A New Year A New Adventure

It's that time of year again. Time to begin a new school year. Every year it seems I begin a new year with anticipation and every year by January I'm feeling the burn. You know, the dreaded burnout, the homeschool doldrums, the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach time of year. What started with such promise and hopeful anticipation in September has faded by January.

Over the years I've gotten used to it and knew it was only temporary. I've also recognized that sometimes that burnout feeling can mean I have tried to do too much and haven't allowed enough breaks. That can lead to feeling overwhelmed and then burned out. This year I have a plan to circumvent that feeling and stop it before it starts.

This year I will be co-teaching with my wonderful daughter-in-law. She has three little girls and I still have two at home, so we decided to join forces. Our plan is to teach two week units at a time, alternating who teaches a unit. We will meet on Mondays and then be on our own for the rest of the week.

We are also going to go to a new schedule which we hope will alleviate the burnout feeling we usually have come every January. Our schedule will be six weeks of school, one week off, six weeks of school, one month off and will repeat until we have finished the year. Plenty of planning time and breaks planned for with this schedule.

The excitement we feel heading into the new school year is wonderful. The load off each of our shoulders is an even better feeling! The pressure to plan a whole year by ourselves isn't weighing us down and is freeing, yet we feel our responsibility to each other, the girls, and following through. We thought the planning faze would be a lot of work, but we were pleasantly surprised by how fast and easy it was to outline our year and decide what we wanted to include in each unit. We are leaving it up to the other to put together the whole units we are responsible for teaching.

As we finished our planning session the other day I laughed and wondered out loud why we hadn't thought of doing this years ago. One thing is for certain, this year is going to be a new year and a new adventure!