Oh.. the crew challenge this week is posting about what a day looks like in our household. Well honestly, it’s still summer here… but I can tell you what a highschooler’s day in the life looks like. At least, what it should look like in our household. Part of homeschooling highschool is the variety of life skills one teaches throughout the day as well. From simply doing their book work, to organizing life around work and outside commitments, to simply helping their mother out with this. This is a day/week in the life of a 16 year old, singleton child, living in Ontario this year.
Where Learning Happens
Last year my son could choose where he wanted to study, the hours he wanted to fill and such like. This year we have modified that. He no longer works alone upstairs in his room, but will be fighting with the cat for the comfy chair. 🙂 It will some days be a battle since that cat is 13 years old and getting to that “grumpy old man stage”. He has back difficulties and has diabetes so some days are hard for an old cat. There’s our dining room table behind this chair so we have options for the “I just won’t be moved” days.
The lad’s day will start (once the official school year begins) at 830 a.m. Sometimes those days will be at the local highschool taking a manufacturing course, or will start here at home. It kinda depends on how covid affects life. Covid has thrown a bit of a wrench into eveything it seems. Depending on what the lad is working on he’ll do his studies using his laptop, or if he needs graphics…better computing skills/speed… the desktop upstairs.
The headphones will travel with him as the lad listens to classical music (mostly) when he does his schooling.
Depending on what his course work entails, other rooms in the house might be involved.
This year that will be english, math (CTCmath two courses, three if can squeeze it in), communications, Manufacturing (public high), physics (grade 12 public), and stuff that right now I can’t remember…
So I expect I’ll see more experiments in the kitchen.
Time Usage in a highschooler’s day in the life
He’ll have a break from 120145 to have lunch and spend time with his dad. Currently they are playing some computer games together. This is one of the reasons we are doing highschool at home. His dad works a hard job doing the afternoon shift. This way he gets to see his dad! This is important to us.
After lunch we normally read together. Right now we are reading… Stranger on the Road to Emmaus and Torpedoed.
You can read my review for Torpedoed. My son did a year long study of WW2 and remains fascinated so we are still reading books about that time period.
Stranger on the Road to Emmaus is an excellent book that walks the reader throughout history explaining the redemption work and promises of God fulfilled in Jesus. It promotes some good discussion twixt a lad and his mother. Highly recommend.
At this time we might decide to watch a movie that correlates with a book he’s reading, or an apologetics idea as well. Something that presents information differently to help a deep thinker think more clearly, or with questions to answer in his own mind.
The lad will get back to his schooling and work until 5 ish, with a break for snacks as needed. I don’t worry much on his snacking as we have ground rules (has to have one fruit/veggie) as part of his snacking, I don’t buy cookies so if he wants that he has to make it. Occasionally I’ll call him aside to help with a project. One that he has this week is to make a top for our mealworm container that will hopefully keep flour moths out of it.
Assignments and Checking-In
Some assignments he’ll submit to me in workbooks, others will be sent to me via email. Today he sent me a punnett square for a biology class he’s tidying up work for. Pay no nevermind to the way too many tabs I have open! Yes, it continues to be a work in progress.
This leaves our evenings free for work at McD’s, finishing chores up (he has specific areas of responsibility), playtime with friends (online computer games mostly, sometimes physical army based games, or long walks on the trails), Army Cadets (Mondays), Youth group (Sunday nights), game/walk/something night with mom (hopefully Thursdays), and Karate (Saturday mornings).
My son is mostly self-sufficient with his schooling but we’re running into a couple time management issues so we’ve instituted some changes to make it easier for him. We’ll add a daily check in (a log of activities accomplished so he knows where he left off the day before) and a weekly “show me what you’ve done” check in.
How do you organize your homeschoolers day?
We’ve had to talk a lot about how to organize his day, helping him to see areas of struggle, and planning out just what he needs to take yet, and how to get to where he wants to be. Changes needed to be made, and I’d rather make them here at home where he can learn necessary skills than to have to learn the hard way later on.
A highschooler’s day in the life is more than just book work isn’t it? How do you help your highschool students? Have you needed to make changes as they learn important skills? Where do they learn best? How have you best figured out how to help them? Let me know eh? Together we can learn how to help our teens gain good skills.
BEFORE I FORGET!
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Sounds like a few changes are in the works. I hope they help smooth out the rough spots. I bet he’s really enjoying the manufacturing class.
He did last year, I expect he will this year too. 🙂
I didn’t realize your son was the same age as my daughter! Homeschooling in high school is so vastly different from the younger years for sure. I enjoyed reading about your homeschooling day!
thank you. 🙂