How Many Hours Should Homeschooling Take?
One of the questions families new to homeschooling ask is how long homeschooling should take. In a site-based school, this is pretty straightforward—the school has set start and end times each day when students are expected to be present. Parents don’t need to think about scheduling in a brick-and-mortar school, but homeschooling requires considerable thought to be given to the matter. You are in charge of how time will be allocated, and you have to figure out the best way to do so.
In this article, we will look at the question of how long homeschooling should take—that is, how many hours of a given day should be dedicated to homeschooling? As a general guideline, kindergarten students may need only about one hour of formal lessons per day. Elementary and middle school students often spend two to four hours on academics, while high school students may need four to five hours. These are flexible estimates, not requirements.
The ideal homeschool schedule depends on your child’s age, learning needs, and educational approach, as we’ll see below…
Why Does Homeschooling Take Less Time Than Public School?
As with everything else about homeschooling, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. In fact, there are a host of variables to consider, which we will examine one at a time. First, however, keep one essential point in mind: our idea of how much of the day should be devoted to homeschooling should not be based on public school models.
Public schools operate on a fundamentally different model of education that has to account for things that do not concern homeschoolers. This includes state-mandated hours of attendance, logistical issues related to moving hundreds of kids around a building, etc. In many cases, public school students are in school six and a half hours per day, five days a week, not because it is pedagogically necessary, but because a panel of state bureaucrats mandated it.
Homeschool is not just an at-home duplicate of public school, and it shouldn’t be thought of as such. The homeschooling family needn’t worry about bussing, state-mandated attendance, or the logistics of shuffling 300 kids around. As a rule of thumb, homeschooling takes less time out of the day than public schooling. (For a more detailed breakdown on this, see our article “This is Why Homeschooling Takes Less Time.”) The average homeschooled child spends less time on formal academic activities than their public-school counterpart because homeschooling strips education down to its fundamentals by jettisoning institutional baggage.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at some of the variables to consider when planning your homeschool day.
How Does My Homeschooling Style Affect Our Daily Schedule?
The style of homeschooling your family follows will have a direct bearing on how long your day runs.
Traditional, class or textbook-based approaches tend to require the most structured days, with subjects worked through in blocks and a fairly predictable number of hours. Classical homeschoolers also tend toward fuller days, especially as older students take on heavier loads of reading, writing, Latin, etc. Charlotte Mason families, by contrast, favor short lessons of ten to twenty minutes for young children and often wrap up formal work by lunch. Unschoolers, too, will have a vastly different sort of day due to the unstructured nature of unschooling. Unit studies and flipped-classroom approaches are harder to measure in hours, since learning is spread across the day or week differently.
Most families are eclectic to some degree, so the point is simply to recognize how your chosen style shapes your day and plan accordingly.
How Many Hours Should I Homeschool at Each Age?
Age is one of the most obvious variables, and also one of the most important. Young children have short attention spans and simply cannot sit for long stretches of focused work, nor do they need to. A kindergartener may need only an hour or so of formal lessons (if that), with the rest of the day given to play and time outdoors. As children move into the middle grades, their capacity for sustained attention grows, and two to four hours becomes more typical. High school students, with heavier reading and writing loads and more demanding math and science, will naturally spend the most time, often four to five hours a day. If you are teaching several children at once, expect your own day to stretch accordingly.
How Do Individual Learning Needs Affect Homeschooling Hours?
We also have to account for inherent differences between each child. Homeschooling affords us the great advantage of the freedom to plan around those differences. A child who is naturally attuned to math may finish his lesson in twenty minutes, while his sibling who struggles with the same material may need an hour or more. Likewise, a strong reader may fly through history assignments that take a reluctant reader twice as long.
In terms of planning, this means you need to think about the child, not the subject. Instead of thinking, “We spend an hour on each subject,” consider where each child excels and where he needs extra support, then adjust your schedule accordingly. Children with special needs or learning differences may require more time in certain areas, or they may even do better with shorter sessions spread throughout the day (for example, shorter sessions are far better for children with ADHD).
How Many Hours a Day Should My Family Homeschool?
So… what’s the answer?
By now you may have realized that there is no clear answer for how much of the day you “should” be homeschooling. There are too many variables to give a one-size-fits-all assessment. The closest answer I can give is that homeschooling should take as much time as you need. Some families may breeze through a full day of homeschooling in three hours; others might need to devote the entire day to it. It really just depends on the needs of your family.
In short, don’t think “How much time should I be devoting to this?” Shift your thinking from what you “ought” to be doing to what is optimal for your children’s needs.
What are your thoughts on this topic? I invite you to join other homeschooling parents and me in the Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group.
