The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [35]
Unschoolers may also prefer a year-round calendar, just because they always have a hard time telling the difference between school days and vacation days anyway. If everyday life is full of opportunities for learning, labeling some days as school days and others as vacation days seems arbitrary and pointless.
Other homeschoolers take a more prosaic view of their school year and tie it to the legal requirements of their state. Where homeschooling regulations require 180 days of instruction, or 875 hours, or whatever the relevant statute demands, they make their school year the length of time necessary to meet that legal minimum. During that portion of the year, the family is careful about recording all learning activities properly, with everything neatly categorized by subject and grade level as required. Once the statutory minimum is reached, the family simply quits keeping the “official” records and goes on homeschooling according to their own interests and plans rather than the state’s.
Finding your preferences for your school calendar is pretty much a trial-and-error process. You can assume you’ll use the traditional schedule and then realize in June that you’re all having too much fun to quit learning, or you can do just the opposite—plan to go year-round and then suddenly opt for the summer vacation, without any earthshaking consequences. Or you can try different calendars each year—perhaps by the time your children are eighteen, you’ll figure out which suits your family best.
Finding Your Own Structure
Figuring out which parts of which ideas will work for you is not easy. Often the ideas you find most attractive and expect will best fit your family don’t work for you at all. Or they work for a year or two and then suddenly seem ridiculous. Just remember that your kids are growing and changing and the relationships among you all are changing as well. It’s unrealistic to expect homeschooling to remain the same in the midst of those changes.
One of the hardest notions for most of us parents to let go of is the idea that there is one correct solution, one right answer that will solve all the problems and answer all the questions. Inevitably, we sometimes question our choices for our kids and worry that we could and should be doing a better job for them. It’s a fine line between always searching for the best solution for the way our kids are today and constantly second-guessing ourselves and our kids. Homeschooling is a process, not a product. It’s a process that never ends as long as our kids are still learning, and if we do it right, they never stop learning, even after they leave home.
CHAPTER FOUR
Assisted Homeschooling, or Do We Really Need Any Help?
GATHERING INFORMATION ABOUT your legal options and about various philosophical approaches to learning is an obvious step in deciding how homeschooling will work for your family. But closely tied in with the legal and philosophical issues involved with homeschooling is the matter of logistics: Will you carry on independently, or will you use one of the ever more numerous options now available to assist you?
It used to be that options for homeschooling assistance were few and fairly uncomplicated. There were a few nationally known correspondence schools to choose from, fewer still private school programs specifically designed to cater to homeschooling families, and perhaps a few similar programs available within your state or locally. In some areas you might have found a school district that had an alternative home study program, perhaps evolved from the district’s continuation school.
In the past few years, though, with the rapid growth of homeschooling, the number of options has exploded. Families looking for