Hours, Hours, Hours

In Missouri, we need to fulfill 1000 hours of instruction each year as homeschoolers. It really is the equivalent of the public schools, but at the same time, different because we do not face the same time issues as teachers in public schools.

If you look at the school day in public schools - school starts at (in Columbia) 8:50 AM in elementary schools, and goes until children are dismissed at 3:45; basically a 7-hr school day. After factoring in homeroom for attendance, lunch and recess, the "instructional time" is about 5.75-hours a day, or 1000-hrs a year in a 174-day school year.

What exactly is "instructional time" then?

Honestly, I don't know - but I can guess that in school it's the time allotted for a particular subject, not necessarily the time spent specifically teaching the subject or doing the work in the subject. If math is scheduled from 11:00-11:45, then it's 45-minutes of math in school.

So how do homeschoolers keep track of hours?

On this, there are two schools of thought - one is that hours of instruction are literal, you record the hours in each subject based on exactly how many you were actually teaching or having your child do work in the subject; the other is based on time-slot management of subjects, followed like the public schools, if you finish early it's the designated time, if you take longer, it's the designated time.

I tend toward the more literal myself, recording hours based on what is actually done, not a time-slot schedule. We usually have no problem fulfilling the 1000-hour requirement since we homeschool year-round - in fact we go way over in hours each year, even with ending our school year in early May for our break from "formal" instruction (seat work) until July.