspect of home school. It's important to balance consistency with growth--for example, by maintaining a regular routine so that your children know what to expect and can stay focused on their work throughout the home school day.
Our Typical Home School Day
With only very limited exceptions, we consistently use the same daily schedule that gives us anchors throughout the day. Lunch doesn’t always happen at exactly 12:00pm, particularly on field trip days, but it does happen during the home school day’s 8:00am-2:00pm timeframe.
Before Starting
The whole house has a consistent sleep routine, which makes getting up about the same time each day routine too. There is space before home school for waking up, breakfast, and getting ready. While my child is getting ready, I prep the morning’s home school materials—curriculum binder/s for the day’s lessons, practice math, work book, and morning reading.
Home School Morning
The home school morning includes four anchors: 1) starting the day, 2) lesson, 3), independent reading, and 4) the day's first work cycle.
We start the day together with a morning gratitude practice and a check-in about any reminders or other relevant topics, which takes about 10-15 minutes. Next, it is my turn to read while she listens or works on a quiet project of her choosing, like sewing or prepping a project that allows her to move while listening. The reading material has evolved over the years and are currently National Geographic and National Geographic History. After the reading, she does one page from the grade level Brain Quest workbook, which is a nice complement to her curriculum, as it provides similar topics taught in different ways.
The lesson is from one of the NAMC Upper Elementary manuals or from an extracurricular topic like art, practical life, editing a piece of her writing, or coding.
After the lesson, she reads independently a book of her choosing for 30 minutes.
After reading is her morning work cycle, which lasts until lunch. The work cycle includes a lot of options for her to choose from. There are six shelves with prepared materials in: art, practical life, culture and geography, science, math, and language arts. She also has access to learning apps on her iPad like Montessori Math and Kahn Academy, as well as her laptop, which she uses for writing, research, or website building.
Home School Afternoon
The home school afternoon has four anchors: 1) lunch, 2) lesson, 3) the afternoon work cycle, and 4) the daily log.
Lunch she generally prepares herself, but I’ll give her different options to consider. Depending on what we have planned for the day, this may include overviews on preparation and cooking techniques. After lunch, she has a sheet of practice math to do before the afternoon lesson, which draws from the same sources as the morning lesson.
The last hour of the day is for a second work cycle. Within either of the work cycles, she also has to manage doing a foreign language lesson in Duolingo and 10 minutes of writing each day.
After the afternoon work cycle, she completes her log of what she did for the day.
FAQs: Answers to Common Questions About Our Full Day of Homeschooling
Are there other weekly projects?
What we described above is a typical home school day spent at home. Not all days have two lessons. We also make space to add special home school classes like sewing, ice skating or private lessons in an area of interest. These latter activities don’t happen all the time, but when they do, they are generally part of work cycle time.
New this year, we’ve also started doing afternoon tea during the Friday afternoon work cycle, during which we usually debate a topic. Sometimes the topics are fun like debating whether birds are better fliers than bats. Other times they are more serious, like whether kids should have reading lists or get to choose their reading. We also allow space for field trips or other travel. On these days, the non-work cycle activities still typically occur.
Are there other monthly projects?
Each month she also picks a topic from one of those covered in the NAMC curriculum (e.g., water pollution or the Vikings) to research and plan a project around that she presents at the end of the month.
Key Takeaways
- Homeschooling offers many learning opportunities. A homeschooler is in a great position to engage in learning opportunities each day across a variety of subjects.
- Value learning. Giving your child a full day of learning with homeschooling will enrich their lives and help them grow in ways you never imagined.
- A full learning day is varied. Our home school day covers a lot of ground and offers a lot of approaches to engage with material whether together or independently, inside or outside, hands on or reading only, on screen or off.
- Material evolves overtime. The materials in 6th grade have changed since starting home school in 2nd grade, and they’ve changed as needs have arisen, both during the school year and at the start of a new one.
Where to Learn More
If you would like more information about building home school lessons and experiences, consider becoming a member of Crush Home School. With our membership plan, you get monthly guidance delivered to your inbox with downloadable resources and much more. Learn more about becoming a Crush Home School member.