The Seasons of Homeschooling

I have seen lots of entries around blogdom lately on whether or not to homeschool year round. I thought I would weigh in with my opinion on the matter. For us, homeschooling year round in just natural, like breathing and sleeping. In our home, homeschooling is a lifestyle in which learning takes place all the time. However, it looks different from year to year and season to season. 

If you popped into my home in late summer to early fall, you would find us hard at work cracking the books. We would be in full swing with all of the fresh and new curriculum. I'd be covering all of the subjects we would be learning that year. There would be stacks of books everywhere. I would be busy getting everyone out the door to our out-of-the-home classes and field trips. We would look almost frantic in our quest for learning and exploring new subjects.

But, if you arrived in the heart of winter, you would find that not all of the classes will still be in full swing. Something would have been put aside, or wintered over until spring (my guess is that would be Latin and or music this year). We would be slipping deeper and longer into chapter books, arts and crafts and history projects. We would be baking and doing unit studies about Christmas. We'd  be picking and choosing our out-of-the-home activities based on how much sickness was going around our community. With our son Timothy, who is a high-end, medically-fragile person, keeping illness out and away from us is important. (Not easy when your dh works in a hospital!)

If you rolled through our home in the spring, you would find us wrapping up SOTW and FIAR for the year. We would be busy with nature studies, playing outside, preparing for end-of-the-year dance recitals and end-of-year testing. You'd probably hear some whining over math and copy work. Depending on their progress, those books would probably be shelved for a few weeks while we do outdoor math games and dabble more in living math books (a bit of a struggle for me, but I respect the idea a great deal). Assuming that no crisis had struck that year, we would be well done with our required 180 days of recorded school. But that does not mean the learning stops.

With the arrival of summer, you would find that we were still at the books. However, it would be different, lighter, and more limited in scope. We'd be covering the 3 R's in a gentle way for a little while each day (30 to 45 minutes). There would be no formal curriculum being used, much more of an unschooling style. The teacher would no longer be me, but the children would step in and take the lead on what we wanted to be learning. There would be hours of water fun outdoors, play dates with friends, messy arts and crafts, crazy science experiments that should only be done outdoors, lost mini-unit studies that had sat around on dusty shelves all year because they hadn't fit in, many caught and gently released critters, gardening and lots of eating straight from the plants harvesting going on. You'd find a Mother dabbling in mother culture (the education of the Mother), more than in the faster paced times of the year. You would also find me pouring over all the new curriculum, planning, dreaming, preparing for the next educational delight.

So do we homeschool year round? You bet! But that is because learning cannot be boxed into just sitting at a desk studying a textbook. There is a place and time for that, but it is far too limiting to say that education happens in one particular way. Learning goes on every second of every day. It is constant! So we have our structured times of year and our relaxed time of year. 

By the way, I did not address the changes in life: new baby, job change, house move, surgery, other health issues, aging parents and all else that life throws at us. All of these also offer many opportunities for learning.

Blessings, Dawn