As a home schooling parent the general idea is to keep the children gainfully occupied doing things that they can learn skills from. If they are not studying their school books, you will line up educational and informative activities for them to do. This stems from a belief that if the children do not have something to do they will get into trouble or fall behind their peers who are in regular school. While getting them to do these activities will help them gain an advantage it can also have a negative effect on the children. Having free time to themselves to indulge in activities that they want to is also important for well rounded development of a child.
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The concept of free time is essentially time that is unstructured and unregulated by adults. The child knows that during that hour or two in the day he can indulge in any activity, which is safe and acceptable to the parent on his own terms. This is where the creativity of the child will begin to bloom. Here is how the child will be able to break free from the daily routine or scheduled tasks, chores and activities to do what he wants. Even if what he wants to do is nothing more than sit and day dream.
The primary reason why home schooling parents don’t cater for free time is that the child tends to come back to them within the first ten minutes saying he’s bored and he doesn’t know what to do. Don’t immediately come up with ideas for activities to fill up the free time. Let them be and you will be astonished at all the different ways that they will come up to entertain themselves with. It can take a while initially for them to get going since you have always scheduled their day for them and they will not know instantly what they can do with the free time. Just make sure that they don’t use the time to sit and watch TV or play video games. The idea is to get them away from screens and activate their dormant imaginations.
Article Inspiration: About Homeschooling
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