Gearing Up for Fall - The calendar

I'm gearing up for Fall studies.  This is always an exciting time for me.  Planning is one of the things I enjoy the most about homeschooling.  I like to organize the year, and map out our plan of attack.  I like to chart and schedule and assemble the resources to make my job as smooth sailing as possible.

The first thing I do is plan the calendar.

This year, I'm trying something new.  We're going to do our work in "blocks."  We'll work hard for 4-6 weeks and then take a week off.  This will give us 2 week -long breaks during the first semester.  We'll take our Christmas break and resume a rigorous school schedule in January, again taking a week off every 4-6 weeks for the remainder of the year.  I've got June 14th as our last official day of curriculum studies.  This will leave us with a couple of weeks at the end of June to tie up any loose ends.

The reason I've decided to make this change is that I've often found myself becoming a slave to my schedule and losing steam after a couple of months.  Although kids thrive on routine, I do not.  It bores me.

I'm expecting that the weeks we take off will be a nice shake up in the monotony of the year, giving us a chance to get out for some field trips, catch up on stray bits of assignments, and do things we don't ordinarily have time to do (or things that we feel we have to "squeeze in" so we can attend to our studies.)

Beginning on Monday, I'll be posting  a series of follow-up posts detailing the way I organize our subjects, our selves, and our time.

How do you structure your school year?