How we take breaks during the school year

Family first year homeschooling

     For the past few years I have tried different methods with taking breaks for school. My first year homeschooling I was biting at the chomp and started my oldest in January before his official kindergarten school year. My reasoning behind this was I wanted to test the waters and see if I would be able to handle homeschooling :) At the time I was very pregnant with #3 and had a very energetic newly 3 year old. I think I was so excited to be homeschooling that we had a great year and I don't think we took much time off that summer either. So truthfully I ended up teaching almost 1 1/2 years straight and may have overdone it.

Noah 5, Kayla 3

My next year I winged it a little more and gave myself a little more freedom  with when to take breaks. We didn't have many public school kids around so we did what we wanted when we wanted but I wasn't intentional in breaks.
     When Kayla joined us in school I eventually went on the public school calendar for the most part besides the fact we only schooled 4 days a week. DH at that time was working Tuesday-Saturday so I would take Monday off for family day and just started a few weeks earlier in the year to give us a little extra wiggle room.
   I think we did the 4 day a week schedule for about 2 years and then DH transferred to a Mon-Friday position within the same company so we ended up going back to Monday-Friday.

Now there are 4
Noah7, Kayla 5, Brie 2, TJ a few months

 We were still sticking to the public school schedule because some of the kids friends would stop by on their breaks and it became harder to do school when other kids were wanting to play.

And Nicholas make 5 :)

     Recently some of the kids frequent fliers moved so this year we are going to attempt Sabbath Breaks. I had heard about doing school 6 weeks on and 1 off. Truthfully, I remember the report card periods were broken into 6 week periods from public school so I just figured that is where the idea came from, but recently I saw this Blog on Sabbath Break. It is a real interesting read. The main idea is that God created the world in 6 days and rested for 1. No, God is not commanding us to school for 6 weeks then rest one, but this article really resonated with my spirit. Usually about 5 or 6 weeks into a school year I need a little break. Sometimes I will give these to myself and we will just spend time picking out what we want to read from the library and explore separate from our curriculum. I love these times, but I need more structure and can't do this type of learning all the time :) Some unschoolers are great at this, but I need more structure.

The 7 of us at Christmas

  This year we are going to try something a little differently with out schedules. We are going to attempt 6 weeks on and 1 off. It also never fails there are Dr. appointments and dentist appointments sprinkled throughout each month, so these weeks will allow us time to plan them there so we don't have to take time out of our regular schedule. Mamma will also get her break and the kids can maybe pick up some books they are interested in and get to some fun science experiments without the worry of doing the unfun stuff that will have to be done. The house will also be given a little extra attention too :) Gosh, after all of this I may need to take 2 weeks off :)
    So since this is new, so I will have to check back in and see how everything is going. We are just starting week 3 of school with the big ones, so once they are done with week 6 we will attempt our first week off. Something to look forward to!!!