Thread: How much of your "home"schooling time is outside the walls of your home?

I came across this article today, and I fell in love with the term "Outschooling." <3 I just wondered...if you were able to quantify, how much of your dedicated learning time is at home, and how much is out in the world beyond your four walls?

Outschooling in the Bay Area - amir.io

Fun article! All of our core subjects (stuff like math, writing) we do at home. My kids will take occasional classes some are for homeschoolers some are for all kids. Most of the classes are enrichment for them. There are a handful of big co-ops around here, but nothing as cool as in the article, many are religious.

Interesting article. I liked the author's phrase "Airbnb for learning activities."

I didn't answer the poll, though, because the amount of time my kids "outschooled" increased as they got older. In elementary and middle school years, learning time at home was probably around 75%. In high school, it was closer to 25%. DH and I readily admit that we outsourced their high school education for some parts. I was more guidance counselor than instructor.

We are doing school a lot less than I'd anticipated. However, the weather is nice now. Throw this up in August/Sept and it will be 90% at home because it's too hot to be outside!

It really depends. This winter, we hardly went out. We had too much snow and driving around was difficult. So now that the weather is nice we are getting out more and we are leaving town for almost the whole summer.

DS does not like anything organized, so we don't do co-ops or anything like that. It is all through what kinds of things we can do on our own.

I can't vote... it has changed over time.

I just skimmed the article, but it honestly seemed very limited to me in some ways. To me, part of schooling in the world is just doing school outside or in the library. And it's using workshops and museum tours and nature walks and so forth. And it's doing experiments at the stream or historical re-enactments. This article seemed like it was mostly about classes. Which, whatever. That's fine. My kids do some classes. No surprise though that a bunch of Silicon Valley types think that paying too much for a bunch of other institutions is somehow superior to paying for a single school institution.

Right now we do all our primary academics at home. That will probably change in high school.

But we used to spend a lot more time when the kids were younger in museums and hanging out with others and doing workshops and small co-ops. Because school used to take less time.

I think the supposition that you can achieve everything kids do in public schools in a couple of hours at home all the way through high school is a load of complete bs.

Originally Posted by farrarwilliams

To me, part of schooling in the world is just doing school outside or in the library. And it's using workshops and museum tours and nature walks and so forth. And it's doing experiments at the stream or historical re-enactments.

right there with you, Farrar! Although outsourcing was definitely a part of our journey, it was the field trips, the nature-schooling, the library trips, the outdoor science experiments, etc that so enriched our experience. For me "Outschooling" would definitely mean Out-in-the-world-schooling