How long should I spend on homeschooling?

[letsjog]

My DS is 5 so reception. He was getting extra support as behind a bit with writing in particular / fine motor skills and a little with speech.
The teacher was making a plan to try and get him up to speed by year 1 but that's obviously now gone to pot.

We are getting weekly packs from school, nothing crazy, same for the whole class. I'd like to help him get up to speed with everything so he starts year 1 at an even keel with his peers.
Question - how long should we realistically spend a day on structured homeschooling?

I also have a 2.5yr old and we will be doing outdoor play as we are lucky to have a garden and I will get them to help me make lunches/bake and we've got a craft pack coming so will be doing lots of art. We painted some rocks yesterday and DS did dot to dot, some writing and reading and play dough independently.
He also watched lots of TV and played with his normal toys most of the day 😂

I want to make it a bit more structured to actually purposefully work on improving the things he's behind on but I don't want to put him off by overdoing it.
Any tips/advice would be really welcome.

I’m a homeschooling mum and ex primary teacher and I agree with a lot of the above. Short focussed sessions. You can get through what they do in an hour at school at that age in 15-20 minutes. Maybe even less. My youngest is 7 and we can do his ‘lessons’ in that time. If I were you I’d have the mornings with a bit of structure and then be creative and have fun in the afternoon.
The academic stuff is valuable to keep them ticking over but the real learning that can be done at home is limitless. The gardening, the baking, the art, the crafts, construction, the practical life skills, chores, the opportunities are endless. Follow your child’s interests. Take this opportunity to foster a love of learning of all types.

For a 5 year old I'd aim for an hour spread out during the day .

My daughter is 4.5 and we make sure we spend between 8-9:30am doing school work that needs proper focus (phonics, writing and maths). Realistically she lasts about an hour and an hour is more than enough time to revise. Anything arty or sporty is just done as and when we get bored in the day!

There was an excellent post on facebook from a HT who said not to think of it as homeschooling, it's just doing some school at home and not to stress too much, just do what you can.

Don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but my daughter is being assessed for autism and has missed a lot of school due to sleep problems, but I’ve found her reading, writing and speech improved dramatically when I gave her a tablet to use with suitable apps (not just learning apps but children’s games too!)

We have a white board with a timetable of what we’re doing everyday on it. My son loves routine so this may not work for others. We do writing and spellings for about an hour but with drawing as well, so we might write out a mnemonic and the draw a picture and colour it. Then we have a break outside for half an hour with a snack. Then we watch a film and write a review about it after. Then it’s lunch outside. Then reading for him for 15 minutes then I read to him. Then 30 mins of maths, we were sent home with a text book but ttrocks is fab too. Then art for an hour. For writing we’ve done things like written out a recipe and then made it. We’ll science too in that way.

If you want to improve his fine motor skills here is something I did years ago with reception age children with similar difficulties. I got them to stand in a circle and write a letter from the alphabet with their fingers on the back of the child in front of them. Of course you can't do that with one child, but you can use it as a game. Using their fingers helps to fix it in their minds because fingers have a direct connection with the brain.
So forget pens and pencils for a while. Get him to write large letters from the alphabet on your back with his fingers. You have to guess what the letters are. Getting him to write the letters of the alphabet in a tray of flour - again with his fingers.
Only do this for a few minutes at a time or he'll get bored. But you can intersperse this activity with jigsaw etc.

Our is year one, we’re doing an hour maximum. But we’ve both got things to do plus an extra child. If I had all the time in the world I wouldn’t exceed 3 hours really, any more than that would be ridiculous for such a young child.

I feel for you OP! I have 2 DC - 10 and 5. We got given a load of maths problems and a blank book and that's it. They have more math stuff to do online via the school but that's it!
How much math can they do?!

I've set half an hour or 2 pages of math in the morning.
Free play.
Hour in the garden for fresh air.
Each DC picked something that interested them and we have been researching and finding out about things. A little writing too.
We also do half hour of reading a day.

Could you maybe sit and discuss your childs favourite book?
What's it called? Why is it your favourite? What's the characters name?
Get him practicing his name?
Phonics maybe?

Is there any way you can email his teacher for advice??

Good luck

X

Everything you are doing sounds lovely and I think that at that age the focus should be on play. My DD at around the same age as your DS (she was a little older) was also behind with reading/ writing/ fine motor skills. When she was a similar age to your DS I made a big effort to help her with her reading, when I realised that she was really struggling to keep up at school. This post might go on a bit, but I hope I can help a bit by telling you what I did.
Firstly, with her reading, I took her right back to the earliest reading books - the types with just one or two words on the page. Once I was sure she was really confident with them I moved on through the books from there, just focusing on building up difficulty really slowly. I didn’t take her past her comfort level. As they were books that were so far easier than what they'd been trying to get her to read at school she felt very confident with them and it made her feel good about reading, more competent.
At the same time, I covered a wall in our house with the first 50 sight words - the ones they are meant to be able to know just by looking at them. I printed them all out individually, and we cut them out and stuck them on the wall. I put cushions on the floor in front of the wall and every day they would sit on the cushions and we would have a little session playing schools, when I pretended to be a really fun teacher (completely out of character) or play at being a really strict Miss Trunchbull type teacher, and I would give prizes for being able to tell me the words I pointed at - for example, I’d give her a sweet if she got 5 in a row. I would teach about 5 words at a time and I started with the easy ones - I, a, dog etc - I would say them over and over and get them to say them and give them a sweet if they got it right. I always kept it easy and fun, but It was amazing how quickly, doing that for 15 minutes everyday. Each day I would start with the words they already knew, so they felt really confident and I built it up each day. My younger one joined in too and she learnt the words as well. I tried to make it really fun, quick, easy and lots of prizes. They thought it was great fun because of the sweets and praise.
My DD made progress with her reading from learning all the sight words (which I think was the most important thing) and the next thing I did was this technique I heard about, which was reading aloud at the same time as your child. So when she had a book to read we would both read it aloud together - speaking at the same time. She liked this - she would just skip words she didn’t know (but hear me saying the word) but join in on all the words she knew. I would try to read at a fairly slow but regular pace so she could keep up. This helped her build up confidence too.
This was a v long post! It sounds, reading back what I’ve written, like I went a bit overboard - but it only took about half an hour a day in total and it really did help. And it was fun too.
I think your focus on play and letting him enjoy this time is the right way to go. Everything I did to help my DD at that age, I tried to make it feel like fun and play.

Sorry if this has been mentioned already and hope you don't mind me bringing this up as a consideration but my ds has similar struggles with fine motor skills, writin, speech etc and has recently been diagnosed with dyspraxia.
I find that short activities a few times a day works much better than one big session. Cutting has worked wonders for his fine motor skills 🙂

Hi there was a teacher on FB saying to parents do not try home schooling your children as you can not create the same learning environment as schools can provide. Instead ensure they do lots of reading. Encourage them to read factual books about wildlife, culture and the environment
well as fiction story books. Older children can look through old school books and remember past learning subjects which could be handy for prep towards last years at school.