Tuesday, June 25, 2013

A space that now you hold: Summer Kid Schedule

T's preschool is on Summer Break until Labor Day. Thanks to my new "life of leisure", this wasn't a cause of consternation or a mad scramble to find camps and alternate arrangements to cover the time.

However, I realized about a month ago that I would need to plan *something* for our days.  We don't do well just lolling around in the house. T can play on her own a bit, but quickly gets bored and wants to play *with* me. While I love being home with the kids, I don't want to be drafted into the role of being their playmate and entertaining them all day long either.

We needed a plan. I've always been intrigued by homeschooling, partly just due to the structure and organization it requires to plan educational, interesting activities.

When T was a baby, I made up a schedule to hang on the fridge that outlined our activities for the week including my work days, our Toddler Group, and various meals and naps. It helped a lot by taking some of the "hmm, what's next" processing out of my brain, and also got us on a more regular eating schedule.  (Coordinating 3 meals and 2 baby snacks was driving me bonkers until I picked times and followed them.)

My imaginary Internet friend J (who I've actually met a few times in real life) posted a quick sample summer schedule on Facebook and it was *brilliant*.  The key items I hadn't thought about were having a couple of "activity blocks" like "art project" or "outside fun" or "game" where you could change it up each day, but still have an idea of what to fill that time with.

So I ran with it. Since we have T (age 3.5) and M's (age 8 months) schedules to contend with, ours is a bit tricky.  It was like a fun logic puzzle to fit in all the pieces.

Once everyone is up and has gotten dressed and eaten breakfast, we do a bit of reading time. I noticed that lately we've gotten out of the habit of reading during the day as T is *so busy* with her own playtime.  Consequently M isn't hearing as many books as T did when she was a baby.  Sigh, poor neglected second child.

As much as I can, I try to be hardcore about making sure we're home at the appropriate times for naps and not scheduling over them. M still takes a morning nap, so we're typically home until she wakes from that, which is around 10:30am.  While she sleeps, T and I do either an art project or work on some of her workbooks. (She loves them- I swear I'm not running an academic sweatshop here.)

The *actual* schedule
We then have a morning "Get Out of the House" activity, which on nice days would be a trip to the park to burn off some preschooler beans, or running errands. (Can I say how in love I am with places that have double shopping carts?!)

Next is lunch and both girls napping (or T having Quiet Time) until about 3pm.  (Divine, I know.) After that we have a quick snack, then our Afternoon Activity, which is T's swimming lesson twice a week, a park trip if we didn't go in the morning, or maybe some sidewalk chalk or playing in the rice bin on the deck.  When it's nicer out, we'll get out the Crab Pool and play in there.

Then we get into the home stretch - T watches some Spanish or educational TV while I cook dinner, then we have Cleanup Time (I have J to thank for this!).  By this time TJ is usually home, so we eat then everyone gets ready for bed. On a good day, the girls are in bed, lights out at 7:30pm. We don't always have Good Days, though. Such is life with 2 under 4, I guess.

But just a few days into Summer Break, this schedule is making me a lot less stressed out. I don't have to scramble and plan for each afternoon while the girls are napping - I just need to pick one activity for the days we don't have swimming.  If we get off track due to late naps or sleeping in, no worries - we just pick up where we left off and skip stuff as needed (except for naps. We try not to skip naps because that causes 2am BADNESS).

I printed a copy of the schedule to hang on the fridge (with cute fonts, of course). T likes me to read it to her each day, and has already taken to asking "what's next on the Mama School Schedule?". Definitely my kid.

That's it - very simple, but super effective. I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves over the next couple of months!

14 comments:

  1. Yay! I love it when something I do is useful. :)

    The other thing I like is that I've used something like this to make sure I don't miss anything -- so if there's some activity we really want to do before the end of the summer, I schedule it on the calendar to go into one of those "empty" times, and then it's already planned when I put together that day.

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    1. Yes! I should do another post about my "maybe" calendar which I'm still constructing, with possible activities so I have things to "fill in" when I'm not sure what we're going to do.

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  2. I love this! I want to have Mama School! Soooo jealous of your stay-at-homeness.

    But you know, this might help structure our home time better too. I love that you've scheduled in time to cook -- I am usually scrambling to figure out something at the last minute, which is usually not as healthy as it could be. So thank you for this!

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    1. YES, it can definitely be adapted for any time, not just weekdays. Our weekends are usually somewhat planned, though a bit more lax since TJ is home and he's much less into "the schedule".

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  3. When I cook, I have things the kids do at the table in the kitchen - puzzles, writing (this is anything from tracing to actual letters to drawing but it's all called writing in my house :)) or stickers.

    Love your list!

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    1. Hmm, that might work too! Since T is off school for the summer, I need her to get her daily Spanish fix so I use TV for that, since I don't speak it. But there are definitely days where she just doesn't want to watch anything, so this is a good idea, thanks!

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  4. For me summer is all about the opposite - un-scheduling. I love not having to get up, make lunches and keep to a schedule for a while. We do have camps so those weeks are always more like school weeks but its nice to take a break and just enjoy hanging out with them

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    1. Yeah, I don't want to give the impression that I'm a drill seargant here. For example, T's art project is slated to last 45 min or so, but the other day she wanted to keep going, so we did.

      But we definitely need some structure or there is a lot of whining. And a lot of my brain whirling trying to figure out if it's time to eat, to sleep, or whether we have time to go to xyz before the next eating/sleeping time. This way I just need to look at the schedule on the fridge :)

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  5. I recently flexed my schedule so I'm home two mornings a week with my two girls (3 & 1) I discovered very quickly I needed some sort of schedule as I do better with structure. So one morning is activity day and one morning is home/chores day. Thanks for sharing your schedule. Enjoy the summer!
    Also for doing the Spanish for T - you should look at your local library - I think they have a subscription to Little Pim which is an online program geared to kids. So that would be different. ~Alissa

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    1. Thanks for this tip! We've found a few of the Little Pim videos online but they're very short. We have also been attending Spanish Story Time at the library, which is pretty great.

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  6. I so so so love this idea. I really want to do it too, but I just need way more mental energy than I have right now. We are still a one car family so we all drive into downtown every morning to take Ryan to work and then I usually take the kids somewhere. That is sort of a schedule, right? (Don't answer that, it is chaos.)

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  7. My kids always look forward to what is on the schedule for the day. A little scheduling ahead of time definitely helps Mama stay sane.

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