Does Anybody Just Let Their Child Finish the Day Early?

[notwhatineeded]

So, I've read a lot about the argument between moving through material more quickly (i.e. doing two weeks' worth of work per week) and going more deeply into subjects. However, I've yet to see a lot about just letting kids finish the day sooner. To me, that's the option that is simplest and arguably makes the most sense.

Letting a child finish the day sooner gives him or her a tangible benefit of focusing and working hard: more time to do what he or she wants. Adding more work - either by starting the next week's work sooner or by adding assignments - seems like a punishment for doing well. I feel like it would encourage dawdling. 

Cost is an issue with both methods. Parents could easily spend double or more on curriculum each year. That could be financially impossible. It could also cut into the ability to do outside activities like visiting museums and attending theatre or dance performances. 

With acceleration, I worry about getting to inappropriate content too soon. I wouldn't want to water down upper-level courses by omitting certain books or topics, but there are books and topics I don't want to use before certain ages. Yes, part of that is protecting innocence, but part of it is simply not being developmentally mature enough for that material (read: I have known a lot of people who start prealgebra in sixth grade and end up having to repeat the course, often twice). 

Going deeper only seems like a benefit for subjects of interest, and those interests rarely seem to align with what's being learned (read: she fell in love with samurai at the time we were studying Westward Expansion and with dinosaurs at the time we were studying simple machines). Additionally, I don't want to plant the seeds that all studying has to be done for school; I want to encourage the idea that it's healthy and normal to look into topics just because they are interesting.

- As an aside, I don't like the idea of doing purely interest-led studies because you have to be exposed to something to develop an interest in it. For example, during that study of Westward Expansion, she found her favorite author, Louis L'Amour. If we had just focused on samurai, she may not have discovered him. 

 

I'm obviously in the minority in my thinking, though, so what am I missing? Other than states requiring a certain number of hours, what made you choose to move through the curriculum more quickly or to go deeper?

 

[Lucy the Valiant]

We ended when the day's work was done. Kids almost always had whole chunks of the afternoon to themselves - one of the most valuable treasures of the whole journey, in our home. ❤️

 

[Amoret]

nm

Edited January 19 by Amoret

[wendyroo]

The way you are describing homeschooling is so radically different than we do it, that, for us, your question wouldn't even make much sense.

We rarely use curricula that are divided into designated "weeks", so we don't move faster or deeper than any arbitrary standard. We study material that is appropriately challenging for the student, for lengths of time that are developmentally appropriate for them, until they master the content and are ready to move on.

Yes, at our house this looks like fifth graders studying algebra, but only for a typical fifth grade amount of math time. When my kids are ready to study history more deeply, we add in primary sources and opposing viewpoints and more of the whys and hows of history, but none of that means we have to study any particular book or event I don't think they are ready for. It means we study the things I want us to cover and the things they are interested in and the things that come up in daily life, and that we don't worry one iota about whether a curriculum says they are the right things to be learning about in any given week.

[notwhatineeded]

1 hour ago, Amoret said:

 

I'm glad you have so many resources available! Our local library is atrocious. It's mostly romance novels and manga, and we don't have any Little Free Libraries. The nearest Goodwill is over an hour away, and the nearest used bookstore is about three hours away, and shipping adds up from Amazon, Thriftbooks, etc. 

I'm not saying I didn't - or wouldn't - support an interest. We did get books and find videos; she even has a translation of The Book of the Five Rings. But, no, I didn't bother setting aside time for it. That would feel too much like a class. 

Edited January 19 by vintagebooksandsunnybrooks
I accidentally wrote "three years" instead of "three hours."

[Amoret]

33 minutes ago, vintagebooksandsunnybrooks said:

I'm glad you have so many resources available!

Could you delete my quote, please? Thank you!

Edited January 19 by Amoret

[8filltheheart]

I agree with @wendyroo.  We don't study by any "fixed" standard, so your question wouldn't actually apply to our situation.  We don't use a grade-leveled curriculum.  We use what is appropriate for the individual student.  We work for appropriate amts of time for the age.  Being done for the day means they have completed all of the work that I have asked them to do. 

