‘Your child must read for 400 hours a week at home as well as doing 49 hours of Mathletics and writing 3 essays’. I’m being slightly overzealous there but boy, there’s a lot to do in the extra curricular world in order to make sure your kids are up to par. Or at least that’s what it feels like. And it’s not just the extra curricular school things I’m struggling to keep up with, it’s those outside of school as well.

Forgive me for writing a post about school again but I’m pretty sure some of you are having the same thoughts as me at the moment so I really wanted to chat about extra curricular activities and how you fit everything in.

Let me set the scene for how Leo’s week looks. On a Monday he has after school club from which I collect him at about 5pm. On a Tuesday evening he plays football; a session that lasts an hour from 5 until 6. On a Wednesday he comes home at normal time. Thursday is a whole new ball game as of this week where he has after school sports club for an hour and then swimming (I will elaborate shortly) and then Friday is another ‘normal’ day.

So you see what with three nights of activities, we’re left with very little time to do all the school based extra curricular ‘stuff’. I try to read with him every day when he gets in from school, bar a Monday. That’s also going to change for a Thursday now as he won’t be getting in until 6 o’clock after swimming. I feel I should elaborate on what seems like a ridiculous day on a Thursday. He used to swim on a Wednesday but then moved up a group and the only class available to him didn’t start until 6 o’clock and he would be asleep in the car by the time we go there so I had to change that. I’ve obviously now moved it to a Thursday and had forgotten that I’d signed him up a few weeks ago to the after school sports club nd we found out this week he got a spot! Gah! Is that all going to be too much? I don’t know?

So I’m really left with Wednesday and Fridays or the weekend to be doing anything educational with him. Is that enough? How do you fit it all in? I’ve been considering putting a schedule together maybe so that I know on a Saturday morning we’ve written numbers 1-20 for example? How much is enough? And I really don’t want to remove his no educational activities. He LOVES his football class and for me swimming is a life skill I really want him to nail and he is making really good progress and I don’t want to interrupt that.

Do your littles do any extra curricular activities in the week? How do they cope with it all? Do you have a structure to ensure they’re learning at home as well as in the classroom or am I worrying too much about what we work on with him at home?