We are on Part 3 of this ACE series! Thanks for sticking with me! Here are the previous articles, just in case you missed one. Join the other readers who have read the ACE articles in signing up for new content to be delivered to your RSS feed or email and never miss another article!
Part 3 is about scheduling your year. This includes vacation days and how much work needs to get done each day. To start off, here is a look at our 2009 – 2010 schedule. ACE Schedule
This basically just breaks down what days we are “on” and what days we are “off”. Essentially, we are “on” for four weeks and “off” for one week.
There are two exceptions to that rule:
- In November, when Oma comes all the way from Germany to see us for three weeks. I do school with the kids for one out of the three weeks so that she can see how the kids are doing and watch as they learn. She LOVES to watch her beloved grandchildren learn and have fun! We take two weeks off while she is here – of course, the consistent exposure to the German language probably counts for something!
- In January, our church hosts an awesome Bible Conference during which we basically live at the church for nearly five full days! It is absolutely wonderful! Obviously, no schoolwork gets done during that week.
- No, we don’t take off for Christmas or Easter. That’s a whole other article series on a completely different blog.
I used to look at my school week as a four day week, but we do SO much school-related activity on those “off” days, that I am just using them as light days now. Friday is the day that we take for gym class, visiting the library, visiting an elderly person in their home, and spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ locally.
In the past, I did not schedule our vacation days. I just sort of took things as they came. But, then we ended up taking too many days off in the beginning of the year and trying to cram in the rest of the work at the end of the year. It got to be pretty stressful. I knew I needed to schedule our vacations, but I didn’t really know how much time I had to use.
In order to help others struggling with the same questions, I’ll list out the computations I went through to arrive at my final schedule.
Start with what you know …
- Beginning and ending dates. Do you know when you would like school to start and end? We start the first week of September and go through July. It sounds like a long year, but we get lots of breaks in between and it is so much better for the kids if they don’t have to go through that three month “forget all about school” period.
- Length of the week. How many days a week are you willing to work on ACE? As I mentioned above, Justus does ACE work four days a week, Monday through Thursday.
- Amount of work to do. Do you have a rough idea of the overall amount of work your student will need to complete for the year? In the very low grades, the PACEs are a little shorter, but in 4th grade the PACEs were about 40 pages long – not including tests, which are taken the day after the PACE is completed. There are 12 PACEs in each subject.
Turn what you know into numbers …
- September thru July is 48 weeks (minus 10 weeks of vacation time which equals 38 weeks)
- 4 days per week
Now, start computing …
- Find number of actual school days:
- 38 * 4 = 152 school days
- Find out total number of pages for each subject:
- 12 * 40 = 480 pages per subject
- Find out how many pages to do in each subject each day:
- 480 / 152 = 3.15 pages per day per subject
- Find out how many pages to do overall each day:
- 3.15 * 5 = 15.75 pages per day overall
We actually do 4 pages per day. That means we are only technically using 120 of our 152 school days. But, that does not include tests. There is one test after each PACE. So, we add on another 12 days (one for each PACE in the subject) to our 120 days and get to final number of 132 days of school each year. That leaves plenty of room for sick days, “light” days where we only get half of the school work done for one reason or another, field trip days, etc. We do still complete 180 days of school each year – this is just computing the ACE portion of our school year.
I hope this has helped you plan your ACE school year! Please leave comments with any questions or comments!
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Hi, thanks for an interesting site. My two sons are currently at an ACE school in Johannesburg South Africa, and I find that they are having issues with the procedures to such an extent that they are not getting through their 4 pages per subject per day. I have discussed this with many of the parents and they are experiencing the same problem. The children are doing 10% of the work at school and 90% at home.
Do you have any suggestions on this, which I can discuss with the educators? thank you Corrine