Mr. Z, lots of people homeschool “anymore”…it’s estimated that homeschooling grows by 10-20% per year. In our city, my educated guess is that there are about 1000 homeschooling families within a 45 minute radius of me. Just in the group I belong to (one of many in our area), there are close to 200 families.

On to the question 🙂

Actual teaching time, I would say 2-3 hours per day last year, including read alouds, actual instruction, help with projects, etc. The actual time he spent working was closer to 5-6 hours per day (sometimes more), but that included several subjects (he likes school and chose to take extra) as well as Scout stuff (his badges are part of school as well, as they tie in with a lot of what we do).

In 4th grade, many children can start to become more independent; you still need to teach the concept (or do something like Math U See that teaches it by DVD), but the student is generally able to read the directions and complete the problems, etc.

My 9.5yo 5th grader gets the following done independently:

Math

Language Arts

Spelling

Reading

Geography

Scripture Memorization

I help him for about 5 minutes each on his Greek and Spanish, and then he completes his work

This takes him 2-2.5 hours, on average (he gets a 20 minute break between every 3 subjects).

I work with him pretty heavily on:

Science (we do a lot of notebooking and hands-on projects/experiments)

History (ditto)

Writing (he’s fairly advanced at the process, but is dyslexic, so I allow him to dictate parts of it while I type)

Bible study

Scout badges (some independent, some together)

Read aloud (generally a book that’s a few years above his decoding/lexile level, like The Hobbit or something like that)

As a 5th grader, he probably spends 6 hours on average, more some days, on his independent work, teaching time, and work-together time combined. But honestly, that’s by choice – he really wants to take all of those subjects.

Hope that helps!

2-3 hours, maybe 4 on a rare day. Schools are in session as long as they are to account for all the time spent waiting in line, waiting with your hand in the air, waiting to be given permission to sharpen your pencil, and waiting for the other kids to be quiet. Not to mention lunch and recess! If you spend 3 hours of actual study time at home, you will usually accomplish more than the schools do in their 6 hour days.

Not all of this time is spent actually “teaching” the child. A lot of it consists of the child working independently on something after the parent has explained it.

Also, Field trips, outside classes, etc. Often take longer, since they are not part of our every day routine, I didn’t count them. Those are more like the “fun days” you remember from school. You know, days when they showed a film, visited a museum, or had a class party. We don’t always try to do all our usual stuff on those days, some days we may skip it all and others we may do just the basics.

When my kids were in 4th grade we probably started about 9 and finished at lunch, on the days we had school. It would be hard to say, honestly, how much time I spent teaching. I would teach math then the child would do the worksheet while I did the dishes, then I’d teach grammar for a couple of minutes and do half the page with the child then let him finish the page while I did another small household chore. Because my teaching time was not condensed, I can’t say how much time I actually spent teaching. Also, that is not counting the outside activities that schools would count as part of their school day, such as PE and art that we had as a group.

My daughter just finished 4th grade. On average, I spent no more than an hour working with her each day. However, on average, she spent 1-2 hours reading each day, spent an hour writing most days, spent another 30-minutes to an hour working on projects, spent another hour doing some sort of art work, maybe 30 minutes a day on math. That works out to 4-5 hours of work a day.

How much I spend actually teaching her varies greatly. Some days, I don’t do anything with her as she’s got herself going on whatever it is that she wants to do. Some days, her math stresses her out and she wants me right there beside her the whole time (yet she won’t usually allow me to help her after the first couple of questions; she just wants me there). But our school hours don’t really vary–every morning is our official school time. Some stuff naturally spills into the afternoons (like her reading or art).

I wouldn’t say we spend a lot of time on outside ‘learning projects’ and field trips. We do have a weekly park day that we try to make each week–that’s one full afternoon a week. Then we have the library to go to once a week. Different times of the year have regular field trips (less in the winter; usually very hectic come May/June). We also always go out at least one other afternoon a week either just on our own or for some specific activity with others (play dates, for example). So, we’re usually out 3 afternoons a week. And then swimming or skating lessons on the weekends.

In reference to Mr. Z, they do not teach for 5-6 hours in school. The kids are in class for 5-6 hours, but that doesn’t mean they are being taught the entire time. Especially in grade 4. And I have no idea what Mr. Z is talking about regarding “who homeschools anymore” since it’s becoming more popular each year.

As an average, I spend one hour of direct time in bits and pieces. I’m always in the same room as my DS is doing independent work. He spends about three hours per day on “structured curriculum”, but he’s learning and we’re discussing, all day long.

We have a three-hour HS co-op on Fridays that’s for enrichment. He also spends time at bible club, scouts, the library, track/cross country, volunteering for a missions organization, indenpendently reading, and at least one field trip every two weeks.

He’s also out learning “real life” in the community. This morning it was learning about the difference between insulin resistance and diabetes at my doctor’s appointment. Then it was doing research on the types of pets we want to get with our new Freecycled (http://www.freecycle.org) vivariums we received. The whole Freecycle thing brought up economics and recycling, etc.

So it’s really hard to nail down what time our “homeschooling” is…it’s so continual and 24/7.

We work about 2 – 3 hours, 4 days a week. It doesn’t quite work out that we sit down every day at precisely 9 and finish at precisely 11, but I would say the time invested is about what I said above. I work outside the home 2 days a week, and on one of those days I encourage my mother/mother in law to take the kids on field trips and to do projects with them. My one child is learning to sew and working on a beautiful quilt for her bed.

We don’t try to imitate public schools or keep their schedule. We don’t need to school for 7 hours as we have such a small teacher/student ratio that we cover material much faster than they ever could.

We have a large homeschooling group as well, so I can tell Mr. Z, quite a lot of people homeschool “these days”!

On average how long do you spend homeschooling your 4th grader each day
http://homeschoolingfaqs.com might help

Basically, our 4th grader is learning all the time.

He is in an improv group, for two hours a week. He goes to a homeschool park day for 6 hours a week. We go to field trips (zoo, museums, historical sites.)

For the past two nights, he’s baked cookies and we cut the recipes by 2/3, so he’s practiced fractions, in addition to researching on the net and reading and following the recipe.

Every night, I read to him, after he’s read to himself for about an hour. Right now, I’m reading a very engaging history book to him.

We are unschoolers, and so never ever have formal lessons. He has to take the CAT every year, and he scores in the 80th and 90th percentiles in every category, so this works for him (and most other kids.)

At any age level we have about 1 hour individual instruction per day, this would include explaining, and or teaching new skills.

That hour is spend on math, reading, and language arts.

After the initial hour or so they will be able to do the work on their own, and come to me when they have questions, or work together to find the answers.

The rest of the day is spend on learning naturally, and by using all kinds of different media, reading a ton of books, clubs, volunteer work, outside classes, like art, and music, sports, work, 4H, Civil Air Patrol, chores, cooking, sewing, helping around the house, hobbies,etc.

We unschool, so there is no time limit on when my kids learn. It also changes day to day what we do, and is fairly indescribable.

My fourth grader and I usually read for about half an hour a day together, for the rest of the hours, play board games, go to stores, museums and zoos, we’ll do crafts, garden, build, and paint, watch TV and play video games, cook, clean, go hiking, fly kites…it’s all learning.