Have you ever heard of Sabbath Schooling? I hadn’t until I read an article in Home Educating Family Magazine a few years ago. As soon as I read it I felt a burden lift off my shoulders. I KNEW this was for me!
Do you experience burn-out in your homeschool? I invite you to read on to find out how you too can breathe easier and bring life back into your homeschool!
First off ~ Sabbath Schooling is NOT doing school on Sundays! Sabbath Schooling uses the principle that on the seventh day God rested. Bringing that into the homeschooling realm…we rest every seventh week.
How does it work?
Each family will be a little different, but this is how it works for us. This is our third year doing Sabbath Schooling. We typically start school around the end of August. We do school for six weeks and take the seventh week off. We keep up this schedule and move around as needed to accomodate for Thanksgiving. We also only school 4 days a week, taking Fridays off.
Come December, we take the ENTIRE month off! This allows for spending quality time with family, baking Christmas goodies, making presents, shopping, etc. We resume the first Monday in January.
We proceed to keep this schedule and tweak as needed to make our Sabbath week our “Spring Break” and Easter break. Then we finish out the year on our 6/1 schedule until the end of June (or until we finish everything). We take about 6 weeks off or sometimes longer, then we resume our schedule.
The idea is to spread out the school year a bit instead of cramming everything into a typical 9 month schedule. Doing this allows for easier scheduling of things like dentist and doctor appointments, errands, and even lesson planning!
For states that have restrictions on how many days you have to school, you could modify this schedule to fit your needs. An example would be doing 5 days a week instead of 4, or taking every 8th or 9th week off. Luckily, in my state, we do not have attendance requirements. I still manage to get about 36 weeks of school in using this method.
One perk for motivation: My daughter has always understood that if she doesn’t get everything done during the 6 weeks of school, she will be working during our Sabbath Week. In three years, this has never happened! It is a good motivating tool to keep on keeping on ~ with a light at the end of the tunnel!
Find out about your state’s compulsory attendance laws and requirements here.
If you are Sabbath Schooling or doing a version of it that you tweaked for your family’s needs, tell us about it on our Facebook Page! Gleaning wisdom from each other rocks!
Written by Carrie
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