Advice to a Parent Exploring Home Education

While there are challenges as your child proceeds through common developmental stages, I would say that homeschooling is easy until you get to high school grade ranges/ages. There is very little you can do to keep a child from learning given healthy stimulation and exposure. My very best advice is teach them to love to read and find opportunities for social interaction and learning and you will have education half beat. There is a year of transitioning time for most families to adjust to routines, and the role of teacher and student integrating into the parent child relationship. I don't recommend you pull a child out of public education to homeschool them past 7th grade for two reasons: 1) They will likely have integrated their social interactions to a point where they do not go to school for educational reasons as they do for social relations. 2) Learning habits are pretty well established by this point and you will have a year of transition time and once you hit 7th grade you don't have a year to "waste" without putting their educational progress in jeopardy. There are other reasons I could cite but these are the two big points.

It takes discipline to work at home, separate learning time from play time and determine what are reasonable expectations for your child at certain points of their development but it is greatly rewarding once you figure these pieces out, There are multiple approaches and tons of resources, co-op groups and books. We would do testing one year and portfolio reviews the next to measure how our boys compare to other students in their commensurate age/grade. In the early years kids slink along at an uneven pace, some excel in a few areas and struggle in others but it is not critical (contrary to what schools tell you). The important thing is that they are close to what is considered standard for middle school ages. At that point, the level of material covered and standard for work completed and accountability needs to steadily increase to prepare for High school levels of productivity. Your record keeping and planning needs to be tighter as well.

We did not assign our boys grades but gave them a pass or fail model in Middle school levels. If work was sub-standard they redid the work until it was acceptable. This builds in a higher work ethic- they know if they don't do it well, they will do it again. We moved at whatever pace it took for them to really learn the material (as opposed to being pushed forward whether or not they learned the material as in public schools) even if that meant we continued into the summer months with their lessons. Our approach is that learning never ends. Teachable moments may come from curriculum, reading a library book, a question in the car or discussion after watching a movie together. Once we reach High School levels, record keeping, planning and grades do come into play for the purpose of a transcript.

Our approach is eclectic and we use a wide variety of online courses, textbooks, library books, outside resources such as Boy Scouts, 4-H, church groups, sports teams and we place a high value on experiential learning- mission trips, service work, musical performances trips to see history first-hand. There are many different approaches and you will want to explore them for yourself.