The last couple of years have seen a tumultuous change in how we teach our children. Many schools adapted to online learning and navigated a lot of different school activities from there. But as schools are opening up (or continuing with online learning), many parents are realizing they can become more flexible in how their kids attend school. There are even options of year-round schooling for kids, which may or may not work into your lifestyle, but is good to research nonetheless.
What Is Year-Round Schooling?
You may or may not have heard of year-round schooling, and it may not even be available in your school districts, but you can always homeschool with a year-round schedule! And before your kids panic from hearing the words, “year-round”, it isn’t everyday of the week either. Year-round revolves around no summer break and varying chunks of school time with a few chunks of time off.
This can oftentimes feel more immersive for children, and can make learning a little easier if they have more time to learn the information, rather than moving onto the next subject week after week. If you are thinking about this in terms of homeschooling, you can also assign your kids more projects and deeper, more in-depth assignments to give them a better concept of research and exploration.
The Schedule
If you are choosing a school with year-round teaching, they may be separated into two different systems, call Single Track and Multi-Track. Single track systems are more unified for the students and teachers, where they are all in attendance at the same time for the school period. Multi-track systems may have more staggered attendance plans, where the students and teachers may not be perfectly aligned each calendar year.
There are different timetables for year-round schooling, and you can always play around with each of them to pick one that works, or simply jump right into one and see how it goes! Most programs follow the 60-20 timetable, where there are three 60-day school day schedules along with three 20-day breaks. There are variations on these, including a 45-15 schedule, which involves 45-day lengths of learning with 15-day breaks in between. All these variations can be used in both Single and Multi-track teaching systems as well.
Food for Thought
There are always going to be pros and cons to any type of teaching method. For year-round schooling, many parents feel like there isn’t enough of a break for vacations, extracurricular activities like camp, or even working. But on the plus side, year-round learning seems to aid students in better information retention, and can make the transition “back to school” easier with less of a break in between.
Katie Kyzivat