First

After you’ve decided to homeschool, the next step is to meet your state’s requirements for homeschooling. How do you do that? You search online for your state’s homeschool requirements. Then begin to fulfill those requirements.

Don’t be scared. Once you begin, give it a month before you make a decision to go on with homeschooling or to return to public school. The first month will be hard. Homeschooling is foreign to most people. After that month of homeschooling has passed, you will know if it is torture for you, as the teacher. You will know if you are making any scholastic headway in your child’s education. Don’t expect a lot of accomplishment yet. After a month, you will know if your student has the potential to succeed in the homeschooling world. If you decide you want to keep trying, then begin to streamline your way of teaching to make it better.

Plan

First choose a way to teach. Choose a plan that goes with your lifestyle as a family. Are you a very active family? Is your family into sports? Is your family very involved participating in baseball games? Are you community-minded? Are you active in your church? Are you, as a family, more of a homebody? Does your family get up early in the morning? Do you stay up late at night? Is your family always in a rush? Does your family like to plan ahead or to be spontaneous? These questions are important because the answers will tell you what hours you need to teach, and how you need to teach.

Make sure to take into consideration your student’s learning style. There are several learning styles. There can also be a combination or more than one learning style per person. These learning styles are the following: 1) Visual is images, reading, and watching. 2) Auditory is hearing. 3) Doing is hands-on learning. 4) Reading and writing is visual and words.

The student with a visual learning style learns more easily from charts, graphs, and pictures. Anything visual for this student (maybe just reading or seeing things written down) will be beneficial. The student with an auditory learning style will learn easily from audiobooks, or tv shows. The student with a doing or hands-on learning style learns by doing; therefore, this child learns easily from science kits, etc. The student with a reading and writing learning style learns best by textbooks with questions to answer in writing, or reading books that require a written report. There is a likely chance that the student has a combination learning style. Perhaps the child is an audio/visual learner. You will find that educational TV shows are an excellent way for that child to learn. Let’s say the child is a doing/visual learner. That child may excel in school kits, projects, or games with written instructions.

Choose curriculum (this means the program or textbooks you will use) based upon all of the information above. You need to consider how many students you will be homeschooling, and how involved you are going to be with each student. Sometimes it seems best to order the same brand of textbook (also known as a curriculum) for each student that you are teaching. Then teach the old-fashioned way, that is, you are set up as the teacher and your students are set up at a desk. These textbooks you can re-use as your younger students become old enough. There are other options.

There are co-op schools. They are sometimes run by a church or as an off-shoot of public schools and can be funded by the state. This may be your option because there are a lot of people involved in running these schools. You, as a parent/teacher are required to volunteer at a co-op. The jobs vary from teaching a class, or helping provide lunch for students, or helping in some other way. This option will mean that you may be driving your students to classes at different times. If you have many children, this option can mean you are too busy. Sometimes this option is perfect for the social family.

There are other curriculums. There are online curriculums and apps that you can buy. Teaching Textbooks is an app. You can even make up your own curriculum. You can make up your own curriculum based upon free options that are available. You can use the public library, tv documentaries or YouTube how-to videos. You can use learning websites (please make sure the websites are from reputable sources). I will talk more about curriculums and where to find them in future articles.

Meals and Chores

If you do homeschooling correctly, you are going to be shocked at the amount of time it takes. Homeschooling will affect your meal prep time and routine chores. Here are some ways to help that may work for you.

• Have freezer meal prep with your students one day per month.
• Use a service like Hello Fresh to help you with your meals.
• Be okay with things from the store (like chicken fingers, boxed rice meals, Hamburger Helper, Steam Fresh vegetables, bag salad, or food from the deli food case, etc.)

Homeschooling will effect a family’s chore time. All I can say is…schedule chore time into your day.

Congratulations!

You have taken the first steps to assure your children have an excellent education. I’m very proud of you. I will leave you with some final comments.

When testing the curriculum that you chose, you will either know right away that it isn’t working, or in one to three months.

The first month of homeschooling your children can be rough. Everyone involved is adjusting. Children can be hard to handle, and adults can be frustrated. Plus, it is an added job for the new teacher–that’s you! Just be willing to adjust to your circumstances. You will overcome! Pre-plan and add an element of fun to homeschooling.

NOTE: There are some parents that can’t teach homeschooling, and some students that really don’t belong in homeschool the traditional way. A student may need a more social atmosphere. (There are other reasons as well.) It’s okay. There are other ways to provide you with what you need. We will talk about that in a later article.

Please check out my videos on YouTube at homeschoolchatwithkatie.com for more help.

Have a blessed day!