Homeschool World Forum

I feel that I am right in between. My children may have a certain time that we start school at, but if they need a break for an hour, then we can take a break! How about you guys? Are you laidback or scheduled?

I would guess that depends on how autonomously your children can study. If all of them are under grades 3-4 or so, and they're fairly self-motivated, then you don't need to oversee much and they can go off and study whenever it's convenient for them. If they need a bit of a push, or if you need to be there to answer questions or oversee experiments or whatever, then scheduling a study time is obviously going to be helpful. But either way, short breaks between subjects won't hurt - concentration starts to drop after 30 minutes to an hour depending on age and attention span, unless the subject/activity is one that your children really enjoy. Even if you have a rigid schedule, it should have breaks built into it.

Most of my friends think we're so structured it's scary, whereas my husband has been known to say I'm so relaxed my brains are falling out. I wanted to unschool, but my kids wanted structure, so structure it is. We have an order we start to follow each day, but there are few days we don't get away from it to some degree. I like to finish everything I plan each day for the first week or two of each term, and after that things kind of blow in the breeze.

I used a very organic approach to teaching using every day things to explain lessons instead of doing a structured lesson.

For example when I was teaching my daughter about photosynthesis I shined a bright light on the leaves of a plant under water and we watched bubbles of pure oxygen form and drift to the surface.

Physical science we learned primarily in the dojang doing martial arts.