No snow days in homeschool: Parents say they value the flexibility afforded by providing lessons at home

While many teachers and students had a bad-weather hiatus for the better part of last week, Christina Green never missed a beat with her students.

First, she had them shovel the driveway Wednesday — part chore, part physical education — followed by lunch and a series of assessment tests.

Green homeschools three of her four children: Gavin, 9, Carson, 8, and Macy, 6.

"The neat thing about home schooling is that a normal day for us is, we get up and have breakfast and morning time, we start around 8 [a.m.] and typically can get everything done around noon," she said. "It's so concentrated. I don't have to work with 30 kids. I can work with three and the older ones help Macy, if I get busy with Trace. She's just starting to read."

Trace, at 3, is too young for formal lessons, but "he's doing matching games and stuff like that. I just try to pull out stuff for him to play with," said Christina Green. "We have Play Doh and an Aqua Doodle ... he likes to scribble on that."

In the Green household, school is a year-round occupation, Christina said, which allows the flexibility to respond to weather emergencies or illness as well as take advantage of a nice day — when she might call off school in favor of a day riding horses at a relative's farm.

Otherwise, "nothing really changes. We get our school chores done and then we play, then we start dinner," she said.

Missouri law requires parent who teach at home to provide 1,000 hours of instruction during the school year. A minimum of 600 hours must be devoted to reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies and science; 400 of those hours must be taught in the home.

"I keep track of that and of my lesson plans," she said.

She decided to do assessments because the packet recently arrived in the mail. Green uses a variety of methods to teach math, spelling, reading, writing and grammar. She includes Spanish lessons and science in the classwork along with devotional studies and general life skills.

She has two bachelor's degrees, in mathematics and education, and a master's degree in natural science with an emphasis in math. She taught at Southeast Missouri State University for 18 months and for three years at the Alternative Education Center for Cape Girardeau Public Schools and one year of seventh-grade math for Jackson Public Schools as well as during a part-time job for Oak Ridge Schools.

She decided to teach at home while still pregnant with Gavin.

"A really good friend of the family had just started home schooling and I was always impressed with their children and how well they behaved," she said.

She has another reason for teaching at home. Her husband, James Green, is an associate pastor at Cape Bible Chapel, "and we wanted to instill Biblical values and give them a Biblical view so they can stand strong in the world as they face the temptations growing up," she said.

Gaven Green said he likes the flexibility of learning at home.

"We just have so much more extra time, because we have the required amount we have to do in all the different things, so if we can get it done faster, we do that," he said.

But Gavin, laughing, pointed out one thing he has in common with most students, whether they take classes at home or inside a schoolhouse:

"The only thing I would change is to not have school all."

pmcnichol@semissourian.com

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