Q: I have a hard time understanding why children are in school for six or seven hours a day, and then do homework, and yet, you say that you only home school three hours a day for four days a week and have no homework! How can that be?

A: It is a bit scary, isn't it? :) There are home school programs that are set to take five days a week and five to six hours a day, and you can certainly work with those programs. What I observed at school is that much of the time at a regular school is spent in group organization, waiting for others, changing classes, recess, and lunch, and that students are not deep in the learning process all of that time. Nor should they be! When you have a group to work with, it takes time to manage everyone, spend time reviewing everyone's work, moving a group from place to place, and, of course, recess and lunch are important. In fact some schools are cutting back on break time to spend more time in the classroom, but that's a whole other story...

What's important to realize when home schooling is that your goal is learning, not teaching. Because we spend our whole lives teaching our children, we don't have to put it into strict time frames. However, we find that it really helps to have a few hours set aside for the more structured work: math, cursive, grammar, spelling, keyboarding and such. This works for us, but each family gets to find a routine that works for them! How nice that is...

Q: Unschooling is too liberal for me right now--I just can't start there, but it intrigues me at the same time. Could you give an example of how unschooling might fit in with a more structured program?

A: Life skills are a big part of home schooling. We have the opportunity and the time to teach our children the things that not only give them a well-rounded education, but also the things that will make them successful in life. Life skills are a great way to experiment with unschooling.

Here's an example: I feel it's important for my boys to be able to plan a meal, shop, fix that meal and serve dinner. We work on that in stages. For the shopping part, I started by making a shopping list just for my son. It had no more than 10 items on it--all recognizable to him at first. We went into the store together and I would push the cart back and forth along the main aisle at the front of the store, which connected with all the aisles of food. (He could not leave the store without my seeing him nor was he ever too far away.)

His job was to find each item and bring it back. He learned to find each section of the store, select the item, matching size and quantity, and bring it back to me. As he became familiar with more things, I added unfamiliar items to the list. He was then given the option of selecting two items that were not on the list, one sweet and one healthy.

This little game we played not only made him very eager to go grocery shopping, which was nice, but it taught him a lot of life skills. He has since learned to order meat from the butcher, select fresh fish at the fish counter (there was a little incident where the requested 1 pound of salmon turned into 1 whole salmon--13 pounds and $75!--but we were able to take that back and talk about portion size in the process) and generally become quite competent in a supermarket. In a modified form this could be started at any age, but it is an excellent training exercise and a very worthwhile lesson.