First Steps in Home Education
This short guide is designed to accelerate you from zero to thirty in five minutes. It is assembled from information gathered from several homeschooling books, conferences, personal experience, and countless web sites. Let's start with first things first.
1. Know why you are home educating
Clarify in writing your individual family's reasons for homeschooling and the outcomes you desire. Are your reasons educational, social, religious, other, a mixture? Do you plan to graduate your child to an ivy league school? A local university? No college? Do you want to raise an entrepreneur, a professional, a missionary, an artist, a politician, a teacher, a mom? What values do you want to instill in your child?Clarifying your reasons in writing greatly simplifies your choice of curriculum, activities, support groups, tutors, and other decisions you will make. You also will be able to assess your progress and make any necessary adjustments with more ease and assurance.
This step is very important. If you don't know what you are trying to accomplish by homeschooling, you won't know whether or not you have been successful, or whether you are educating your child according to the goals and personality best suited to someone else.
Click here to use a tool on this site to help you clarify your reasons
2. Find out about legal requirements in your area
If you live in the United States you can click to locate a legal summary for your state. Outside the U.S., you can click to locate information for your country.
3. Educate yourself
Accepting responsibility for your child's education is certainly a serious endeavor. You may be feeling excited with anticipation, overwhelmed by the responsibility and choices, or perhaps burdened by what has become a necessary change for your child's education.Whatever you may be feeling, educating yourself on the topic of homeschooling will ease your journey considerably. By reading only a few introductory books you will begin to get the lay of the homeschooling land and you will likely to see a plan for you and your children start to fall into place.
Once you understand the basics and begin homeschooling your child, continue your reading habit. You will probably not need to consume books at the same rate, but continue at a steady trickle. There is an amazing difference between providing a good education for your child and providing a challenging, custom-tailored education so your child will display confidence at the highest levels in any arena of life. Making continuous, small improvements that will have an amazing impact over time.
4. Find local support
In addition to teaching at home, you can pool resources with other parents offering classes or register your child for classes in your community. You can also find encouragement, support and practical advice by joining a group. But watch out! You are likely to make a lot of friends along the way.Here are the most common ways to interact with the homeschool community.
Parent support groups
These take place in online forums, email groups, or in person at small meetings. The purpose is to exchange information and ideas, encourage one another, and to enjoy traveling on a common journey.
Co-ops
In an educational co-op parents contribute by using their individual areas of expertise or study to offer classes tailored to the needs of the children. They usually meet once a week to supplement the core curriculum being taught at home and to provide an additional arena for developing friendships.
They may also pool their resources to hire instructors in areas where there is not a parent in the group who is able to provide that instruction.
Fee-based homeschool classes
Fee-based classes offer a hybrid approach to education. They are unlike public and private schools in that the parent is still the primary educator, but a paid teacher or tutor supplements home learning by teaching certain subject areas.
Community class offerings
There are numerous places, such as recreation centers and YMCA's that offer classes for kids that can complement your home education. And, increasingly, there are sports teams, arts & science programs, bands, orchestras and other groups that are formed exclusively for homeschoolers.
Groups you are already involved in
Your church or other groups you are involved in likely include homeschooling families that would be glad to share information and encouragement.
Homeschool resource centers
These don't seem to be as widespread yet, but some cities have designated rooms for homeschool resources. You can peruse various curricula and even check them out to try at home.
Park days
Kids have lots of energy, and parks are a good outlet for it. Sometimes moms will announce that they are visiting a park and invite others to join them. This can be a standing event, or can be announced on very short notice. Parks are good places to meet homeschool families that you might not run into through other avenues and is another valuable place to develop friendships and exchange information.
If your city is represented on the Homeschool Infocenter, look under the Support Groups section for a listing of groups in your area. If you are aware of additional groups that are not on the list, please leave your research behind for those following behind you.
5. Prepare a budget
Pick a starting figure. Any reasonable figure will do since you will probably adjust it quickly. Then, if you are married, discuss it with your spouse. Before we did this, my budget was $0. We knew we would end up spending a lot more than that. But that was my mental budget, so I felt guilty about every purchase. In later years, we set a figure based on past purchases and current income. We had to exercise a lot of self-restraint because we wanted so much for our children. But it was a joy to purchase the items we eventually decided on since we had already allocated the money beforehand.Costs for schooling one child can vary from $300 to $3,000 to more than $50,000 per year, with the average cost being $546 according to one estimate.
