It’s a common question, “What about homework?”
Another way people ask, “Do your kids have homework?”
Here’s the deal: it’s all homework. I don’t mean that snarky. What I mean is that the goals of homework are accomplished during the day.
The real questions that people are actually wondering are the following:
Do they have to do extra work in the afternoons/night/weekends? No, they don’t have to do that.
It’s a matter of the difference between group teaching and one on one tutoring. That difference is huge. The amount of time it takes to teach a concept while doing one on one style of teaching is much less than what it takes to teach in a large group. Ask any teacher.
So, when we have a math lesson, we work on it until the student understands it. That may mean minutes. We’ve often done several lessons in the curriculum in one sitting because the student either already knew the concept or got it so quickly it would be a waste to not move along. It also may mean we take a couple of days.
There is no need to assign work for later in case they didn’t get the concept because homeschooling is based on mastery. It’s actually a pretty big deal to most homeschoolers.
Do they do extra work to reinforce what is being learned? No. And yes.
Again, the tutoring style of education applies here as does the mastery method.
My kiddos (and homeschoolers in general, most of the time) do not do an extra math paper in the evenings, but they might go on a field trip, do a fun activity or craft, bake a dessert, watch a period movie, or read an “extra” book (for fun). These all reinforce learning.
Do they have their 15-30 minutes of reading? For sure.
It just doesn’t have to happen during evenings and weekends. It gets done during the day. Reading real books is a part of our curriculum (very much on purpose), a party of our family life, and a part of free time training.
I’ve never had to make HB or Noah read. They’ve loved it from the get go. Chloe, Phoebe, and Esther have had to read their curric books, of course, but I had to assign them pleasure reading during the day. I didn’t have to do it for long for Chloe. She fell in love with reading and hasn’t looked back since.
Phoebe and Esther are still in the thirty minutes of pleasure reading in an approved chapter book stage, but many days they don’t stop when the buzzer goes off because “I just want to finish this part”.
Do you really mean that your kiddos’ evenings and weekends are free? Yep.
Ok, mostly. Our high schooler sometimes has to put in some work time on the weekends, but it usually due to not managing her time well and/or not listening to her sage and brilliant parents.
The rest of the kids spend their weekends with their family with nary an academic assignment in sight. Pretty nice, right?
So… there ya’ go, homework in homeschool.
