What we are using

25 January 2010

Short Lessons or Long?



I always thought that my homeschool day would full of short lessons with engaged kids. I thought that doing 20 minutes of math and 20 minutes of writing and 20 minutes of something else was a great ideal. I imagined that as my kids got older, I would gradually increase the length of their lessons until we had a full day. Today, I realized that I have been completely wrong.

My daughter at 9 would happily do her lessons for an hour or two for each subject. She has a very long attention span. She is always the last person finished in group projects because she is busily add more detail. She also prefers to study one thing a a lot of depth than to go over several things. She gets bored easily with shallow information or simple assignments.

Which is better - two hours of French with writing full sentences, learning prepositional clauses and new words or twenty minutes of French, twenty minutes of vocabulary, twenty minutes of grammar, and twenty minutes of writing then something else to fill the rest of the two hours?

I'm not sure what this means for our homeschool day, but if all we accomplish on a day of school is math, French, and art, I think I will have to give myself a break because I know that those lessons were deep and meaningful and that she'll probably read tonight until her eyeball turn to raisins.

4 comments:

Working Through said...

I love it when they are so engaged that they lose track of time in a lesson. Congrats !!

Anonymous said...

I so enjoy the insight you share about your homeschooling experiences. As a newer homeschooling mom I have a lot of the same thoughts and feelings, so it's nice to know that there's others out there who go through the same emotions and realizations.
I've got a Kreativ Blog award for you if you want to swing by my blog and "pick it up" so to speak. It's a pay-it forward gesture, as I received it today from a fellow blogger ;) cheers!

Smrt Mama said...

I think we hear so much of "if you're doing it right, you can be done by lunch" from our fellow homeschoolers, it's hard to feel like we aren't somehow doin' it wrong if we either choose or end up with a longer lesson or a longer day. I actually prefer long blocks of time for more significant topics. We always allot 45-60 minutes for things like history and I regularly give us big blocks of time for special topics. As Captain Science gets older, I anticipate much longer blocks of time spent on each subject, not shorter.

Urban Mom said...

God love ya for recognizing what the need and giving it to them rather than insisting, "no, this is how i read to do it, and so you have to move on to the next thing now." You know them best, as well as your goals for them. And it's happening. And as another new homeschool mom, I am so excited to read about your experiences!