For the last two years we have added into our home school routine, what I affectionately call, “Supplemental Saturday”. I first started it because incorporating the “fun” side of home school was lacking on my part, because I don’t really like the mess, organizing and implementing of “crafty” type things. I always had big plans, but life would happen. I tried to do the fun things in the afternoon, but by that point the girls were usually involved in outdoor play most days, or deep into something else or we had different errands to run on any given day. I also had a few subjects that I did not want to do daily and felt weird only doing as sporadic as I was attempting to do them. Thus, Supplemental Saturday was born.
Awhile back I wrote a post titled Home school Year-Round & Saturday Too. In that post I discussed that we sometimes held school on Saturday, because my husband works six days a week and we need and liked the structure of having something to do with our day. I decided to take the 6th day of school to add in the things, I felt, we were lacking or not getting to do consistently in our home school.
Arts and crafts were a big area that I knew the girls would enjoy and I knew that I would not be overwhelmed with, since it was only one day a week. I let them do other non-messy and creative crafts throughout the week as they want too, but the time for paint, glue and glitter was just not happening.
I had also wanted to start implementing Sigh Language into our studies as well. At the time, our youngest was doing a little bit of sign language during her music and movement time for preschool, but I wanted all of us to learn it together as well. Saturday was a perfect time to introduce this to them as well.
Last year we did geography on Saturdays. I took all the Geography lessons for the week from Sonlight’s Core C and we just did those on Saturday instead of during the week. This year though, I added a more in-depth Geography this year with studying the United States and decided to have it on a loop schedule with science, and so far, that is working out well.
This year to replace Geography I added in music to our Supplemental Saturday routine. It has been going over very well. I see music being a regular part of our routine now on this day.
Now, as I discussed in a previous post, we do not have school EVERY Saturday. Some Saturday’s life happens, we go some where or have an outing planned, or we have a family event scheduled. Supplemental Saturday is an easy thing for us to skip, and it does not get us “behind” in our academics at all. However, when we are traveling with Daddy-o, and we do not have a lot to do, and we are waiting for him to come home for the day, it gives us something to do. It also is not a full academic filled day either. It takes us 30 minutes to an hour most Saturdays. Honestly, it is also the girl’s favorite day of the week, and they are often counting down the days until its here again.
This time of year, I begin planning for the following year (buying curriculum, planning out goals for the year, etc.). I have not yet decided if we should add anything else to our Saturday’s, but we will for sure be keeping Art, ASL, and Music into our routine. I am tossing around the thought of adding in some Physical Education, Home Economics, or other skill, but for now I like where we are at.