Rabbit trail - It has been a beautiful summer day today. Sunny warm days are a treat here in the PNW. This spring has been a long one with lots of gray wet days.
The sunshine has prompted me to rethink the amount of hours I'm willing to keep my kids indoors. When there are only a few good months out of the year it seems ridiculous to keep them inside for several hours of school. I started to wonder how many hours of school we need? This sent me on a rabbit trail trying to find out how many hours of instructional time are required in various public schools and home schools. It varies widely. Thailand reports 1200 hours per year while some states require approximately 775 hours. Many states don't require homeschoolers to track days or hours (our state falls in this category).
While searching for this type of information I actually came across a homeschool book, Homeschool Odyssey, where the dad reports that they only required an hour a day with arithmetic, grammar, and spelling. What?! An hour? Honestly, I believe my kids need more than that. I've skimmed the first third of the book and it seems like their children attended public/private school here and there.
Then, there are the Swann's. Their kids homeschooled year around from 8:30-11:30am. None of my kids are independent, so I don't think that would work here. It would be great, but...
I guess I feel pressured to spend more time on academics because my younger two are already "behind" their age mates (the youngest significantly so). I hate playing catchup.
I've spent the afternoon trying to whittle down 13yo's subjects into a reasonable amount of time for the summer. She needs the daily review, but she also needs to hang with her neighborhood friends...I think. Shall we say 1 1/2 - 2 hours of school a day?
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