In addition to the confusion, there is an overwhelming feeling of responsibility that if you don't do everything right, your child will be ruined forever. What if you miss something, and one day send this poor young adult into the world who doesn't know the genres of literature or the latest in string theory!?
New parents just starting out will find there are a ton of different "methods" of homeschooling. I won't try to list them or go into a description of them. Just do a Google search and you'll come up with a list including Charlotte Mason, Classical, unschooling, unit studies, Montessori, Waldorf, correspondence school, and more. The main reason I'm not going to get into them because I don't know much about them. In the beginning, I started out reading about all these different methods and quickly became confused. I liked different parts of what I was reading, but nothing seemed exactly right for us. At that time The Big One was young enough that I decided I had time to figure it out and put reading about "the methods" aside to look into later. Once later came, however, I still wasn't interested, so we just started to do our own thing and never looked much into the lists of methods again.
When we began preschool with The Big One, which came not at any particular time or age but just as a natural progression of the teaching we were doing already, we did "school time" for just 30 minutes a day. We would do pages out of preschool workbooks, talk about things we saw outside, do arts and crafts, or spend time on www.starfall.com. We pretty much learned about whatever we felt like, for approximately 30 organized minutes. That was time aside from the normal things most parents do with their preschoolers like read, sing ABCS, and play. For example, if we saw ants outside we might try to catch them to look at, write "A-N-T" on the driveway in chalk, and cut paper circles to make ants with a head, abdomen, and thorax. That was preschool.
We did send him to a 6 week My First School camp, being a little nervous about him not having the "proper" preschool start. The teacher basically told us he was well ahead of where he should be and to not worry and keep doing what we were doing. Our pediatrician said the same and advised that if we weren't going to homeschool him, she would recommend a private Montessori program.
The next year, for kindergarten, we increased our time to an hour. We started a notebook where we would do simple math work, practice writing, and draw. We worked a lot more on reading and writing. I also included whatever "basics" I could think of, such as calendars, cardinal directions and map keys, what is a sentence, question words, basic level charts and graphs, and other things like that. I didn't necessarily think reading and writing were necessary skills yet, but I knew that having a start in them would make it easier for the coming years, and plus The Big One had an interest in them. I do think it's best to build off interests, if you can do so constructively.
Once we started first grade, we divided our time into subjects and started to spend roughly 3-4 hours per day on "school time". This remains the same now. How much time we spend depends on how attentive we all are being (yes, sometimes I am as much of the problem as the kids) and how interested we are in the subject. If we like a history subject, and there are a lot of books and videos available, we may spend longer on it. If it's boring, we'll learn what we need to know and move on. Sometimes there are extra crafts or activities we want to do, sometimes there aren't. This ends up meaning that some days we'll be finished in 2 and a half hours, and some days it seems we're working on school alllll daaaayyyy.
Also, we don't necessarily do 3-4 consecutive hours of work. We can start something in the morning and come back to it after going to the store. We can break for lunch, playtime, or socializing time when we need to.
As a parent, not all of the "school time" has to be spent completely devoted 100% to just The Big One and his work, either. For example, when he's doing math we will start the lesson together and then I will slowly back away while he finishes the practice problems on his own. I can start prepping dinner, work on something with The Little One, or check my email while he works. I mention all this just to give an idea of the time required to homeschool. People always ask me, "How do you have time for that?!" It doesn't require a lot.
Particular methods of homeschooling aside, how scheduled or un-scheduled you decide to be will largely depend on your personal style and that of your kids. I like to schedule and plan. The Big One even more so. It helps us to have a general guideline for what we should be doing.
This probably won't make sense to anyone else, but here's what our schedule looked like last year for 1st grade:
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | |
| Intro day – reading / videos | Reading – history topic | Science - info day | Reading – history notebook page | Science - experiment day | 60 min |
| Discussion and map page | Writing & word review | Writing & word review | Writing & word review | Spelling & vocab test, writing | 10-15 min |
| ID vocab & spelling words | First Language Lessons | First Language Lessons | First Language Lessons | Week wrap up | 15-20 min |
| Math | Math | Math | Math | Math | 30 min |
| PE | Art | PE | Music | PE | 20-30 min |
| Free read | Free read | Free read | Free read | Free read | 30 min |
I didn't do this completely on my own. I got a rough idea of how I wanted to structure my day from the book A Well Trained Mind, by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. The book is "a guide to classical education at home". I wouldn't say I follow the classical education method, because I don't exactly, but I get ideas from it and use the aspects that are logical to me as a guideline.
