Today, I got the academic year planner for 2008-9 and began the task of filling in the weeks on which we are going to homeschool, however loosely, as opposed to the weeks that are holiday.  I have to do this because all the possible holiday time is taken with up with trips abroad or visits from family.  It’s a struggle to fit in 36 weeks of school time, but I make the effort.  If I did not mark those weeks out, they would disappear into more trips and visits.  And I’ve just remembered an extra thing I didn’t count, so I’m already a week down.  Now, I’m not knocking the educational and social value of trips and visits, but:

a) They are usually exhausting and over-stimulating, such that all attempts at reading, writing, maths, rational thought and maturity go out of the window during them.  Whereas those things are important.  All the little schedules we set up to make our life work better get blown away too.  There is pretty much always a longish take-off ramp for getting back in gear.

b) During trips and visits, every available minute of the child’s time is pretty much planned out by the adults around her.  Whereas when we are ‘doing school’ she gets large amounts of the day and week to do exactly what she wants: play, carry out a project, read a book, or ask to visit somewhere or someone locally (she knows what’s available, so she can make a choice).  This, I think, is even more important.

I would love to have more flexibility, but the year isn’t long enough.  Mike has a solution: we “do school” during trips and visits.  Then we can squeeze in more of them.  He doesn’t understand that point a) means I have noticed that this is a failure already.  He thinks we can somehow make it work if we just try harder.  Maybe it will work better if he is on board as well.  I don’t think he really appreciates the value of point b) at all.  I would be more motivated to try to do school during trips and visits if I knew for certain that it was going to pay off with a couple of quiet weeks at home just pottering around.