Just as we seemed to be getting into a good routine, we all came down with the flu. So today we had our first sick day and I'm feeling very guilty about it, even though it can't exactly be helped. I tried to put the morning to good use and decided to re-work our daily schedule, which definitely needed some tweaking. Thus far, it's been taking us an awful lot of time to cover very little work each day. I can't imagine what our day will be like once we add Latin back in - and Science (oh, and let's not forget Geography next year!).

My biggest problem is that I also work from home and need to work a certain number of hours per day, so when school takes too long, the kids get antsy and my job suffers. Here's another problem - since we're starting our school year from the beginning, I don't have the luxury of spacing out lessons the way I'd like. We have a lot of material to get through!

Anyway, so here's the schedule I came up with:

I'm not entirely sure that it'll work yet (math, in particular, will probably require more time), but at least it's a good start. Our daily "Main Lesson" will include a mixture of Bible, history and literature. For English, I generally spend at least half an hour with my fourth graders while my eldest takes a break and/or eats lunch, then I spend the remaining time with him while they take a break. So far, that has worked very well, so I guess we'll see how this goes!