Monday, July 23, 2012

Scheduling Summer Sanity


Just to make things clear at the start, I’m not a fan of rigidly scheduling my non-work time, especially in the summer.  All year long, I am slave to the schedule of the school year and school day.  My bathroom breaks are scheduled for me, my lunch is scheduled for me, every 45 minutes I have a different class of students…scheduled for me.  I love teaching, so I happily go along with the schedule.  Then summer arrives and I just want to float and do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it.  That being said, I have two boys, who in summers past, have made me crazy by summer’s end and in talking with my husband towards the end of the school year he said, “Maybe you should have a daily schedule….”

My initial reaction was “UGH! I don’t do schedules!”

After calming down and thinking on it for awhile, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to try.  So, I got online to see if there were any other moms out there that had given it a go.  I came across this post: http://prettyorganizedpalace.blogspot.com/2009/06/summer-schedule-for-kids.html . Her schedule seemed pretty doable, so I took it, made some adjustments and came up with a schedule that actually really works!  I was a skeptic, but I am a believer now.  The best thing about our schedule, that works for me, are the big blocks of time when the boys can be playing outside for the most part and the time is unstructured.  The other thing I did when setting up our schedule was plan time for just my 10 year old and me to spend some time together doing a craft or an experiment.  This has created some really special moments for us this summer spending time together on projects that we might not otherwise have done.

Here is what our schedule looks like:

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