Your First Year of Homeschooling
Whether you’re just beginning to consider homeschooling or you’re finally ready to get started after years of preparation, let us be the first to congratulate you and welcome you to the wonderful world of homeschooling! It isn’t uncommon to get an email asking where a new homeschooler should start. Here are our best tips, tricks, and random thoughts for you in hopes that some will prove helpful to you!
Learning Styles
If you haven’t already done so, determine how your child learns best. Usually, the simplest way to guess this is by how you were best able to soothe him/her as a young child or infant. Watching people and objects will soothe a visual baby. An auditory baby is soothed by sounds/singing. The kinesthetic baby just needs to move or be moved – bouncing, rocking. This will help you decide what the best curriculum for them is- the most traditional curriculum is designed for the visual learner and is easily translated for the auditory child. Kinesthetic programs are harder to find but worth the effort if that is how they will learn best. (For more information on this, we highly recommend Talkers, Watchers, & Doers by Cheri Fuller. ISBN #1-57683-599-5.)
Pick an Approach for this Year
To get the ‘big picture’ of homeschooling, you may want to try checking out various homeschooling books from the library. The Charlotte Mason Companion and Ruth Beechick’s books are great starting points. There are many different methods, and you may want to decide what will work best for your family up front. Or, you may simply want to figure out the details as you go—this approach works well for many families!
Curriculum Package or Custom Curriculum?
Many new homeschoolers like to start with a curriculum package for the first year. This lets them relax knowing everything is covered and get their feet wet with a complete plan. There are those adventurous parents, though, who would rather hand-pick each element of their child’s curriculum. You and your child will benefit when you are ready to do this.
One word of caution here, though, is that I know some moms who are committed to teaching, loving, and training their children but are completely overwhelmed when analyzing curriculum components for their children. Relax! Maybe you aren’t as much of an educational geek as the mom leading the homeschool group, so what? That makes her perfect for that job, but you don’t need to be her. You don’t feel bad about using a mechanic, so why agonize over curriculum particulars? Find a reliable source, ask your friends, and then focus on helping your children learn. That’s the good part anyway!
Get the Big Picture
You will have days that you’ll ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. At some point, take a minute to write down why you are homeschooling. For instance, if your primary goal is to give your child a family-focused environment, a day spent at the hospital getting stitches is no less a success than the first time he reads an entire book. If your goal is one-on-one instruction, then the hour you spent working on math during the baby’s only nap still puts you miles ahead of the teacher who would have been juggling 24 students all day.
Placement Tests
Unless this is your child’s first year of school, you’ll probably have questions about where to start. We offer free placement tests for most of our kits and specific subjects. If you still have questions about where to start, please contact us. We'd love to help!
Make a Decision for this Year, Then Move Forward
Thinking ahead is important, but don’t feel like you need to have the rest of your school years planned out now. Decide for this year, and then reevaluate at the end of the year.
For instance, you may be torn between Math-U-See and Horizons Math. Pick one for this year, and tell yourself (and perhaps your child) that you’ll reevaluate at the end of the year. That way, you can settle down to work through the curriculum without constantly looking over your shoulder for a better way.
Chat with Your Child
You’re the parent and the teacher, so you make all final decisions, of course, but part of our planning each year includes getting together with your students and finding out their goals and aspirations. For instance, if they want to learn about astronomy this year rather than botany, why not? Or, if they have always wanted to learn how to sew, you could add a home economics portion to this year’s plan.
Plan an Annual Schedule and Weekly Checklists
Our curriculum kits include free access to our online scheduler. This makes it easy to customize your schedule to meet your family's needs.
Here's how we used to do it manually:
Our family made two lists for each child at the beginning of the year. The first was the annual plan. This included every school book we planned to get through that year, as well as how many pages/lessons were included. We then determined how many weeks we planned to do school that year. A typical school year is 36 weeks long, but you may wish to do school year-round, take two weeks off for vacation, or other variations. It is then simple math to determine that the 144-chapter book should be completed at a pace of 4 chapters a week.
Once we had a yearly plan, it was easy to make a weekly checklist. We simply listed all the books/curricula from our annual list with a checkbox for each lesson or page. As we completed a page or lesson, we could check it off our lists. Even pre-readers can enjoy crossing things off their list to do each week. Independent learning is our goal, and a weekly checklist helps us get there.
Set a Goal
For most children, it will be important to have a reward for completing the list and a consequence for not getting it done. For us, this was a weekly family night. We would plan to watch videos or play games on Friday night, and all who had their list done could participate. Each of us had weeks where we put off school until the very last minute and bore the consequences, but in the process, we learned about time management and responsibility in a very practical way!
Have a Backup Plan
Start another list of educational things you want to do someday with your child. Label it Field Trips, and set it aside for those days when you both would do better with a breath of fresh air. Not sure where to start? Grab a tourist’s guide to your city and look for local landmarks, vistas, businesses, etc. Call the local fire department and see if you can get a tour. Visit the zoo. Explore the beach/lake/mountain/river/canyon/fossil field, or other geological features. The possibilities are endless.
Connect With Others
In the “olden days,” this meant joining a local homeschool group and attending homeschool conventions. While that is still an invaluable resource for many families, other options include finding like-minded homeschooling influencers or connecting with friends and groups on social media. The important thing is to have a handful of people who can provide help, encouragement, and a vision for your homeschool.
Change As Needed
Learning is hard work sometimes, and your children will soon discover that. But if math brings them to tears every day, you will want to step back and try to figure out what is going on. Is the program best suited to their learning style? Is there too much repetition? Not enough? Do they understand the work? Is it possible that they have missed a foundational skill? Perhaps they simply need glasses!
Remember, You Can Do This!
After all, you already taught your child to walk and talk, both incredibly complex skills! Each state varies on what it requires, so you should check with HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) to find out what you need to know. Legal questions aside, while planning out your child’s education may seem scary, it is not overwhelming. You do not need to teach your child everything. Instead, teach him how to learn, as this is the most essential skill he’ll ever develop. After that, whether he needs to learn algebra or firefighting, simply point him to the right resources and watch him go.
What If You Leave Out Something Important In Your Child’s Education?
Quick, what was the cause of World War I? How do you divide a fraction? Does a tendon connect muscle to bone or bone to bone? If you didn’t know one of those things, did you panic? I hope not! If you think back over everything your teachers sought to drill into you, how much did you retain? Not nearly as much as they’d hoped! This has not made you a “less successful” person, nor would it keep you from learning any skill you suddenly found you needed or wanted. If your child learns how to learn, he will be much better prepared for life than many high school graduates.
Here at Timberdoodle, we like to say that school is for people who don’t have a life. This means that if you teach your child the essentials and he uses the rest of his time to live life, he will likely score better on his exams than his peers do and be much more well-rounded than if he sat in a classroom all day attempting to absorb information he cannot relate to.
Ask Questions
We are always happy to answer questions, even if they are unrelated to our products. We are much more concerned that you find what works than that you buy our materials! So, if you have any specific questions, please contact us, and we will try to help you find products that will work for you and your family.
More Articles
Finally, here are a handful of our most helpful links and articles: