How To Homeschool

So you’re looking into homeschooling? Awesome!

It turns out that the internet is full of an infinite supply of ideas of things you could do. However, in my experience, what most people need is a simplification of what it means to homeschool, not a list of possibilities. So that’s what you’ll find here. We’re going to start with the big picture, just a wire-frame. Then I’ll give you links to travel down the rabbit trails that interest you most. (But let’s not be too harsh with those endless lists of possibilities. We homeschoolers love this stuff and love to share ideas! I’ve certainly scared people off a time or two!)

Homeschooling boils down to leading your children.

The best way to learn how to lead them is by doing it.

However, I’m a bit of a researcher, so I understand if you need more information than that! That’s why I’ve bothered to type this all out.

What you’ll find on this page (aka Table of Contents):

Content You might also like from other Pages:

First, Some Encouragement

Educating your children is a journey- but not the kind of journey where you’re backpacking through uninhabited wilderness. Instead, this is a journey where you’re surrounded by fellow travelers and restocking stations everywhere you look. You don’t need to know it all or have it all to get started!

In fact, if you have children, you’re already on this journey whether you realize it or not. You taught your child to walk and talk and eat by example and a little hand holding. You’ve read to them, played with them, and talked to them. All of education is like this! Parents with kids in public schools still need to teach their kids how to cook, clean, and be kind. All parents are teachers. In fact, parenting and educating are so similar they’re often hard to tell apart. So, I promise anyone CAN homeschool their child. In may ways, every parent already is.

Plus, you don’t have to commit to homeschool forever! Just pray about it and decide one year at a time. (Of course, your first year might be hardest since change is hard, but you’ll see the fruit of it as well.)

How To Think About Education 

Now, I’m sure you have some questions and objections- we’ll get to those. First, I want to help you structure your thinking so you can more easily take in all this information. When we think about homeschooling, we’re thinking about doing at home what a public school would usually do for a child. However, we don’t have to do it in the same way they would. In fact, why would we? The public school needs to educate 30-40 students using one teacher. We have a much lower student-to-teacher ratio, so we have all sorts of choices. There are 3 main choices you’ll need to make before you get started, but you can change your mind on your decisions anytime:

  1. What to teach? This is your content
    • What to teach when? Age matters!
  2. How to teach? This is your pedagogy 
  3. Who to do school with? This is your community or co-ops

We’ll look at these one at a time below:

Content- What To Teach:

There’s a ton of life skills that we all need to teach our kids, but here I want to focus on the 4 core content categories that homeschoolers teach instead of having the public or private school teach:

  1. Math
    • There are so many different choices but they don’t all cover topics in the same order, so you’ll want to pick one and stick with it if you can.
  2. Language Arts
    • Curriculum usually starts with reading & handwriting and then, when the student is ready, adds spelling, grammar, & writing
  3. Science
    • Pick from: biology, chemistry, ecology, astronomy, human physiology, etc
  4. Social Studies
    • History & then pick from: Geography, Government, economics, etc
  5. (Optional Electives)
    • This is where you add in Bible, art, music, physical education, typing…

You’ll want to pick out curriculum (as the age of your child indicates- see below) from each of these categories.

Keep in mind that kids remember very little of the actual content they learn in elementary school; they only seem to remember what is repeated over and over. With a subject like math, as soon as they learn a skill like counting, it’s then used every day learning the next skill: adding, which is used multiplying, which is used in algebra, which is used in calculus…. Because math builds, they remember the elementary school content. However, with a subject like science, they only seem to remember what’s repeated- like the scientific method, or the joy of discovery, or the science songs they sing over and over. Most kids forget the awesome science experiments and all the books we read to them.

You can pick a curriculum set that includes everything you need for all the subjects (a great way to start) or you can choose your own for each (many homeschoolers end up doing this eventually). I go back and forth on what I suggest. It seems to me that the box sets usually include way too much to do. However, I like the ease of “open and go.”

In the end I suggest you start with something. Ask a homeschool friend if you can even borrow their books. After a few weeks of teaching your kids you’ll know better how you like to teach and how your kids like to learn. If you’re truly starting from scratch, I’d buy the following (probably from RainbowResource.com or Ebay.com):

  1. Math
    • Saxon Math. Rainbow Resources has free placement tests if you need them, but I often find the books cheaper used on Ebay.
  2. Language Arts
  3. Science
    • I like Apologia’s science
  4. Social Studies

What Age to Start What Stuff

It’s important to realize that when kids are little, they learn primarily through play. We want to lean into that. There’s no reason to sit them down with text books and worksheets when they’re little! (a good way to destroy their love of learning!) However, as they get older and are trying to absorb a much higher quantity of information, learning from books becomes far more efficient. Of course at every age, play and exploration are still important, so be sure to leave room for it.

The age brackets you see here are just a rule-of-thumb. You know your child better than anyone else, so please focus on his/her readiness, not their age!

  • Birth to 6
    • Play, Explore & Read books aloud (some do their read aloud in a “Morning Time” as a whole family)
  • Kinder to 3rd
    • Add math and language arts (Reading, Handwriting, & Spelling) for 30-60 minutes each a day.
    • Make Science and Social studies part of the “Play, Explore & Read aloud”
    • Structured School is 1-2 hours a day.
  • 4th to 6th
    • Add a Writing and Grammar curriculum for 30-60 minutes each a day.
    • Structured School is 3-4 hours a day.
  • 7th to 12th
    • Full curriculum for Middle/High School.
    • Structured School is 6-7 hours a day.

