Best Home School Schedule For Your Child and Your Family
The Best Time for Children to Learn
If there is a magical time when children learn best, it is when they are alert, well rested, and interested in the subject you are trying to teach them about.
Babies start learning the moment they arrive at birth. Adults of sound mind stop learning when they leave this world. Do people continue to learn in the next world? That would be a subject for another time. I want to limit my discussion on learning to when it happens in this world we are all currently inhabiting.
There is no magic in the traditional school year schedule. Every living person of sound mind is learning all of the time. What people are learning may not always be worthwhile, but they are learning just the same, from everything they do, see, and hear, and every experience they have.
Children learn in July just as well as in October or March. Children can learn at 7:00 PM just as well as at 9:00 AM. Children can learn on Saturday, or Sunday, or Christmas Day, or on any day. Children do not just learn only on Monday through Friday and on non-holidays. Children are learning all the time.
What Time Is the Best Time For Children To Learn?
Plan Your School Schedule According To What Works Best For Your Child, Your Family, and You
How you plan your home school schedule is your choice and that is one of the many advantages of home schooling.
The important thing is to choose a time for instructing your child when s/he is alert and in a receptive frame of mind. Choosing a time when there is no reason to rush through the material is important.
Public and private schools have been in existence for a long time. If we go by their example, we might believe that learning only takes place in a formal classroom of diverse students from around the community between mid August and mid June. Between 8 o’ clock AM and 4 o’ clock PM, from Monday through Friday, no holidays included. This is not true.
In fact learning takes place all of the time for all human beings. There is no specific month, day, or hour that is magical in promoting the learning process for all individuals.
Why Do Public and Private Schools Have the Schedule They Do If There Is no Optimum Time For Learning?
The reason the school year generally goes from early September to late May is that the first schools in this country chose that particular schedule. Why? Because our country was a more rural country and most of our population were farmers. Children were needed at home to take care of livestock and to work in the garden and the fields in order to produce enough food and cash for the family to survive. Children could not be spared from this work to go to school. School was viewed then as a luxury.
How many of you reading this have grandparents or great grand parents who had to quit school at age 12-14 in order to help on the family farm, or to get a job to help support their younger siblings?
The reason our schools generally follow this same schedule today is tradition. Our country’s population has not been primarily rural or made up of mostly farm families for a long time. There is no longer any reason, other than tradition, to adhere to the old school schedule that was built around family farms and the growing season.
What Is The Best Age For A Child To Begin Learning?
Children learn at different rates and are ready to learn at different ages. In fact, some ‘experts’ believe all humans have learned most of what they will ever know all of their lives by the time they are 5 years old! Most children are only just getting started in school at that age.
The most important points I am trying to get at here are that learning takes place all the time, and that some children may be ready to begin formal learning much earlier than age 5 or 6, while other children may not yet be ready to start formal learning until age 7 or 8.
Due to the complications our formal school systems must already deal with, allowing children to start at what is the optimum time for them, and then progress at their own rates, would not be feasible. Just managing so many children in one place is a challenge in itself without tailoring the learning process to individual children.
As a result our public and private schools tend to treat children like objects on an assembly line. They all move along at the same rate of speed and are exposed to exactly as possible, the same information in the same ways, and at the same age.
As a result, some children do well while other children do not do so well in our formal school system (public and private). For one thing, not everyone learns well through the same methods even if age and readiness are not a consideration.
Home schooling allows parents to choose what school schedule works best for their entire family and for their individual children.
How Can We Home School When Both Parents Are Working?
Most people believe both parents in a family cannot hold jobs if they choose to home school their children. If both parents are working, it would complicate things depending on the number of hours both parents are working and what those specific hours were, but with determination and fortitude, it can still be done.
The reason both parents can hold jobs and still home school is that there are no magical times of the year, week, or day when learning can take place. You simply have to arrange to provide necessary instruction for your child(ren) at a time when they are alert and ready to learn. If you can’t arrange your own schedule to accommodate this necessity, then you may have to engage a nanny (or relative) to stay with your child(ren) for general care, and engage a tutor to assist in the instruction of your children.
Any tutor you engage should have an abundance of patience with children and the ability to control children in a positive way. Your tutor should also understand the material s/he is trying to convey to your child(ren). You may also consider combining the positions of nanny and tutor if you know someone who can manage both jobs just as you would do if you chose to stay at home instead of holding a job.
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