I have seen lots of entries around blogdom lately on whether or not to homeschool year round.  I thought I would weigh in with my opinion on the matter.  For us, homeschooling year round in just natural, like breathing and sleeping.  In our home, homeschooling is a lifestyle in which learning takes place all the time.  However, it looks different from year to year and season to season. 

If you pop into my home in late Summer to early Fall, you will find us hard at work cracking the books.  We will be in full swing with all of the fresh and new curriculum.   I will be covering all of the subjects we will be learning that year.  There will be stacks of books everywhere.  I will be busy getting everyone out the door to our out-of-the-home classes and field trips.  We will look almost frantic in our quest for learning and exploring new subjects.

But, if you arrive in the heart of Winter, you will find that not all of the classes will still be in full swing.  Something will be put aside, or wintered over until Spring ~ my guess ~ it will be Latin and or Music this year.   We will be slipping deeper and longer into chapter books, arts and crafts and history projects.  We will be baking and doing unit studies about Christmas.  We will be picking and choosing our out-of-the-home activities based on how much sickness is going around our community.  With our son Timothy, who is a high-end, medically-fragile person, keeping illness out and away from us is important. (Not easy when your dh works in a hospital!)

If you roll through our home in the Spring, you will find us wrapping up SOTW and FIAR for the year.  We will be busy with nature studies, playing outside, preparing for end-of-the-year dance recitals and end-of-year testing.  You will probably hear some whining over math and copywork.  Depending on their progress, those books will probably be shelved for a few weeks while we do outdoor math games and dabble more in living math books (a bit of a stuggle for me, but I respect the idea a great deal).  Assuming that no crisis strikes this year, we will be well done with our required 180 days of recorded school.  But that does not mean the learning stops.

With the arrival of Summer, you will find that we are still at the books.  However, it will be different, lighter, and more limited in scope.  We will be covering the 3 R's in a gentle way for a little while each day (30 to 45 minutes).  There will be no formal curriculum being used, much more of an unschooling style.  The teacher will no longer be me, but the children will step in and take the lead on what we want to be learning.  There will be hours of water fun outdoors, playdates with friends, messy arts and crafts, crazy science experiments that should only be done outdoors, lost mini-unit studies that sat around on dusty shelves all year because they didn't fit in, many caught and gently released critters, gardening and lots of eating straight from the plants harvesting going on.  You will find a Mother dabbling in mother culture (the education of the Mother)  more than in the faster paced times of the year.  You will also find that I am pouring over all the new curriculum, planning, dreaming, preparing for the next educational delightment.

So do we homeschool year round?  You bet!  But that is because learning can not be boxed into just sitting at a desk studying a textbook.  There is a place and time far that, but it is far too limiting to say that education happens in one particular way.  Learning goes on every second of everyday.  It is constant!  So we have our structured times of years and our relaxed time of year. 

By the way, I did not address the changes in life: new baby, job change, house move, surgery, other health issues, aging parents and all else that life throws at us.  All of these also offer many opportunities for learning.

Check out more Thirsty Thursdays here.

Blessings,

Dawn

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Posted by SandBetweenMyToes

I enjoyed reading about how your year looks. Everyone schools year round......they just don't always call it that. Unless parents let their kids completely veg on tv and computer, then the learning never stops. It just looks different.

Letitia

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Posted by lexi

Great thoughts and well said!

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Posted by Anonymous

Thanks for this post! I have found myself belly-aching a lot lately over having to "summer school" this year. But you are totally right! It is lifestyle learning all the time! =)

~Kellie
www.thepiratemom.com

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Posted by Anonymous

Excellent post! There is an ebb and flow to our school year too, but you made yours sound so much better :)

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Posted by OldSchoolMarm

Wonderful Dawn! I completely agree :-)!
Blessings to you and yours,
Julie

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Posted by proverbsmomof3

You nailed year-round homeschooling on the head. That's pretty much how our school works.

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Posted by Joy @ Five J's

Thanks so much for posting your play-by-play. It really helps me to see what I have to look forward to with our new venture in "year-round schooling". And thanks so much for participating in Thirsty Thursday this week.

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