How much time each day/ how many days in the year for homeschooling?

[alonemany]

Hello,

any advice/ experience would be welcome.

I'm in the early stages of considering home schooling my DS from next school year- his last of primary, with a plan to also homeschool for secondary. He has Dyslexia and is stressed and exhausted by school but responds better one to one. My own work is flexible and I'm trying to work out how much time I will need for supporting DS each day and to what extent home schooling tends to follow the "school year". I think I must be so institutionalised from my own schooling and his to date that I'm struggling to think outside the box of the normal school calendar.

I'm just wondering how many hours each day realistically would he need to spend on learning? From my research so far, this seems to be less than a traditional school day? Do people stick to the general school year model with a summer break etc or have people found other ways to do this?

Many thanks in advance.

Home education simply needs to be full time, efficient and suitable to age and ability.

Some people do no formal education at all. But still fulfil the above criteria.

For us we followed school terms roughly as mine got older. Initially because it worked well when one chose to go to school. In the later years my youngest had done group classes that have followed school terms so we are naturally in the rhythm. We take shorter days and less of them. 4 days a week usually, plus a day allocated to home ed groups/trips every week. Usually did at least one more half day with home ed friends/activity/trip a week, often more. Also usually took all of Dec off and downed tools for summer some point in June. Home ed is just more efficient.
It's scheduling the social aspect, which doesn't come naturally to either of us, that I felt the need to do as we had to work on that.

We do entirely informal learning, so no "lessons", though I have occasionally done lessons when my kids requested it. For example, one of my kids wanted us to sit down together to work through a reading scheme.

So for me, the question of how much time I devote to my children's home education would be the same as how much time I devote to parenting them. That would involve not just "educational stuff" such as taking them to the library and visiting museums, but also taking them out to see friends, helping them to do what they want to do at home, and generally being together so they won't be bored and lonely.

How much of your time and attention do you feel that your son needs during the school holidays? That is how much I would aim to be available while home educating. Depending on whether you have friends or family available and whether you want to pay people to help out, you might be able to delegate some of it. For example, one of my kids was super sociable and used to have frequent all-day playdates. Even when it was my turn to host, this freed up a lot of time for me as the kids were so busy playing. I also used childminders for a while. They were home educators too, and used to take my child to the home ed groups and for days out.

And then my own child worked as a teenaged babysitter, taking a couple of younger home ed children to the park, playing games with them at home, and taking them by bus to their drama class while their mum worked.

So it all depends what you feel your child needs, socially as well as academically. Obviously you can't just sit him down to do lessons at set times and then expect him to play by himself at home all the rest of the time. Few children would be happy in that scenario.

We do a couple of formal lessons a week, mainly the maths and English they would not encounter in daily life as a child but need to know for when they are older. - but this is most but by no means every week and the rest of the time we are very informal and just go to groups and events. We tend to stay home more and do more structured learning during school holidays as most groups close and everywhere is so crowded it is less enjoyable to go out. But this would still only amount to a couple of hours a couple of times a week.

But our children are learning 24/7/365 so we just go with the flow - we had two months last spring where we did no formal learning at all.

In essence we try and get away from the idea that learning is something done formally or sitting down etc - we stress that learning is part of everyday life and everything we do.

Our children are just turned 7 & 13.

I’m not home educating now but we did 2-4 formal hours a day, 4 days a week. We mostly followed school terms except for the summer when we’d often keep a bit of routine. It was roughly 1-2 hours in the morning of Literacy and Maths then another 1-2 in the afternoon of our project activity which encompassed all the other subjects. Around that they played, went outside, went swimming etc. One morning a week they did a religious based group and one day we would go on a longer adventure to a museum or art gallery in winter or to a large park in the summer.

I’m a qualified teacher and my children definitely made at least expected progress on that basis as they got dedicated attention even with lots more play and freedom.

I found facillitating the social side hard work and ultimately that’s why we decided to send them to school. But if they ever decide to leave school again (they are happy at the moment) I’d probably just book them into after school club a few afternoons/evenings a week for the social side (for some reason this never occurred to me at the time!).

We do some form of learning everday. Nothing longer than 1hr (depends on how long the boy to do the task) and we do that nearly every day of the yr. Some days we don't, like if we are on holiday (although we read books or gl to museums etc, so we do do some learning even then), or on birthdays, Christmas. But that's the magic of home ed, everything you do is a learning experience, eating some lovehearts on a long car journey and the child reads the little phrases, it's practicing reading! Just because it's not a worksheet or a biff and chip book, doesn't mean it's not a valuable learning moment.

My two sons (now in their 30s) were home educated, they did NO formal lessons at all. They were autonomous and learned from daily
life, going out to interesting places, meeting up with other HE families, having friends round and going to friends’ places etc etc. The social side is very important in my opinion.
At 16 they went to college into re-sit classes (classes for students who failed their GCSEs first time round) so they took one year to complete any GCSEs they required to get into higher education (eldest did A levels, youngest did one year of A Levels then switched to a HND)
Eldest went into employment at 18 and didn’t want to go to Uni, youngest did a Bio-medical Science degree while also running his own software business and was recruited immediately after graduating by a high profile software business and he worked in several places round the world then moved to another software company (a fintech company) to head up one of their departments, he now works based in England and also in NY.
My eldest worked for various companies and moved down south and he makes TV/film props and models.
Eldest is diagnosed ASD and youngest is probably on the spectrum too (maths genius from age 3) I am also autistic. I honestly believe school would have failed them as their abilities would not have been catered for. I didn’t want them hot-housed and I could see they were learning far far more than they would have at school.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s easier just to let them educate themselves. It’s not! You can’t just stay home and expect them to learn anything stuck in the same four walls every day, and the internet is no substitute for the real world. You have to make a huge effort to take them to places and to meet other people.
They also had a lot of school-going friends too.
With regard to the legality, it’s well within the law to allow your children to educate themselves. The Law states you must “cause them to receive” an education, it doesn’t say you or anyone else has to teach them.