6. Attend State or local Homeschool Conferences
You can jumpstart your progress in all of these areas by attending a homeschool conference. You will hear from veterans and learn what they did right and, just as important, what they did wrong. You will be encouraged to see hundreds or thousands of others taking the same journey with you.Also, you will want to plan plenty of time to spend in the vendor hall. You can browse through new and used materials, and sometimes you can ask questions of the authors in person.
Each year there will be a different mix of sessions that will interest you. Your goals will be refined, and you may even hear some of the same things you heard before and glean new insights from them.
Some people attend a conference as soon as they make the decision to homeschool their children, sometimes even before they have children. And it is more valuable to go as a couple, no matter which parent is the primary educator.
7. Start evaluating curricula
This can be the most exciting and most overwhelming step for some. There are thousands of resources available, and the choices are increasing every year. It is helpful to know that in each subject area there are a handful of time-tested materials that have a wide following, and there are also a handful of comprehensive curriculum sets that are widely used. Then there is a host of materials which are lesser used, but still may be the perfect fit for you and your child.Start by comparing a few curricula to each other to understand what the differences are. Then go back to your list of reasons from step 1 above and look at them again through the lens of your priorities. Your reasons can change over time, so your selections will probably change as well. It's not uncommon to make several overhauls during a child's education.
The vendor area at homeschool conferences is a great place to put your hands on the resources and examine them in depth. Also, if possible, borrow a curriculum from a friend and try it out for a week or two before making a purchasing decision.
One tip from old timers - Don't buy too much too soon. You may invest a lot of money in an expensive set and visit a friend a week later to find that she has just the program that is suited to your child. Many parents will testify that many of the purchases they made in the excitement of the moment are gathering dust, while other well-considered purchases were worth every penny they paid for them.
The description for the Eclectic approach has a useful list of popular curriculum choices sorted by subject to help you get started.
8. Get Started. Refine as you go.
You are going to make mistakes. School teachers make mistakes, and so will you. So don't wait until you are perfect before you start. If possible, you may want to consider starting before Kindergarten age. You don't need a full-blown program, and it could be as short as 10 minutes to half an hour a day. The important thing is that you will begin to think of yourself as your child's teacher. It will give you a chance to begin working out your schedule and see where you may need additional resources or suggestions to help you reach your goals.Even if you are not able to start that early, remember that homeschooling is a long-term prospect. You don't have to determine your successfulness after a single year, and at any time you can switch resources, procedures, schedules, programs, tutors, etc. to get the results you are after.
9. Consider joining a legal defense organization
Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, but there are officials here and there that are not fully acquainted with the law, or have their own agenda. Legal defense organizations will defend you should that be the case, but for obvious reasons you need to join before an incident occurs.Even if you decide not to join a legal defense organization you should at least familiarize yourself with your parental rights and know how to respond in the unlikely event that a social worker appears at your door one day.
10. Evaluate unnecessary classroom habits
Most of us have not been homeschooled ourselves, so we are trying to impart to our children something outside our experience. We can acquire experience vicariously from books and the stories of others, but it is so easy to repeat habits from our school days simply because we have not thought of replacements for them.It may be helpful to consider public schools and why they are the way they are. Learning occurs in time-limited segments in a single building. A lot of what students experience is due to the nature of the schools having a high student-to-teacher ratio - students are grouped with other kids their same age, they study at the same pace, they are graded and evaluated using techniques that work for large classes, they have a preselected set of subjects to pick from, and they are taught from the prevailing values within the system.
As a homeschool parent, you can be more efficient in the use of your time. You can choose when to school, you can choose where to school, you can adjust the pace to each of your children in each subject area, you can choose exotic topics to study, you can review areas until they 'get it' before moving on, and you can model and teach your family values.
And, finally, you can jettison the concept of "average". There is only your child. Every child can excel once you discover their individual giftings and provide them with encouragement and resources. Not all of our children may be like some of the founding fathers who graduated from Harvard or served as U.S. Ambassador overseas before they were 20 years old, but they can accomplish more good than we realize when they have our support and encouragement.
"Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther."
- Thomas Carlyle
Revised 3/8/08