Homeschooling Time

One of the biggest worries families seem to have approaching homeschooling is the time factor. The time it will take away from the day, the time invested, the time taken away from the primary teacher planning and grading and teaching.

Stop thinking schoolish thoughts for a minute. Institutional teachers plan curriculum and structure simply because of legal requirements and crowd management issues. Sure, homeschooling can look like that, but that doesn't mean that it has to. Homeschooling looks different through many eyes but also in many homes.

Here's what homeschooling looks like for us. Lil'Bug LOVES computer games. She needs help sometimes, so I put the computer for her in my bedroom and I fold laundry while she plays. Her favourite game involves pages that quite frankly look like school worksheets. I loathe busy work, but she enjoys them so she plays and learns. She whipped through the entire K-1 program in about a week and now she is repeating the program by her own choice. I have the next and a few others, but she wants to repeat. So I fold and they play.

Lil'Bug does farm chores and learns hands on about animals and their needs. She comes in and washes up. We talk about hygiene sometimes. Then she helps me with dishes and making our food. When we grocery shop we plan and talk about budget and I talk her through it as we walk the rows. I explain my choices and let her make some of her own. We talk about taxes and fees. She spots the produce manager and greets him asking, "What's fresh and in season today?" or, "What country is that watermelon from?" or, "Please could you help me reach the Brussel sprouts, they are my favourite!" He says I have her well trained and I respond that it is simply and wonderfully her.

We watch movies together. We sing together. We dance while cleaning up. We count things for fun. She likes doing workbooks in the long car rides to and from town. We play with friends. She goes to art and music classes once a week. Sunday school at church. We talk about the lessons. We practice. We pray.

The girls have free access to art supplies, some of the mediums are quality some are crayola. Lil'Bug loves painting with gouche and she also loves attending an art class in town.

When the weather warms up we will spend time in the garden, planting and tending. Lil'Bug has always helped with these tasks. Blueberry does too, as much as a baby can! They both help harvest and eat. Washing vegetables and fruits are fun!

I don't worry about teaching my then 4 now 5 year old to read. I read to her. We look at signs. We talk about words and letters. Some classical schooling methods don't worry about reading and fine math skills until 8-9 years old. If I change my mind about unschooling, I can always revert to Charlotte Mason or Waldorf. LOL. That's a little bit of unschooling humor there. We read a lot. Because we read a lot, Lil'Bug has learned to read early. She hid this from us though, she some how got the idea in her head that she would have to read to herself when she learned and would lose bedtime reading with us. Silly, but, to her, a real concern. She's over that now.

Life is learning. I used to catalog our day and match the activities to schoolish concepts, but I don't do that anymore. It can be helpful for someone who is new to homeschooling, or for filling out the legal forms required by our state. The problem is when school think invades your learning and there is no other way. The beauty of homeschooling is the freedom that we experience, not additional restraint.

Our days are free to explore. If I have more work to do one day, I do it. If we spend all day watching NG videos on penguins, we do it even if laundry piles up. If we burn dinner, we eat out or make a snack plate or eat leftovers. It's all fine. To an outsider it may look like we have no structure, but that is an illusion. We do have a pattern to our day, our week, our months. All humans do naturally as dictated by our sleep wake and season cycles. When we are at home, we move through our days naturally, sleeping when we are tired (ok, not me but the kids do) and eating when hungry. We go to town once or twice a week. We visit the Amish farm down the road once every other week. There is pattern, but it is not dictated by scheduled bathroom breaks or bells that ring and tell us we have to stop doing math. Sometimes the day gets away from us, but we just become skilled at bending time. We make time for things that matter to us, make time for things that need to be done too.

So I spent an hour scanning through pictures to find good ones to illustrate what our homeschool looks like. Then it dawned on me! That's what this entire blog is. Our life. Just scroll through the past 2 years and that's it. Life.