Home Schooling Style

If I *had* to tell you what our home schooling style was, I guess I'd say it's closest to School at Home. But without any schedule or lesson planning (I gave that up at the start of this year). I do have particular books we learn from and (usually) follow those in some kind of order and do things like review questions and tests...mostly for things to stick in a portfolio at the end of the year. I started school with visions of how I would be TEACHER and stand in front of my child, having his rapt attention, while I regaled him with the day's information in a fun and interesting format...with a big easel in front of us for me to write key points on. Uh huh. Mostly I thought it would be fun to write on one of those big easels but I can't figure out exactly why I need one or what I would put on it.

I think our schedule has the ability to be as loose as it can be partly because I'm a non-working single mom home schooling an only child. I only have to make sure that J.T. and I are schooling when we want to...without worrying about someone else's work schedule or when anyone else wants dinner, etc.

That being said, please don't spit out your Diet Coke (does everyone but me drink diet pop? do you call it pop or soda? anyhow...) when I say that we sometimes are doing school at 6 a.m. or 4 p.m. or 10 p.m. or midnight. I sometimes suffer from insomnia. I've learned (and am very thankful I have the flexibility to do this) that if I'm tired enough to go to sleep, I had better do it. And, being that I'm the teacher, J.T. pretty much sleeps when I do so that we are awake at the same time. Our first year, I started off deciding that we must get up by XX and start school by XX and take a break at XX and be finished by XX. My first big wake up was when my entire day's worth of planning turned out to be about an hour and a half of school. When you don't have to wait for an entire class to get ready, and for everyone to ask their questions, and line up and wait for everything in between...a day's worth of work doesn't equal the actual time a child spends in school. Also, neither J.T. nor I are morning people and neither one of us enjoyed school in the mornings. Near the end of that year (last year actually) we said "screw it" and started just making sure we did the necessary work each day. Who really cares *when* it gets done? If my dad were alive to read this, he'd probably have a big 'ole cow. He's the kind that thinks if you sleep in until 9 a.m., you've "wasted half the day". I say if you go to bed by 9 p.m., you're sleeping half the day away! ;-) So, anyhow, we go to bed when we go to bed and wake up when we get up. We usually start school within an hour or two of waking up and take however long it takes to get it done.

We've played around with "where" to school also. We started off at the kitchen table, but my winter village took over the table last winter and we migrated to TV trays in the living room. At the start of this year, J.T. needed a new computer desk and his old one has turned out to be perfect for a school desk in the living room. We do reading and TV/movie watching on the couch, but he does paperwork at his desk. This also helps discourage the dog from getting jealous and trying to talk one of us into holding her instead of what we are doing ;-p

So, anyhow, that's our "style" and what works for us. I imagine it will evolve as time goes on but, luckily, I'm less panicky than when we started and we'll just go with the flow.