If you're thinking about homeschooling and are wondering how long does homeschooling take each day, the answer might not be as cut and dry as you would think.
How long Does Homeschooling Take Each Day:
The time we dedicate to homeschooling each day varies on our schedule, what subjects Kyle is working on that day, and what specific assignments he has for those subjects. On average, I would say that it takes us about four hours to get through all of our schoolwork each day, but there are a lot of factors that go into the overall timeframe.How Long are Formal Lessons:
As far as the hands-on parenting aspect involved in homeschooling and teaching, I'm involved in a very small portion of those four hours. We set up our homeschool room to have a written schedule for Kyle each day. We do not set a time limit or timeframe that he has to be doing each thing, just an order in which his work is to be accomplished.We have his independent work front-loaded in the morning, and by the afternoon when he needs help with language arts and history I hop into the situation.
For language arts, I recite just a few sentences that he writes, and then I correct them and he works on spelling errors. Then most days he finishes the rest of language arts on his own. The only exception to this is if he has to write an essay, something that is a little difficult for him, then I'm more hands-on in helping him through that as well. Maybe 20 minutes total for language arts.
For history a lot of the work is me reading aloud to Kyle and us looking at maps and things together. This is more hands-on for us, and it usually takes me about 30 minutes to work through history with him, we do history 2 times per week.
Science is by far the most hands-on activity that we do. We work on science twice a week, and we usually have an experiment for every lesson. For this, I need to be a lot more hands-on to help with the steps, but I would assume we spend roughly forty minutes on science with him twice per week.
This means that I'm spending about one hour hands-on with Kyle each day for homeschool, five days per week. So it's five hours of my time in the entire week.
Why I Don't Set Time Limits for Homeschool:
I don't set time limits for homeschooling because I want Kyle to feel empowered to get his work done at his speed. If he wants to be super focused and get everything done in two hours so he can do what he wants the rest of the day, more power to him. If he wants to take his time and it takes the entire school day for him to get his work done, I want him to recognize that and what it feels like to procrastinate versus not procrastinating.Learning to be Flexible:
I also feel like for me, I need to work on being flexible and patient. Knowing that homeschooling and Kyle's needs can vary greatly from one day to the next helps me to be patient and work on skills that I need to improve upon. I think homeschooling is teaching me that I don't need to know what's going to happen from one day to the next, that I can go with the flow, and that the consequences are actually fairly minimal, even though my uptight self would like to think otherwise.
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