Our Real Homeschool Schedule (and the Part That Used to Fall Apart Every Day)

Every day in our house looks a little different, and for a long time I thought that was the problem. I thought if I could just get the day to look the same, if I could pin it down to the minute the way a school day is pinned down, the chaos would stop. It didn’t, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the chaos was never about the clock.

So here’s what a real homeschool day looks like with four kids (eleven, nine, seven and five), and then the part I actually want you to take from it, which is why our days used to fall apart every single day and why they mostly don’t anymore.

What our homeschool daily schedule actually looks like

We wake up when we wake up, which is usually somewhere between 7 and 8:30 depending on how late the kids went to bed the night before. The first thing my kids do is read silently. Nobody tells them to, it’s just what happens in our house before anything else does.

Then they get hungry, and we have breakfast, and we all sit down together for it. They clean up from breakfast, go upstairs and get ready for the day, which means brushing their teeth, getting dressed, making their beds and picking up anything that’s on their floors so the rooms are at least a little tidy.

And then we start academics, and we start with math, for everybody. All four of my kids use Beast Academy, and it’s completely individualized, so each kid starts wherever they actually are and works for 30 to 45 minutes while I bop around the room helping whoever’s stuck.

After math, each kid goes to their board. I’ll explain the board in a minute (it’s the whole reason this day works), but the short version is that it lists their classes and the subjects I’m hoping they get through that day. Between nine and noon is when we try to get most of the sit-down academic work done, and what’s on it changes by the day. Some days it’s writing and math and science, other days it’s spelling and math and reading and social studies.

Most days at least one kid has at least one class, whether that’s on Outschool, at the micro school, or an art class somewhere local. They each have their own. The kids are expected to make their own snack whenever they get hungry in the morning (nobody’s waiting on me to plate apple slices), and around noon we have lunch.

Afternoons are for getting out of the house. Playground meetups, friends, field trips, the library, or honestly just hanging out, depending on the day. Pretty much every evening somebody has sports practice, so we do sports, we have dinner, and then we wind down: showers, getting ready for bed, reading AGAIN before bed, and then sleep.

If you came here for a sample homeschool schedule you can copy, that’s ours, and you’re welcome to steal any of it.

How many hours a day do we actually homeschool?

About two hours a day of sit-down academics, and that’s the maximum. That number makes people nervous, so let me back up and explain what it actually means, because I think it’s the most misunderstood thing about homeschooling.

When I say two hours, I mean the kind of work most people picture when they think of school: a kid sitting down with math, or writing, or a specific piece of curriculum, and working through it. That part is about two hours. But it isn’t two hours of sitting still in a row. It might be thirty minutes of math, then a bike ride, then reading over lunch, then social studies at some other point in the day, so the two hours often gets spread across three or four. (Movement breaks like that are a big part of how we handle ADHD in our house, too, which I wrote about in homeschooling a child with ADHD.) Some mornings my son is up at seven and does his math before breakfast, or right after it, while half my girls aren’t even awake yet. He doesn’t wait for nine o’clock.

What nine to noon really is, for us, is protected time. I don’t schedule a playdate or a library trip or a field trip in that block, generally speaking, because that’s when we hold ourselves accountable for the more serious academic work. The kids just don’t all have to start the second it opens.

I taught public high school for eleven years, about thirty kids in a room, and the thing nobody tells you about a seven-hour school day is how little of it is actual learning. There’s the taking of attendance and the passing out of papers and the waiting for everyone to settle, and the explaining of the thing to the kids who already got it so the kids who didn’t get it can catch up, and the transitions, and the lines, and the bells. A kid working at her own level, on the next thing she actually needs, with nobody to wait for, gets through an enormous amount in an hour (and she isn’t sitting bored while the rest of the room catches up).

And honestly, the two hours isn’t where most of the learning in our house happens anyway. My kids read for fun for four, six, sometimes seven hours a day, in the car, at breakfast, at soccer practice (when one of my girls is practicing, the other is on the sideline with a book). They’re playing games, having real conversations, taking classes, working through bigger problems and helping around the house all day long. The sit-down part is the floor, not the ceiling.

It will grow as they do. My son is eleven and heading into middle school, and if he wants an AP class or a dual enrollment class down the road, his academic hours might go up to three or four a day. That’s still a fraction of a public school day.

Why our days used to fall apart

Our days used to fall apart pretty much every day. My kids weren’t difficult, and I wasn’t disorganized. They just had no place to look. Every morning it was up to me to tell each of them, individually, what I wanted them to be doing that day, and so every morning I was the schedule. Four kids, four sets of instructions, all day long, coming back to me every time they finished something and wanted to know what was next.

I felt like I wasn’t getting done any of the things I wanted to get done. And they weren’t completing the work I thought they should be completing… not falling behind exactly, but not pushing themselves forward either, not growing the way I knew they could if they were keeping up with their studies.

And here’s what’s actually going on when that happens, because it isn’t a you problem. Most of us only have one picture of what a learning day looks like, and it’s the one we grew up in, where an adult stands at the front of the room and tells everyone what to do next. So we bring that home without meaning to. We become the teacher at the front of the room, except now the room is our kitchen and the bell never rings, and the kids do exactly what school trained them to do, which is wait for the adult to say what’s next.

The board that fixed it

So we built each kid a board. Ours are in Trello, one board per child, and every season I sit down with each kid and we build it out together. It’s a conversation, not an assignment. We talk about what they want to work on, what they need to work on, what classes they’re taking, and it all goes on the board so that everyone knows what’s expected of them.

Now when someone wanders over and asks me what they should do, I don’t answer the question. I say, “What do you have left on your Trello board for you to do today?” And they go look, because now there’s somewhere to look.

That one change is the difference between the day I used to have and the day I have now. I’m not the schedule anymore. I’m the support, the person who helps when somebody’s genuinely stuck, and that is a completely different job (and a much more sustainable one).

If you want a board like ours, I sell the exact Trello setup I use as the Student Dashboard, and you can add it when you get the Secular Homeschooling Family Rhythm Planner, which is the block-scheduling system the rest of our week runs on. I wrote more about why we use blocks instead of a timetable and what stays fixed when everything else flexes.

What to take from our day for yours

You don’t need my wake-up time or my curriculum or my kids’ sports schedule. You need two things, and you can start on both tomorrow.

First, give your kids somewhere to look that isn’t you. A board, a list on the fridge, a notebook, it really doesn’t matter what it is, as long as the answer to “what do I do now?” lives somewhere other than your mouth. Build it with them, not for them, because a list they helped make is a list they’ll actually check.

Second, pick one thing that starts the academic part of the day for everybody, the same way math starts ours. Everyone working at once, each at their own level, gives the morning a shape without pinning it to a clock.

And then notice where your day still gives out. If you’ve homeschooled for a while you probably already know the exact hour.

If you already homeschool and you’re not sure where your day is actually breaking, I built a short assessment for exactly that. It’s twelve statements, it takes a couple of minutes, and it shows you the point where your day gives out. Find where your day falls apart →

For outside classes, here’s our honest Outschool review, including the classes that flopped.