So you’ve decided to homeschool your child(ren). Congratulations, and welcome to the homeschool community. Now is the time to start planning your homeschool effectively.
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Homeschooling allows you to tailor a specific education to your child’s individual needs, something that is often lacking in the public or private school systems. Homeschooling also allows you and your child to learn together, creating not only a valuable learning experience but strengthening family bonds.
Create a Plan
One of the most important aspects of homeschooling your child is coming up with a clear plan and set of goals. One of the greatest perks of homeschooling – its complete flexibility -but can also be one of the most difficult if it is not approached directly. Without a clear plan, you run the risk of creating a scattershot education that puts your child out of place with his or her peers. While I am not talking about peer competition, I do feel that students need to stay on task within their own academic level.
So when you begin homeschooling, you should come up with a clear set of general goals. Think about why you want to homeschool your children, and what you want them to get out of the experience. What, generally, do you want your child’s education to encompass? Once you have answered these general questions for yourself, begin to split your child’s education into various subject areas. For each subject area, you want to come up with a timeline and set of goals.
Set a Timeline
A good place to start in terms of a timeline would be to look at the standard curriculum for your child’s grade in a public or private school. While it is almost certainly true that one of these reasons you’ve selected to homeschool your child is to go beyond and outside this standard curriculum, you can use this as a guide to help you determine what is being taught at each level.
Come up with your plan by looking at the standard expectations for a given subject level and then working backward: how do you want to achieve that level of knowledge? What are the targets for each week? By setting these targets you can establish a timeline and curriculum that allows for effective homeschooling.
Be Flexible
Clearly, one of the points of homeschooling is its relative flexibility, and you by no means need to stick to a plan in a completely rigid manner, but don’t let this tempt you into avoiding one: there are many different homeschool styles. Do your research and find the one that works the best for your family. Once you found one, make a clear educational plan that allows for flexibility. Plan what your child is going to learn, but leave the “how she will learn it” some breathing room: as you begin the process of homeschooling you’ll learn how your child learns best and can begin to incorporate this into the lessons.
By coming up with a clear educational plan you arm yourself with one of the most essential tools to planning your homeschooling effectively.