In terms of following interests, though, that we definitely do to a pt.  It doesn't mean that we don't study things they aren't interested in, but it does mean that we do expand on things that they are.  I have zero regrets with that approach.  My kids have all developed lifelong goals/interests that way.

[HomeAgain]

When youngest ds was home, we worked as long as appropriate on open ended subjects.  But I think part of your question is what is the point of education besides the acquisition of knowledge?

DS could do a lot at a young age, but he was also still very developmentally at the age he was.  Accelerating curriculum wouldn't have worked well because more developed skills like patience and fine motor control would have become bigger issues.  What worked best for him was to work in ways that were beneficial for him, AND focused on developmentally appropriate skills at the same time - including, as he got older, how to struggle and learn to study.  We looked for and found materials that would work with his physical age limits (like Calculus for Young People is fantastic, so is Gattegno math), or I made them for him, but I tried to keep the knowledge acquisition at a point where he would occasionally struggle or need to develop skills like learning how to write outlines, take notes, or methods of study. 

I didn't want my kid to flame out.  There's a balance there that always goes back to teaching to the child in front of you and teaching to the whole child, not just the parts they find easy.  I wanted to give him skills he could take into adulthood when he was faced with something that wasn't necessarily easy for him to learn.

[Clarita]

We accelerated our curriculum because DS asks for this to happen. It looks like we are working on a particular topic and he tells me "I already know this. Can I skip this?" Then I figure out what he can do to "prove" to me that he knows the material (sometimes I also already know he's mastered it, some lessons we just got onto the topic so I give him a problem as proof.)  Then if I'm satisfied with the results then we skip that section. The next day we just work on the next thing. He's never really doing more work than he would be if he didn't understand the material. There is no punishment. 

I'm not sure what you are suggesting though. Are you suggesting something like instead of skipping the material I would let him not do math for a week because the math lesson on adding numbers to 10 is a "week-long" lesson according to the curriculum?

[Lucy the Valiant]

21 hours ago, Lucy the Valiant said:

We ended when the day's work was done. Kids almost always had whole chunks of the afternoon to themselves - one of the most valuable treasures of the whole journey, in our home. ❤️

 

To clarify, our "school" day also looked a lot like what wendyroo is describing . . . but yes, I did ask the kids to do a certain amount of math each day (ours was a set time of steady progress vs a pre-planned "day" or "week" of a curriculum). And if the kids WANTED to "go deeper," we never stopped them, but we also didn't require MORE work once the day's goals had been reached.

And YES to following interest-led subjects, especially in the content areas (history, geography, pre-high school science, music - things where sequence is less important). The skill-based areas (math, foreign language, music performance, grammatical systems, cooking) were more parent-directed, primarily because some skills build on others (hard to do algebra without basic arithmetic first). 

One result of a lifetime of interest-led learning is that a young adult may look back and conclude that SO MANY things in life are SO interesting, and that learning about them is enjoyable and worthwhile. That's not a given, of course, but . . . it's a possibility. ❤️

[Dmmetler]

Yes. the day was done when it was done. It allowed a lot of time for independent projects-and also kept ME from having to be prepped too far in advance. In general, interest based projects, reading books, web based/computer based stuff---have at it kid. Stuff I had to prep, we did X amount per day or X time, whichever was finished first. (the latter rule was put into place when AoPS came into the mix, and I realized that my kid would literally sit for hours staring at a single question, getting more and more frustrated-and if I put the brakes on, about 30 minutes into building with lego or playing piano, it would be "Wait, I've got it!!".)  Still ended up accelerating a lot just because my kid doesn't need much repetition, but yeah, lots of school days that were completely done by noon. One reason why L took almost every class Athena's and G3 offered was that it made ME feel less like we weren't doing much even if the stuff I planned only took an hour if there was ALSO an hour of online discussion about a topic in the day!

 

One of the biggest, most important lessons to learn is that you don't have to go hard on everything all the time-and it's better to learn that at home than by burning out in college.