5 Reasons Why We Homeschool in the Afternoon

If you read my last blog post, you learned the secret to our smooth homeschool routine. Making this simple adjustment has made such an impact in our daily lives, groove, and sanity levels. In this post, I’m going to tell you the reasons why we do it this way and, in another post, I'll give you a more in-depth view to help you see what it looks like as far as our routine goes.

Let me preface this by saying we are not unschoolers (we dabbled in it a bit and may go back) but we are more directed by interests, weather (not even kidding), traveling dad’s work schedule, and church/extracurricular commitments.

So here we go... here are 5 reasons why we decided to start school in the afternoon.

1. Coffee. I don’t know about you but I need some caffeine in the morning. Sure, I could wake up super early and get started on my caffeine intake but I don’t usually go to bed until way late. Plus, I don’t like using an alarm. Getting started in the afternoon allows me to enjoy my coffee and for my brain to wake up completely.

2. Weather. We live in a place where it’s commonplace for triple digit heat. Other months are cooler and by cooler I mean in the 90s. We do get some mild weather briefly but mostly... it’s hot. And when it’s hot, we want the A/C. However, we LOVE being outside. So how do we compromise? We go out and play in the morning. Literally, the whole morning—for about four hours we are outside at the park, on a walk, at the river, in the backyard, at the lake, wherever it may be. By the time the afternoon rolls around, the heat of the day is setting in and we are hungry for lunch.

3. Wiggles. Unlike me, my child wakes up with energy galore, as I'm sure you can relate. Having him sit down for anything with these many wiggles pent up in his little self is unrealistic... even for breakfast. He. Is. Ready. To. Go. And I’m still waiting for the coffee to hit me. We tried school in the morning before but, man oh man, that was like fighting tooth and nail. He wasn’t enjoying it, I wasn’t enjoying it, he needed to move, and I needed to stop telling him to sit still. I scratched that idea and realized there is nothing that says we have to do this in the morning.

4. Quiet time. By the time the majority of the wiggles are out, he’s able to focus and be still while we have some formal learning time. We are both more focused at the same time—his wiggles are out (mostly), and my caffeine is in. This is the time.

5. Learning videos. As mentioned in point 2, we are outside most of the morning. Lunchtime offers a perfect segway into the sit-down learning part of the day. During lunch we usually watch a learning video about the topic at hand (if we are doing a unit study) or any other interest. Usually, it’s an animal, SuperBook, or Brave Wilderness.

BONUS

As I was writing this list out, I thought of another reason we do school in the afternoon...

6. Errands. We can do all the necessary things we need to do while no one is out. Grocery shopping, library hauls, appointments, IKEA (that’s necessary, right?). The fun thing about running errands in the morning isn’t just the not-so-cramped aisles, it’s getting to actually have conversations with people who have time to have a conversation. We’ve had long and meaningful conversations at these places with veterans, grandparents, friends, store employees, librarians, people from other countries all because we had the time in the morning to do so.

So, there you have it, our 5 +1 reasons we homeschool in the afternoons. The cool thing about these reasons is they kind of all coincide with one another. I’ll go into more detail on that in another post but until then, which one resonates with you the most?