Generally, my son (who is 1st grade) does seatwork for no more than 30-45 minutes (reading, math, handwriting, lang arts). He participates in science with his older sisters and sometimes history. He's also working thru a 1st grade Abeka history reader. He also reads to me before bed probably 3-4 nights per week (mostly Bob Books that are completely review but are short and sweet ) My older girls are 3rd and 5th grade. They work longer. It varies with the day and subjects. Sometimes it's 2 hours, sometimes it's 6 (including lunch)....most of the time, it's 3-4....plus personal reading. I saw your other post about a rough day. Last year, we did my son's K year in short bursts of 10-15 mins with breaks in between. Our year went well and he's progressed further than I had expected. This year, he's chosen to work in a more "focused" way so that he can get it done and move onto "computer time, tv time, etc". This was his decision. I had anticipated a similar schedule as last year but so far, so good on the "focused" schedule. We'll play it by ear. Just remember, homeschooling is a marathon, not a sprint (advice given to me before we started). Rhonda C.
I go over the top, so I am probably the longest, WE school normally from 830 to 10 take a 30 min break, then another break at noon to one pm. Then we go for another hour or so depending on the amount of work that got done. I have 6th and 11th graders though. When I had younger grades we did k- half day max, which included half hour of out door or free play, and fifteen to thirty minute class time of Singing songs, counting games, writing numbers, coloring pictures etc, and reading stories with me! 1st to 2nd grades we finished by 1 pm, which meant if we stopped for lunch we didnt do any school after that because I had them do quiet reading time or watch a movie while I worked with older ones..
Well we are doing kinder and our school day (including play time, and arts and crafts) usually takes about 1 1/2 hours before lunch and 1/2 to 1 hour after depending on how involved our art projects are! But we've also had days where we only do 1/2 -1 hour of school as well.
We work for 4 days a week, starting at 9 and going to 2. This includes breaks (1/2 hour snack break and 45 minute lunch break), reading time (me reading to them), projects, etc. So actual work time would be 3.5 hours a day for 4 days. DD is 2nd grade. DD2 joins in when she wants to!
We have to get a min of 990 hrs for high school with sd. We usually spend about 2-3 hrs a day going over stuff and then she spends about 5 or so more hours doing her work (she stalls alot while doing it). When I start with dd next year I plan on doing about 4 hours a day plus co-op on Fridays.
I average 4-6 hours per day. I am required to have a minimum of 3 hours a day, for 170-180 days because I belong to a private Christian umbrella school. Some of the time spent in school is so fun that my son doesn't even really consider it school, like swimming for PE and doing Origami for art and singing praise & worship songs for Music class. Today was a long, bad day. For some reason my son decided to totally flake out on me and it was a real struggle to get anything done. He's still not completely done, but it got to the point where I finally said, just go, get out of the house, play with your friends until 8pm, then come home for dinner and a bath and then instead of his computer/video game time he gets to finish the work he should have had done very easily, but just wouldn't stay on task.
Let's see.... Probably a good three hours in the morning, and then again in the afternoon another 2-3. But part of me feels that, since they are ALWAYS learning, they are ALWAYS in school. Example: My girls are cooking one evening a week, so I can say Rachael was at school this evening for an extra hour!
We're supposed to do 4.5 hours a day (who came up with that number, anyway???) for 180 days a year. We usually average somewhere around that. It definitely takes DS1 that long to do all he has to do in a day. It does NOT take that long for my first grader...he maybe spends two hours total on bookwork. But the state allows us to count things such as reading, exercising, educational tv, music, etc. as schooltime...so it all equals out for him.
My 6 year old son does maybe 15 minutes a day of seatwork but even then many days go by without it. My 10 year old daughter (who was unschooled until 8) does about 2 - 1/2 hours in the morning and another hour in the afternoon. That doesn't count read alouds and videos.
re the numbers really! who comes up with them? WE had started out with having to have an hour for the main classes , math and English, then half hour to 45 mins for science and social studies ( H?G) and whatever after that was half hour increments... but I have adapted I put down on my hourly schedule the times but we usually have lots of free time with the occasional problem days where we use it up and then some! Lol
We aren't required to do a certain amount of hours in my state (or days for that matter), so dd does work until she's done. I decide what needs to be done for each subject each day & she works until she gets it all done. If she puts in effort & really works, it could be done by luch time. But, there are days where she's working right up until bedtime, because she stared at a wall for 2 hrs instead of doing Math or fought with me for an hour before she started Science. Yesterday, she spent at least 3 hours looking up vocab words in a dictionary, not because she had that many words but because she didn't want to do it & kept trying to tell me the words weren't there.
We don't have to worry about a certain number of hours or days here and I always thought it was a weird idea anyway. I mean, coulnd't I just count or reading time as part of that? Time spent watching a Discovery Channel special? The suppertime discussion of the book my daughter was reading? I'd probably end up with a HUGE numbers of hours.
This probably isn't answering your question exactly, but I am required by my state law to instruct for 875 hours per school year in the subjects of reading, language arts, math, science, social studies and health. I believe we are required to use a sequentially progressive curriculum. It is recommended that we keep attendance/daily log/records of what we do just in case we would ever need it, but no one checks. We have no required testing or sending in of records and such. The only thing we have to do is send in a form each year that states that we are following the law, how many children we are home educating, what school district we live in and a parent/guardian signature. Some homeschooling parents in my area interpret our laws differently. We all seem to count hours in a different way. For instance the lady I talked to yesterday counts lunch, but not bedtime reading. I would count bedtime reading and only lunch if we talked about the nutrition and food groups (health). In our law it states that we can hire tutors or have our children learn from parents/guardians, but I thought I read in the law somewhere that we are not suppose to count activities/classes that are open to more than one family. Some homeschooling parents I overheard yesterday at our co-op registration said that they count our co-op classes. I didn't think that I was suppose to count educational programs at the library either, but maybe I should start counting those things, so I can get all the hours in for my 7 y.o.
We have to have 1000 hours of instruction which equals about 5.55555 etc hours per day. I tend to do more than that each day, one to be sure I get all of the hours I need and two, because I cant seem to get it done any sooner.
We cover as much time as we need to complete our lessons. Sometimes it is a few hours and sometimes more.
If I counted swimming as PE and educational TV and free reading, my son would look like all he ever does is school.
I, personally, would count co-op and library enrichment if I had to report hours. Co-op is learning in a group setting (like the ps down the street) and the ps kids also go the library (to get books, storytime, etc). Rhonda
We are not required to keep records on hours of instruction. Sometimes we take 2 hours and other days 2 1/2 - 3 hours. It depends on what is covered that day (generally we take longer on the days we have Science and Social Studies).
3yo-about 1 hour, 4yo-about 1.5 hours and my 8yo-about 5 hours. I could get it down to 3 hours for my 8yo but I added science and she can take FOREVER on some stuff. We are doing notebooking this year and that takes more time. Also new thing is that if her work is sloppy I make her redo it and that will take longer time because she don't want to do it. Yesterday is took us 6 hours to do all the work. I even have my dad watch my younger two yesterday.
