In Tennessee, homeschooling time must be at least four hours per day to be considered one homeschooling day, but finding time to homeschool may not be as difficult as you think. This time may be very easy for a stay-at-home, homeschooling parent of one child. It can get more difficult when you add multiple children, self-employed parents, or working parents.
When you first start homeschooling you think, “How am I going to teach for four hours a day?” That, however, is not the case.
Four teaching hours doesn’t mean four full-on, face-to-face, opened book, kid at a desk, teaching hours. It means, your child just has to be learning something.
*This post contains affiliate links, meaning, if you click through and make a purchase or sign up for a program, I may earn a commission. This is at no additional cost to you.*
Teach During Everyday Moments
Do you like to cook? Does your child like to help? There you go, you’re teaching!
Do you love flowers and like to be in your garden? Take your child with you and teach him to identify which plants are weeds and which ones are flowers. That’s another teaching moment.
Do you teach Sunday School at church and need ten goodie bags with two little toys and two pieces of candy in each bag? Enlist your child to help. BOOM! Math lesson!
These lessons can be taught as a child gets older too. You teach them to drive and how to care for their car or truck, how to budget their money and how to be generous, and home maintenance.
Constant Teaching, Constant Learning
The thing is, as parents, we are constantly teaching our children. We teach them life skills, to explore the world on their own, to ask questions, and we teach them to love. Those are the most important things, right?
I believe the question becomes, When are we not teaching our children? As opposed to, When are we going to “do school”?
We’re constantly “doing school.”
There is a time for formal instruction, just don’t forget there’s more to learning than what you read in a book or exercises your child can complete in a workbook. You homeschool, you’re the boss, you can mix things up from time to time.
[bctt tweet=”There is a time for formal instruction, just don’t forget there’s more to learning than what you read in a book…” username=”Momof8Melanie”]
We follow a schedule a lot of the time. You can read more about that in this post about Our Imperfect Homeschool Routine. However, we are not strict about it and if I feel we are getting burned out, we shake things up by trying something new or different. As a new homeschool mom I was afraid to do that, but being well-seasoned now, I’m up for trying anything once.
If you are new to homeschooling, you may feel like you have to do all of the subjects kids cover in public school every day, but you don’t. Pick up a good book and find lessons within the pages that your child will associate with the story. This will truly help them retain the education you’re giving them.
