5 Days of Office Schooling–Day 2- Choosing Curriculum and Time Management

I hope you enjoyed reading about the “Why” of office schooling yesterday for Day 1 of this series! Day 2 of this series we will discuss how to choose your curriculum and manage your time appropriately.

If you are in a situation where you need or want to “office school, you need to consider using as many hands off curriculums as possible. Do I mean to say you won’t be doing anything as the parent/teacher? Definitely not!

That being said there are some curriculums that are more hands off than others. Use that to your advantage. There are definitely some subjects or topics that can’t be hands off.

We use Easy Grammar for our grammar/Language Arts curriculum. It is a wonderful program AND it’s fairly hands off. I, of course, check their work, and they need questions answered from time to time, but other than that, they do it on their own. (I wonder how the book would think of that last sentence riddled with comma’s?) Honestly, I love this curriculum and we used it even when we were still at home doing our school.

My daughter uses a math program (Teaching Textbooks) that is done mostly online. I do have her do the work in the workbook too, though, because I don’t want my kids to forget how to write. ;)

Obviously, not every curriculum can be done by the child by his or her self. And, this will depend on the ages of your kids too. Older children can do work on their own easier than younger ones. And, if you have older kids, they can help you with the younger ones, too!

Making good use of your time is key to office schooling.

Now, I’m not an expert at time management, but the intentions are there! :)

Try your best to make good use of your time. If you have calls to make, try to make them back to back so that you will have a patch of time to work with your kids. Or, if you are dealing with people throughout the day like I am, try to schedule appointments back to back so that you have open time slots where there are no appointments.

Bottom line… When you have appointments, paperwork to do, phone calls to make or whatever it is you need to do for your particular job, have your kids do school they can do independently. Then, when you have an open time slot, take that time to work on things you need to do together.

Office Schooling takes flexibility in your schedule. It is not well suited for Type A personalities, that’s for sure. If you have to know exactly when everything will happen throughout your day and want it all to take place a certain way and at certain time slots, then office schooling may not be for you. On the other hand, if you can be flexible… know that not everything will happen the same way each day… be okay with some days being super crazy… then this might just work! :)

So, what do you think? Any questions about Office Schooling curriculum or Scheduling? Are you thinking of Office Schooling?