UnSchooling Worksheet

Our oldest kid should be starting Kindergarten right now. We did a homeschool co-op for preschool, but this year we are choosing to go a step further and "unschool." Unschooling has a lot of definitions, but to our family it is learning what we want to learn, when we want to learn about it. It is about parent/child mentorship, and passion instead of pressure. I am a student of homeschooling while my kids are students of life. We are both learning as much as we can. 

​In order to provide a little more "structure" to our "unschool," we have started a series of goals around tracking how many hours we spend on key subjects to Kindergarten and Preschool. 

The average minimum hours of instruction for Kindergarten is 450 (in Idaho). If we do 500 hours in a year for each subject; we will far exceed instruction requirements, and I think our kids have fun seeing it this way (I know I do). For additional reference, instruction time for grades 1-3 are 810 hours and grades 4-8 are 900 hours.

The subjects that we are focusing on for each of our 500 hour goals are as follows:

• ABC's/123's (workbooks, singing, flashcards, etc.)
• Games (physical activity, learning board games, card games, etc.)
• Art (painting, coloring, etc.)
• Reading (aloud and quiet time)
• Science (experiments, cooking, exploring nature, microscope time, etc.)
• Outdoors - this is actually a 1000 hour goal for the year!

(Five subjects with 500 hours = 2500 hours, if we only do half we still have double "hours of instruction" for a traditional school.)

Other "subjects" we try to touch on daily but don't track progress on are as follows:

• Freeplay
• Legos
• Music

Download a free copy of the 500 hour tracker here:

sssprinkles_unschool_grid_of_hours.pdf
File Size:	157 kb
File Type:	pdf

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