8 Helpful Steps to Start Homeschooling : A Family’s Guide

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Getting Started Homeschooling New to Homeschooling Resources

Something has shifted, or you wouldn’t be here. Maybe it was a conference with a teacher who clearly cared and clearly couldn’t help. Maybe it was a child who stopped wanting to go. Maybe it was just a quiet Tuesday when you looked at your family’s week and thought, there has to be another way to do this.

I spent years inside schools as a teacher and then a principal, and I now homeschool my own three at the kitchen table. I’ve watched hundreds of families make this decision and I’ve made it myself. Here is what I would tell any family sitting where you’re sitting, in the order I’d tell it.

Step 1: Know your why

Before the curriculum catalogs, before the Pinterest boards, sit down together and finish this sentence: We are homeschooling because…

It doesn’t have to be profound. “Because our mornings were miserable” is a perfectly good why. So is “because she reads three grades ahead and is bored to tears,” or “because we want our faith at the center of the day,” or “because we want more time together while they’re still small.”

Write it down. Ours is on the fridge. On the hard days, and there will be hard days, it is the sentence that reminds you why the hard is worth it. On the confusing days, it is the compass: does this curriculum, this activity, this schedule serve our why? If not, you’re allowed to let it go.

Write your why down. Ours is on the fridge.

Step 2: Learn what your state requires

Homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, but the states do not agree on what it looks like. Some ask for nothing. Some want a letter of intent, a list of subjects, attendance records, an annual test or portfolio review. I can’t tell you your state’s rules in a blog post, and neither can anyone else. Go to the source: HSLDA’s state-by-state guide lays out exactly what is required where you live, including how to withdraw a child who is already enrolled.

Read your state’s page twice. Then do what it asks, in writing, and keep a copy. Compliance is not the exciting part of homeschooling, but it is the part that lets you sleep at night, and it takes an evening.

Step 3: Decide what homeschooling will look like for your family

This is the step families skip, and it’s the one that decides whether year one feels like freedom or like running a tiny, underfunded school.

Two girls doing schoolwork together at a kitchen table

Start with the truth that homeschooling does not look like a school day. There are no lines, no announcements, no twenty-five children waiting their turn. Formal learning takes a fraction of the time you’d expect: an hour or two a day in the early grades, three or four by high school. The rest of the day is reading, playing, cooking, errands, the library, the woods, and all of it counts.

So instead of a timetable, sketch a rhythm. When are your children at their best? When are you? Who is home, and when? A family with a nursing baby, a family with two working parents, and a family with a teenager who wants to sleep until nine will all build different days, and all three can work. If your children are coming out of school, plan a real break before you begin anything formal. We call it deschooling, and it matters more than any purchase you’ll make.

Step 4: Set up the admin

In a school, a whole office handles the paperwork. At home, that office is you. The good news is that a homeschool’s admin fits in one binder, or one spreadsheet, and once it exists it mostly runs itself.

The legal file: your letter of intent, any state forms, and your withdrawal confirmation.
A simple record of what you did: a weekly line or two, plus a folder of work samples. This is your portfolio if your state asks for one, and your transcript when a teenager needs one.
A calendar: your start date, your end date, and the breaks you’re taking on purpose.

That’s it. Do not buy a planner system you have to maintain. The simplest record you’ll actually keep beats the beautiful one you abandon in October.

Step 5: Learn how your child learns

One of the deepest reasons families come home is that a system built for the average child was never built for their child. This is where you get to fix that, and the tool is not a quiz. It’s a conversation.

Ask your child what they loved at school and what they dreaded. Ask which teacher they’d follow anywhere and why. Ask what they’d learn about if nobody assigned anything. Then watch. Notice when they lean in and when they check out. Notice whether they need to move, talk, draw, or sit in silence to think.

You will not understand your child completely by week two. You’ll understand them better by week ten, and better still by spring. That’s the whole point: nobody else in the world gets to do this study of one, and it is the thing that makes a homeschool education better than the one I used to run.

Step 6: Choose a curriculum, last, and less than you think

I’ve put this sixth on purpose. Families who start with the catalog end up shaping their whole home around someone else’s boxes. Families who start with their why, their state, their rhythm, and their child end up choosing curriculum that fits, and choosing less of it.

I don’t recommend one curriculum, and here is why. What I do recommend is this: pick something solid for reading and math, leave the rest of the day open at first, and add subjects as you find your feet. Whatever you buy needs to meet your state’s requirements and, more importantly, work in your actual house on an actual Wednesday. If it doesn’t, you are allowed to stop using it. That is not failure. That is the freedom you came here for.

Step 7: Find your people

The socialization question gets asked so often that I wrote a whole post about it, but the honest short answer is that homeschooled children are out in the real world all day, with people of every age. What you need to plan for is the people part for the parent.

Look for a homeschool learning center or class day near you, a church or library group, a co-op, a park day. Wild + Free has groups all over the country. Ask at the library; librarians always know. And you’re warmly invited into the Homebuilt Community, which is free and is where the moms who’ve done every one of these steps hang out. I wrote about finding your people in more depth here.

Step 8: Stay open to changing all of it

Here is what nobody tells you at the start: the plan you make in August will be a different plan by October, and that is homeschooling working, not failing. What fits a seven-year-old won’t fit her at ten. The curriculum that was perfect for one child will bore the next. Life will hand you a new baby, a move, a hard season, and your homeschool will bend to hold it.

Being able to change the plan to meet the needs of your children is the single greatest advantage you have over the school down the street. Use it without guilt.

Eight steps to start homeschooling: know your why, learn your state's rules, decide what it looks like for your family, set up the admin, learn how your child learns, choose curriculum last, find your people, stay open to change

Before you go buy anything

If you’re feeling the panic of are we behind already, read this first. Then go back to Step 1 and write your sentence. You already have what it takes. You’ve had it since the quiet Tuesday.

Every one of these steps is a chapter in The Homeschool Bible™, with the worksheets to go with them. And the Homebuilt Community is free to join, full of families a few steps ahead of you. Come find your people.

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