The short answer
Winter costs more progress than the summer holidays, because nobody plans for it. The slot a family chose in September is now in the dark, the child is tired an hour earlier, and the lesson slips a day at a time. Move the hour before you change anything else, and treat the colds as a reason to shorten a lesson rather than cancel it.
Why winter is the harder term
Families brace for the summer holidays and plan around them. Nobody braces for November. The clocks go back, it is dark before the lesson, the child comes home flatter than they did in September, and the half hour that worked perfectly well two months ago starts being postponed.
Nothing announces itself. A lesson moves on Monday, another is skipped on Thursday, and by the middle of December a family who was doing four a week is doing one.
The four things that actually work
Move the hour, not the plan
A child who was fine at six in September is often finished by six in November. Pull the lesson earlier, straight after school with something to eat first.
Protect the weekend mornings
Winter weekends are the easiest slots of the year to keep. A Saturday morning lesson is rarely the thing a family cancels.
Shorten rather than skip
A fifteen-minute lesson on a bad evening keeps the habit alive. A skipped one costs the next one too, because the child spends it remembering.
Fix the corner
A warm, lit corner with the screen facing into the room. In summer any table does; in winter the cold corner is the one nobody sits in.
Colds, and what to do about them
A child with a sore throat should not be reading aloud for half an hour, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But a lesson does not have to be a reading lesson: a teacher can spend it on listening, on the meaning of what is being memorised, or on the rules the child has been getting wrong, and the week stays intact.
Tell the teacher in the family group what kind of day it is, before the lesson rather than after it starts. That one message is the difference between a quiet half hour and a wasted one.
The school holidays at the end of it
- Decide the holiday plan in the last week of term, not in the first week of the holiday. A plan made after the routine has already stopped almost never starts.
- Keep the same number of days and move the hour later. Children who are off school read better at eleven in the morning than at eight at night.
- Pick one small thing to finish over the break -- a surah, a section of the Qaida. A child who has finished something comes back in January willing.