Just last week, I came down with a twenty-four hour bug and was down for the count. We didn’t officially start our new school year until Tuesday, but it got me thinking about how we handle homeschooling when I (the teacher) am sick.
In a traditional and private school setting, there are substitute teachers ready to step in and help out when the teacher is out for any reason. But what happens when mom is the one that is the teacher? We don’t get time off from being mom when we are sick, so how do we handle illness when we also have school to teach?
If you have ever been in this situation, you probably have some handy ways you handle (mom) sick days. But, if you have never been in this situation or have been in it, but not know what to do, hopefully these ideas will help you to be more prepared when sickness comes knocking.
5 WAYS TO DEAL WITH TEACHER SICK DAYS IN YOUR HOMESCHOOL
Homeschool-lite
By homeschool lite, I mean make it a very light academic day. If you are sick and you really don’t have the energy to get out of bed to teach a lesson, why not bring everyone to you? Have someone bring you a book that’s related to a subject you’re currently teaching and just read from it. To make it more fun, instead of reading straight out of a text book, have some living books around that make stories and subjects come alive.
Don’t feel like reading yourself? This would be the perfect time to get some extra reading practice in for one of your students that needs it. You could even have everyone take turns reading and acting out the living story. Make it fun for them, and very little work for you.
Extra Days
Depending on your state’s laws, you may be required to homeschool for a specific amount of days each school year. In this case, you may find it easier to just take a few days off to get well, and then tack on a few extra days to the end of the school year to make up for those days.
Alternatively, you could also start the school year a week or two early as a “just in case” precaution. That way, if you do need to take a few teacher sick days off, you’ve already got your required days covered. And the best case scenario is that you don’t need any sick days, so because you started early, you get out early-win/win!
Cut the Holidays
No, not cut out holidays all together. I mean that you might have to take a few less days for holiday time in order to catch up. If you normally take a full week off for Thanksgiving, maybe this year in order to catch up from those sick days, you may teach the Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week.
It may not be the way you normally do things, but it might make you feel better once you’re all caught up when school starts back after the holiday.
Double Time
In this scenario, you would still keep the same amount of planned school days, but double up on work until you are caught back up to where you would have been if you hadn’t taken sick time off.
I would caution with this method that you’ll really need to determine if your student can handle a doubled work load. If you have a preschool or kindergartner, it may not be a big deal to teach two letters that week as opposed to one. If you have a middle school or high school student that already has a rigorous work load, it may not be a good idea. Of course you know your children best, and you know what they can handle so you know how to make that judgement call.
School Year Round
Finally, you can do what we do in our homeschool, and that is to homeschool year round. I absolutely love the flexibility that comes with year round homeschooling. I understand that some need a long summer break from school (I don’t blame you at all!), but the way we do it makes it easy on all of us and not hard to keep up with.
During the “normal” school year, we stay on a pretty consistent schedule and make sure to get to every subject every week. However, during the summer months, we do homeschool-lite. This means that we pick a couple of core subjects and continue with those through the summer. Not everyday, but maybe a couple of times each week. This way, the material stays fresh in my kids’ minds and we are able to get ahead or get extra practice on things they were struggling with.
Homeschooling year round means that I don’t worry so much about taking a day or two off for sick days because we’ll be in school all year. It’s almost impossible to get behind. It’s really worked well for us.
Those are a few options for how to handle teacher sick days when you homeschool, but I’m sure there are more.
How do you handle sick days in your homeschool?
This post contributed by Jennifer from Organized Home Organized School
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