Diwali falls on 8 November this year, and for most families the holiday stretches well beyond the day itself. Gujarat board schools are allotted around three weeks of Diwali vacation in the state calendar, and CBSE and ICSE schools usually give a shorter break, so check your school's circular before planning anything.
Either way, the question in most houses is the same. Should the child study during the break, and how much without wrecking the holiday?
Start with what the break actually costs
Three weeks of no contact with a subject does real damage to recently taught chapters, which are exactly the ones that have not been revised enough times yet. The chapters from June are usually safe, because they have been seen repeatedly. The ones from the last month are fragile.
That is the whole problem, and it is a small one. It does not need two hours a day. It needs contact.
The plan: thirty minutes, five days a week
That is it for Classes 1 to 10. Half an hour, five days out of seven, with the festival days themselves completely free.
What to do in those thirty minutes:
- Twenty minutes on an old chapter. One chapter per day, oldest weak ones first, closed-book recall rather than re-reading.
- Ten minutes on sums or writing practice for whichever subject is weakest, usually Maths or a language.
No new chapters. No getting ahead. The break is for consolidation, and trying to pre-learn December's syllabus in November is how a holiday plan collapses by day four.
Thirty minutes a day for fifteen days is enough to hold a term in place. Two hours a day for three days is not.
Pick the chapters before the holiday starts
Do this now, while school is still on, because nobody wants to make decisions on day one of a holiday.
List every chapter taught since June that your child would struggle with if tested tomorrow. The half-yearly papers make this easy if you sorted the mistakes, and if you have a chapter map the weak rows are already marked.
Aim for ten to fifteen chapters across all subjects. One per day, done properly, clears the backlog that would otherwise follow your child into the final term.
Protect three days completely
Diwali, the day before, and the day after. No studying, no reminders, no "just ten minutes". A plan with genuinely free days in it is far more likely to survive, and a child who has had a real holiday starts the rest of the break in a better mood.
The same applies to any family travel. Days on a train are not study days, and pretending otherwise just builds guilt into the holiday.
Keep the time slot, shorten the session
School holidays break routines because the anchors disappear: no school bus, no fixed dinner, no homework.
So pick one anchor that still exists during the holiday and attach the thirty minutes to it. After breakfast is the most reliable, because mornings are the least negotiable part of a holiday day and evenings during Diwali belong to everyone else. Same time, every day, short enough that nobody argues about it. That is the same principle that makes a routine survive busy weeks.
The last three days of the break
Reserve them for a different job: getting ready to restart.
- Day one: gather and check. Notebooks, missing work, anything the school asked for.
- Day two: a quick pass over the two chapters the class is likely to continue from.
- Day three: reset the routine. Normal sleep time, normal wake time, bags packed.
That last one matters more than any revision. The usual post-Diwali slump is mostly a sleep problem, not an academic one, and it costs most children the first week back.
For Class 10 and 12
Slightly more, but not dramatically more. An hour a day, five days a week, with the same free days protected.
For Class 10 in particular the arithmetic is uncomfortable: the first board phase is in February, which is about twelve weeks after the break ends. A holiday spent entirely idle means January gets spent re-learning instead of revising, which is exactly the trap to avoid this year.
What to tell your child
Agree the plan before the holiday starts, not on the first morning. Thirty minutes a day, these days are completely free, and when the thirty minutes are done nobody mentions studying for the rest of the day.
That last clause is the part children actually negotiate for, and it is worth giving. A holiday where studying is finished by ten in the morning feels like a holiday. One where it hangs over the whole day feels like school with worse food.