How to Get Started Homeschooling

3 min read

Getting Started Homeschooling New to Homeschooling Resources

There are wonderful courses and paid guides for first-time homeschool parents, and some of them are worth every penny. But if you’re a “search bar” mama like me, most of what you need to get started is free and simple to find, once you know what you’re looking for. Here is the short list.

1. Learn your state’s homeschooling requirements

Start here, before anything else. Every state allows homeschooling and every state does it a little differently: some want a letter of intent, some want yearly testing or a portfolio, some want nothing at all. HSLDA is the most complete resource I know. Pick your state and you’ll find everything from how to withdraw a child from public school to which subjects are required. Read it, do what it says, keep a copy.

2. Get to know the big homeschool philosophies

Charlotte Mason, classical, unit studies, Montessori, unschooling, eclectic, school-at-home. You do not have to pick one and you certainly don’t have to be loyal to it. But an evening spent reading about them will show you where your family naturally leans, and that makes every later choice, curriculum, schedule, expectations, so much easier. Most of us end up eclectic. That’s allowed.

3. Choose a curriculum that fits your goals, not someone else’s

This is the step that swallows parents whole, because there are thousands of options and every one has a glowing review. Two things help. First, decide what you actually want this year, for this child, and shop for that alone. Second, buy less than you think you need. I don’t recommend specific curricula, and here’s why, but HSLDA’s “what to teach” pages are a sane place to start narrowing.

4. Hand your children back their childhood

This is the step nobody puts on the list, and it’s the one I’d fight for. If your children are coming out of a classroom, give them a real break before you start anything formal. Let them sleep, play, read what they want, be bored. It’s called deschooling, and it does more for your first year than any purchase.

Hand your children back their childhood.

Then start small. A read-aloud and some math at the table is a homeschool. Everything else can be added once you’ve found your feet.

The honest part

As a former principal, I can tell you there is no point at which you’ll feel you’ve learned and understood it all. I haven’t, and I do this for a living. That’s fine. You don’t need to know everything to begin. You need your state’s rules, one solid plan for reading and math, and the willingness to change the plan when it stops working.

If you want the longer walk-through, the eight steps we took as a family are here.

The best thing you can do is take the leap.

You don’t have to take it alone. The Homebuilt Community is free to join, and it is full of moms who were searching the same things you’re searching tonight.

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