What does after school look like for your middle school kid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid isn't the type who can easily go from thing to thing. She does want to do a couple of after school activities that will go until 5 p.m. What is reasonable to expect when we get home? She will have a greater homework load this year, probably at least an hour to 1.5 hours per night. And daily violin practice. It feels like something has to give on those couple of days.

Home by 2:45 or so. Fifteen minutes of tell me about your day.

3-4 homework, including instrument practice (although that window may grow as the school day gets longer and homework demands increase).

4-530 -- relax/screentime/project. .

6ish Travel sports practice or music practice (or more relax orr)

830 - Leisure/shower/games

9:30 Bedtime for Bonzo.

[Anonymous]

Two days a week: home at 4, done with homework by dinner, chores, screen time (1 hour) or reading after dinner.
Two days a week: home at 6:30 after EC activity, dinner and homework
Fridays: sports practice, dinner, chores, screen binge if he wants it
Always in bed by 9:30.

[Anonymous]

comes home, does homework. Two days a week has an activity after school. Other nights goes over to a friends' house or friends come to ours when HW is done, or he just hangs out at our house.

Bed by b9:30

[Anonymous]

My 5th grader gets out of school at 3:15. Mondays and Fridays he has soccer from 5:30-6:30. Tuesdays and Thursdays he has Cross Fit from 3:30-4:30. Wednesday he has Hebrew School from 4-6. He averages about 30-60 minutes of home work a night. He loves his activities minus Hebrew school - lol) and has no issues getting homework done. He is always asleep by 9 pm and I wake him at 6:30 am if he hasn't woken on his own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My 5th grader gets out of school at 3:15. Mondays and Fridays he has soccer from 5:30-6:30. Tuesdays and Thursdays he has Cross Fit from 3:30-4:30. Wednesday he has Hebrew School from 4-6. He averages about 30-60 minutes of home work a night. He loves his activities minus Hebrew school - lol) and has no issues getting homework done. He is always asleep by 9 pm and I wake him at 6:30 am if he hasn't woken on his own.

This is great but clearly your son is a go-go-go type of personality to handle this schedule. I actually walked through your son's schedule in my mind b/c I would love for my kid to have a schedule like this - factoring in travel time to get home from school, to/from soccer/crossfit, your son basically gets home from school to snack to HW to soccer to dinner to HW to shower/bed. I also have the kind of personality that thrives on constant activity and busyness but my son does not, he is more like OP's and needs downtime/transition time. I think a lot of a kid's after school schedule depends on that fact - do they thrive constantly moving from thing to thing to thing, or do they need to recharge after school/between activities. Neither is better than the other, but I think when planning one's schedule that should be taken into account or else the person will be overstressed, in one extreme, or bored, in the other.

[Anonymous]

Oh, and where does your son do crossfit? So cool.