Welcome to Our Homeschooling Community: Your Guide to Getting Started and Thriving

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Getting Started Homeschooling New to Homeschooling Resources

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Welcome. If you’re new here, chances are you’re new to homeschooling too, or thinking hard about it, and I want to say the thing I say to every family in their first year: you are going to need people. Not because you can’t do this on your own. Because you shouldn’t have to.

I was a school principal before I was a homeschool mom, and the part of the building I miss is not the curriculum or the schedule. It’s the staff room. The people who had already had my exact week. Here’s how to build one for yourself.

What homeschooling is, in one paragraph

Homeschooling is educating your children at home and out in the world, on your family’s terms, instead of inside a school system. It’s legal in every state, it looks different in every house, and it works for far more families than the myths would have you believe. If you’re at the very beginning, the eight steps we took as a family are the place to start, and HSLDA has your state’s rules. This post is about the part that comes after: not being alone in it.

Why community is not optional

The first year has a rhythm most of us don’t expect. September is exciting. October is hard. November brings the first am I ruining them night. Every homeschool mom I know has had that night, and the thing that got each of us through it was not a better curriculum. It was a text to another mom who said, “Oh, that. Yes. Here’s what we did.”

Your children need community too, and they’ll get it more easily than you will; children make friends at a park in eleven minutes. The one who needs a plan is you.

The one who needs a plan is you.

Where to look

Your local homeschool learning center or class day. Most areas have one now. Ours has been the center of our week for years: classes taught by parents and specialists, a place for the children to belong, and for me, a hallway full of people who get it. Search for “homeschool co-op,” “homeschool learning center,” or “class day” plus your town.

Mandy smiling at her kitchen table arranging flowers

Your library. Ask the children’s librarian. She knows every homeschool family in a ten-mile radius and which groups meet where. Some of my best friendships started at a library table with a mom whose stack of books looked suspiciously like mine.

Church, sports, music, scouts. Not homeschool-specific, and that’s the point. Your children will make friends across ages and settings, and you’ll meet parents who have room in their lives for a friendship.

Online, carefully. Facebook groups for your state are useful for legal questions and curriculum sales, and exhausting for everything else. Go in for a purpose, and come out.

Live online classes, for the interest you can’t teach and the friend group that comes with it. Outschool has been part of our week for years.

The Homebuilt Community

This is the part I’m most glad to tell you about. The Homebuilt Community is the staff room I wished for: homeschool moms from every state and every season, a growing shelf of free resources, and the answers to the questions you’d be embarrassed to ask anywhere else. It’s free to join, and it’s where I spend my own time.

Three things to do this week

Find one local thing — a class day, a park day, a library group — and go once. You don’t have to commit. You have to show up.
Text one homeschool mom you already know, even a little, and ask her one real question.
Join the community. It takes a minute, and you’ll have people by tonight.

Homeschooling is a journey of continuous learning, and not only for the children. It’s much better with company. Welcome to ours.

If you’re already in the thick of it and need more than encouragement, here’s how to know when and where to ask for help. The tools on our table are in my Amazon store.

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