What is Deschooling?

Deschooling means to take a break from school work before starting. This can be helpful if your child has had a bad time of it and just needs to unwind or if you need time to organize. I don't have any personal experience with it because my kids asked to be homeschooled, so they were anxious to start, but for many parents, it can be helpful.

If you're only home for a year or less, you really can't just take a year off. Your children will be too far behind when they go back. You can, however, take a few weeks off or you can just start slowly--so slowly your children don't even know you started. Homeschool learning often takes informal forms, so you can do educational things that don't look like school. If you're required to put in a certain number of hours, keep track of these types of informal learning experiences and use the time to relax and to organize your future schooling. You might want to start this way and add an hour a day until you're up to three hours a day. In California, where I started, homeschooling only had to be fifteen hours a week. No matter where we moved, we kept the formal part to that and filled the remaining hours with fun and informal learning. We did three hours a day five days a week until I figured out we could do three hours formally and one hour informally and take Fridays off. That simplified life dramatically. However, we always had a lot of extra time due to having a pretty educational homelife, and that freed us to take the entire month of December off or to take sick days.

Examples of Fun Learning:

Take a field trip (previously known as a family trip) to something educational but fun. Zoos, museums, historical sites...those are all field trips now and they all count against the hours you are required to teach. Record it under whatever it teaches (science, history, etc.)

Read together as a family. You can increase your storytimes, including reading chapter books with older children. Have them take turns reading--pass the book around so everyone gets a turn. Record it as Reading.

Put on a puppet show. (My readers suspect I am addicted to puppet shows.) Let them choose the story, write the script, make the puppets, and run the rehearsals alone. Don't do anything yourself except to be the audience. Record this as literature, creative writing, art, and theater. Use an upturned coffee table or the back of a sofa for the theater.

Teach the children how to cook, garden, work with wood, build models, or something else you want them to know that seems fun. Count it under whatever subject fits, such as Independent Living. (If they double a recipe, they are doing math. If they read the recipe, it's reading.)

Go on a family bike ride. (Gym class--you figured that out already, right?)

Instruct your child to spend an hour a day learning something educational--anything at all, with parental right to refuse. (Don't give up the right to veto it or they'll want to make a bomb or learn how to play a video game.) Ask them what they always wanted to learn but never had time before or that was never taught in schools. Then let them decide how to learn it. For instance, if they're interested in robots, do they want to read books about them, build one, make a video about them, or write a story about them?

Sign up for an "afterschool" activity. This is fun learning so the kids won't think of it as school--but record it anyway.

Make sure you allow a lot of down time. Your kids may have lost the art of entertaining themselves because they were too busy, but they will have time now. Let them help you make a list of things to do when they're bored. If they're bored, send them to the list. If they are still bored, tell them you have chores to be done. That always makes them think of something to do. Minimize the television and computer--part of homeschooling is learning to have hobbies and entertain yourself the old-fashioned way.