Year Round Homeschooling?

One of the “mommy wars” debate is between those moms that insists on homeschooling their kid from the time they turn 1 and those that want to postpone education until it’s time to send them to school.  I have always been in the middle of this spectrum (pretty rare for me to be in the middle of anything).  Recent media reports say that new research says that starting a child in school too early can have negative effects but what can you do when your child just loves school and considers it a special treat?

While I want to make sure that my children get an early start for learning, I also want them to enjoy being a kid and have plenty of time to play.  For this reason my goal for this homeschooling year was to limit the “academic” part of our activities to not more than an hour, preferably closer to 30 minutes and have the rest of the learning take place through play based activities and informal learning.

This was all great in theory but I didn’t expect to have a child that insists on more schoolwork and thrives on it.  He loves worksheets and doesn’t consider play based learning as “school” even though he learns from playing math board games or reading games with me he still insists that he “do school” which means give him a workbook and pencil and let him have fun.

This week his daddy found a desk on the curb that a neighbor was throwing away and it’s Shammy’s new school desk.  He was ecstatic!  He immediately picked a spot for it and loves having his own personal space. Now all of his school supplies are within reach so he just helps himself to school work whenever he feels like it even if I am busy doing something else.

While I originally planned to finish our homeschooling year at the end of this month, at this rate we may end up doing year round homeschooling.