It is Saturday, and I just finished a homeschooling session with my daughter. I am not talking about teachable moments either. While teachable moments are incredibly valuable to a homeschooler, this morning we did math.
After looking over the weeks work, I realized my daughter did not do as much math as I would have liked her to complete this week. If she wants a summer vacation, and to be ready for the placement test she will have to take (for next years program) in a few months, she needs to stay on a schedule. Since we homeschool, adding an impromptu Saturday session is easy.
In my state, a homeschooler needs to do “school work” for an equivalent of 180 days a year and for 4 ½ hours a day. The operative word here is equivalent. This means we could homeschool 200 days a week for 4 hours. We could also homeschool 250 days a week for 3 hours and 14 minutes, which is closer to our schedule. If we wanted, we could even homeschool every day of the year for 2.19 hours. There is no hard rule here.
Then there is the other question as to what activities can be counted to fulfill those hours. Well, I could count the Arts and History program they attend on Mondays for 5 hours. I could count the 1-hour swimming lessons as phys-ed each week. I could count 2 hours of Sunday school for religious instruction (hey! We homeschool on Sunday Too). I could count our visits to museums and the library, which takes up about 5 hours a week. If I add that up, our maximum week requirement of 22.5 hours would be met with only 9.5 more hours of instruction each week.
All of these numbers are great, and help me to know that I am meeting state requirements, but as for us, we homeschool until the work is done, and worry about the requirements later.