As from the book's website:
Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the
mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts,
systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle
grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school
years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is
called the trivium.
The backbone of what we do is history. In A Well Trained Mind, they've divided history into 4 chronological sections - ancients, middle ages, Renaissance, and modern. You go through the four sections on a grammar stage level, then start at the beginning and do it again at a logic stage level, and finally repeat it in a rhetoric stage level. We attempt to link topics in science, art, music, and even language arts, to what we are learning in history.
So for 1st grade history we covered the ancients. At the end of Kindergarten we had done the solar system, which flowed well into the birth of the Earth, geologic time, prehistory, dinosaurs, prehistoric man, etc. That left us pretty well set up to slide right into ancient history. I'm going to devote a whole post to each of our major subject areas, including the books and websites we use / have used, coming soon. With that, this will all (including my crazy charts) start to make a little more sense, I promise!
Basically, our schedule is history three days of the week and science two days of the week. We do some language arts, reading, and math every day. I haven't been organized about art and music, but have tried mainly looking at them from the stand point of the historical time we're studying. PE is running around outside, or gymnastics, karate, or sports camps. Health isn't even worth mentioning for 1st grade - teaching your child to brush their teeth, go to the doctor, eat healthy, and the like are daily activities in health.
When we started 1st grade, I made our weekly schedule and compiled a list of the main books we would be using. I somewhat reviewed the county curriculum for 1st grade, which was available online, and found that we were on track or ahead on most things. Because The Big One has a late birthday, the state required I register him as a Kindergartener, which set us even more "ahead" (I say this in quotations because I don't really think there is an ahead or behind. In the end the vast majority of people will end up as capable, functional adults no matter what, and even if not independently functional, we all have the same inherent capability for happiness.)
I organized five different colored binders - one for history, one for science, one for language arts, one for math, and one for PE/health/art/music. They have tabs of the different kind of work we do in each subject. We keep all our work filed in those binders, and date all of our pages. This made it really easy when lived in a state that required county reviews of work, and now it's just a habit.
Our schedule is not perfect. I'm sure some things will get missed. It is evolving. This year I started with changes so it looked more like this (colored coded and everything!):
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
| SOTW chapter + review questions and short narration (AB) | Internet videos, library books, KAMW review | Science - info day (BP & USE) | AB activity | Science - project day | 60 minutes |
| Map Page (AB mapwork) | UEWH pages + timeline page | narration page or animal profile page | websites (UEWH) | observation page or animal profile page drawing | 15-20 minutes |
| Character page | Comprehension quiz | Narration and copywork | Plot Page | Book report | 30-60 minutes |
| FLL | FLL | FLL | 15 minutes | ||
| Free Read | Free Read | Free Read | Free Read | Free Read | 30 minutes |
| Math | Math | Math | Math | Math | 30 minutes |
| PE | Art | Music | PE | Health (BPJ section) | 30-60 minutes |
(Again, I will be posting by subjects and explaining what all this means in the upcoming weeks.)
Next year I will make more changes. But the "method" is not especially stressful to me anymore. I've been around enough homeschoolers who are taught in so many different ways, and they are all still wonderful, bright kids, just like their regular-schooled counterparts. It doesn't seem to matter what the parents do, as long as they are doing something. Part of why many families choose homeschooling is wanting to encourage love of learning and inquisitiveness, which can oftentimes be squelched (inadvertently I'm sure) by school. In this open setting, it is important to be trusting. Trusting in your child that they will learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it, and trusting in yourself that you will know what to teach when you need to teach it. This means changing and adapting when methods don't work. With that being said, while this (above) is the current method to my madness, it's not the only way and probably won't even be my only way.
I'm also sure my children will be "ruined" no matter what I do or don't do, so all I can ask of myself is to give it my best shot.
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