Pedagogy- How To Teach:

OK, back to the 3 Main Choices- Second is “How to Teach.” This is your pedagogy (such a fun word)- it’s your style or approach of teaching, your theory of how we learn. Homeschoolers (like me) can really geek out on this stuff, but try not to get too bogged down in it here at the beginning of your homeschool journey.

You can spend a TON of time learning about each of these or you can just get started and figure it out as you go. Research or Jump in? Neither is wrong- which do you want to do? What do you have time for? Over the years, as you teach, you’ll start leaning towards one or more of these anyway, so don’t feel bad about just jumping in!

I actually suggest you skip this questions for now and revisit it after you have a year of homeschooling under your belt.

Still, I’ll try to summarize each style, but this is a dangerous task! People disagree with how to describe or implement each and there’s a lot of variety within each style. So at the risk of offending other homeschoolers, Here is my summary of Homeschooling Styles, their pros and cons, and what brands use each style. I also think it’s important to spend time thinking about The Purpose of Education.

I’m a big fan of The Classical Model of Education, so it’s the one I always suggest, but that’s just me.

Community- Who To School With

The longer I homeschool the more important I realize this is. God did not design us to be alone. We need community! Perhaps your family is big enough that it provides all the community you need, but life with be richer with a few other families in your life. I urge you to try out all the different groups around you, or maybe start your own.

Some groups are free and some are more expensive. If you’re looking at a group where some instruction is provided, you can calculate the dollars per hour of instruction or dollar per subject to compare.

Joining a community can feel a bit like joining a church. It’s full of people and relationships are messy. Still it’s worth it!

We’ve been part of one Classical Conversations (CC) community or another since 2012. Some years have been messier than others, but it’s been a consistent thread throughout our lives and both my children and I have reaped so many benefits. If you’re considering CC, and I highly suggest you do, here’s a few other resources that will help:

Government Money and ESA

Our family has been very blessed by our state’s ESA program. It’s allowed my kids to take extra PE classes and enroll in some online classes we might not have done otherwise. There’s a wide variety of opinions about taking government money in your homeschooling, but I really appreciated Ethan Demme’s words on the subject, so I’ll like to a recent podcast he appeared on: The Changing Face of Education.

If you’re looking for technical/legal information about how to change from public school to homeschool, I suggest you start with HSLDA and find a local state group (for example, Arizona’s AFHE group) to learn what paperwork you need to file.

Objections 

What other objections should I add to the list?

Allow me to raise some more ideas for you to consider about this…. 

The social aspect of homeschooling has long been a chief concern for many people who haven’t homeschooled long. However, anyone who’s homeschooled a while figures out that the social interactions and learning aren’t missing, so much as they are now another items for you, the parent, to create and direct. 

Socialization is really learning the traditions and norms of society- how to act. It’s different in different societies but also different in different social and ethnic groups- it’s a very cultural thing. Kids will learn it no matter what; you can’t keep them from it. If you stay at home all the time they will learn your family culture only and then have a harder time when in a culture different from your family. On the other extreme, if you travel all around the world with them, visiting and living in places with all sorts of different people spanning all sort of different economic and culture all backgrounds, they will learn how to act in many different cultures, but never fully adopt your personal family culture. Either extreme, or somewhere in between, you’ll still need to have conversations with them to help them to learn what is right. 

At a traditional school, children learn the social norms of that school. Each school culture has its own norms, but they are rarely taught with open conversations. In this school setting, children learn how to make and keep friends through trial and error with a variety of results. Some kids learn to close up and build protective walls around themselves, some kids learn to manipulate the culture to their own benefit. Rarely do you see kids learn how to be a good friend from school- they still need to learn that from home. In can absolutely be done, but it takes a lot more intentionality to stay connected to what your kids are doing and maintaining a teacher role in their life. 

At home, you’re constantly working on character and the right way to treat people during sibling interactions. Sibling interactions are often more candid and raw than interactions with kids from other families, allowing you to really see each child’s thoughts and fears. Every time you go out to a homeschool co-op or group, your child can interact with others, but then you get to have conversations about their behavior and talk about why it was or wasn’t right. As they (and you) get to know others in your group, you can see exactly who they’re hanging out with and what kind of influence the kids are having on each other. 

When homeschooling, you’re the teacher for everything, so it’s very natural for you to teach your kids about relationships. When your kids spend 8 hours a day learning from someone else, it’s a lot less automatic for your kids to come to you to learn, making it harder for you as a parent to teach them about relationships or anything else. 

So, in the end, I see the social aspects as a reason TO homeschool, not a reason not to.

I don’t think you ever “find” time or money for anything- you make time and money for what’s most important.

That being said, there are ways to homeschool that take more or less of either one or both. Don’t let these be the hurdle that keeps you from homeschooling. Instead, prioritize what’s important to you and find unique ways to make the most of what you have.

This could be a long series of articles all on it’s own, so I can’t fully address it here, but I know many people who homeschool their kids while having a side hustle or part time job. I’ve also seen people cut costs in other ways so they can live on one salary.

Where time is concerned, you’ll find homeschooling can take a lot of time or less time. It’s easy to keep adding stuff until it consuming every waking moment. I find I need to take a hard look at what we’re doing every few months to make sure I’m not making it more complicated that it needs to be.

This is why you have curriculum! It leads you through the process and you only have to stay one lesson ahead of your students.

You can also use outside resources like private tutors, co-op classes, online video courses, and the vast resources of the web. I especially like Kahn Academy.

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