Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments What does your homeschooling look like?

I could use some help. Can you share how long you spend a day on homeschooling. DD is 6 and right now we do about 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours a day, but it is starting to feel like not enough time to cover everything at the level she is working on. I know a lot of homeschooling families of normal development kids only do a few hours a day in early elementary school....and I want dd to have lots of time to play, but now here academics is that of upper elementary and early middle school, so to get them all done we would need to spend more time, which makes since, but she is still 6, so do I keep the time the same, and drop extras like history etc, or expand the time, or try something totally different. I just am not feeling like we have enough time but am not sure if I want her to have to not have as much time to play and be creative. Thoughts? How does it work in your home?

What does your daily schedule look like now? Is your daughter happy with the amount of time you spend on each subject or is she always left wanting more? One thing you could do is try to integrate language arts and writing with history and science- then you wouldn't have to increase the time you spend but wouldn't have to dump any "extras".

Thanks W'sMAma. Right now, we start with spelling, then do grammar and vocab, then math, and alternate science and history. Reading is combined with science and history and then lots of free read times or books assigned to the history period. DD reads all the time, so we don't really cover that. I would like to add a foreign language and typing. DD has been asking to learn french....and she wants to start learning cursive. I guess we do need to move into a little long periods of time. I mean she would be in first next year and our school goes from 8:00-2:45. So she would still be getting more time to play and no homework. LOL. I guess I am just not sure how to schedual it all and transition her to more time doing things. She wants more time at the moment of doing it, we end up sometimes doing more grammar pages which she loves or more math work, and then we don't have time for other things.

For us (ds5), it looks like three times a week, maybe an hour a day. And that is just math and handwriting. Everything else he just absorbs through tons of reading- which if you count reading time, would up it to 3-4 hours a day. It is not what I had envisioned our schedule looking like...but for now it is what works.
If you plan to work through the summer, you don't need to worry so much about fitting all the interests in.

Personally, at this age I think I'd make history just a matter of fun readings...but not a specific study.

One way to look at it is that you really have all the time in the world--if she is years ahead, why not take detours, put math and other basics on hold while you do a history excursion, or whatever you don't have time for. Not going years ahead in math won't hurt. I can't see that more than three hours of essentially one on one time is needed for hg+ kids, especially at six.

But take this all with a grain of salt, as I'm really still struggling to find out how to do this too!!

Good luck!

Thanks phey. Trying to figure all this out is tough. So much on homeschooling is written not for hg+ kids, so it is hard to figure this out. Maybe one day we will huh? LOL.

We find it is inefficient (and very distracting) to switch between so many subjects in one day. Instead we'll usually do one or two weeks worth of lessons on just one subject on any given day. We don't follow any kind of schedule at all, but it all gets covered in the end.

This is rather what we did, too. DD also needed no specific instruction on some things-- spelling, for example, and grammar (up through middle school, she watched a few SchoolHouse Rock videos and we called it a day).

So our homeschooling curriculum at this age (5-6) was highly eclectic. Math was three or four times a week, usually.

My list for her was a daily thing, and on it, I included everything that I considered "school" work for the day.

A typical day included:

1. Math
2. a workbook selection-- some days it was handwriting, some days another workbook (Spanish, US History, Science topics, etc.)
3. reading-- assigned short non-fiction books, usually 35-50 pages, so maybe 2 books or three depending upon the topic(s).

4. other-- physical activities, games, 'box' studies with the current topic box (basically a "center" but for my homeschooler)-- one was "paper" another time it was "fairy tales" or "magnets."

We, too, didn't really switch between different subjects. DD always happily engaged in free reading, so we used to that to our advantage-- a LOT-- in our homeschooling. She read hundreds of pages a month. I think that the month before we enrolled her in a virtual school, my records indicate that she read about 4600 pages of material with a reading level of grade 6 or higher... and she was 6. So it was never a problem to get her to learn about anything we chose--I just went to the library and was careful not to strain my back. LOL.

Thanks yall. I think that is the problem, switching between so many subjects when DD gets so into one thing at a time. And then she reads so much, that maybe I don' really need to cover so much. She complains that she already knows this, so why do we have to do it. I have been thinking, and maybe we will just do spelling and math everyday, and then focus several weeks on a subject of her interest. That would give us more time to focus in depth and not be distracted by moving between one thing and another. Thanks yall!

We haven't homeschooled, but we did a ton of research to make sure we were comfortable with that option if it was necessary. I was very impressed with The Unschooling Handbook as framing out how a child can be largely self-directed. I don't think I'd advocate it 100%, but we would follow a soft-structure. You have a lot of flexibility when your kid is naturally on fire to learn.

I'm about to post more details over in another forum, but when my kids were that age, we did almost no formal anything. Maybe 20 or 30 minutes a day four times a week. We took a lot of trips to museums, and we did a lot of projects. For example, when we learned about ancient Egypt, we mummified a chicken. We read a lot of Egyptian mythology, and we watched documentaries about the pyramids on Netflix. We practiced writing our names in heiroglyphics. When we studied the Vikings, we read a lot of Norse mythology, and we brewed our own mead. We also did science experiments, spent lots of time at the library, and listened to a ton of audio books. Neither of mine were reading at that age.

Neither of my EG/PG kids have ever been very on fire about academics. My daughter loves to read science fiction and fantasy, and she has read a ton. My son likes to draw, design video games, and make animated movies. We have done the bare minimum of formal academics, and my daughter met or exceeded the DYS cuts on the EXPLORE this year on 4 out of the 5. I just offer that because I think that PG kids can learn really, really well with a minimum of structure.