How to get started Homeschooling ( FREE PRINTABLE)
Hey friends today we are going to talk about four steps on how to get started Homeschooling.
First let me tell you who I am.
I’m Elisabeth from Nutritional Blessing, Where I believe God can heal you everywhere you hurt, sometimes that is in our kid’s schooling.
We all have a story as to why we want to homeschool. Mine is a couple of things. I was working at my kid’s private school when I became pregnant. I knew I wanted to nurse my son and not send him to a sitter or daycare as a newer baby. When I quit teaching at the end of May that year, my kids were home for the summer, and we spent the summer learning a lot. My oldest was entering fourth grade and my second born was going to start kindergarten.
My third was born in September school had started in August I was extremely nervous about not being at the school with my kids. Also my daughter is allergic to peanuts and seeing it was her first year of school without me I was standing by the phone the whole time holding one baby worrying about another. Then my son started to have some issues at school, regular 4th grade kid stuff like his shoes weren’t new enough or his clothes were not and brand-new top notch but my oldest just started to not seem like himself.
For years I had planned to want to home school but thinking I wasn’t good enough to homeschool my kids
SO, this was the year all of that changed so
I know you have a story too. What is your why you know it.
What is your worries? You know those too, so let me help you on your journey to starting home schooling.
Four steps to get started homeschooling.
- How do you legally Homeschool?
okay first step how do you legally homeschool in your state and where do you find what laws are for which state there’s a bunch of different ones I’m gonna walk you through a website that has all the answers to everything okay so how do you find out the laws for your specific state.
Go to https://hslda.org/ HSM homeschool League Defense Association this is actually a whole group of people who are just to defend your legal rights to home-school your kids and to preserve actually their purpose is to preserve your God-given constitutional right to direct your child’s education that is there their motto.
okay so you go to legal different state laws so you go ahead and click on state homeschool laws and you can find each of your state.
I clicked Florida because I live in Florida and it shows you the requirements at a glance there’s no notice required low regulation so these would have higher regulations mine has moderate regulation so, some lower ones would be the blue and these are the required ages they have to school and down here shows you all kinds of local Florida things some great news and stuff and we’re in an ever-changing world so you can come on here and keep updated with it.
2.Decide on which approach you might take in homeschooling.
There are so many different kinds now we’re going to talk about the different types of homeschooling.
First one is Relaxed homeschooling.
So, I’ll start with the most common the most common is a relaxed homeschooling you would use a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
Where you use your mornings are used for schoolwork and your afternoons are used for the extracurriculars and then it is very easy to adapt to your families so
the pros are that it is very adaptable.
and the cons are that it’s kind of hard to measure the homeschooling as you complete it
Next School at home
the next one is school at home homeschooling so there’s like a classroom with a desk and you have a very strict schedule, and you use the programs that you would use for this is like k12 or Becca or like a full curriculum.
the pros to it is that you know exactly what to teach there is no questions you
just follow the curriculum and it’s exactly what it is
but the con is that it has the highest burnout rate it’s kind of hard to bring school into your home.
Unschooling
okay next we’re gonna talk about unschooling I know it sounds big but it’s really neat so unschooling is where learning comes from playing as the child has the ability to direct their own learning, so they learn more through experiences
the pro to unschooling is where there’s time to research and play and become experts and this is really good for having a deep rooted in in a field that they maybe really love
The con is that they may not do as well on grade level assessments so it could be hard to go back to school afterwards seeing how they are going at their own rate and they are learning from what they do.
Classical Homeschooling
Okay, next is classical homeschooling it’s a very old way of learning and so it’s been well tested and it’s very it’s very thorough so it focuses a lot on memory work and there’s not many worksheets it’s mostly like blank notebooks and they fill in from their own they do copy work off of like a whiteboard or something or the whole concept is that you can draw in the sand classical learning is very history rich so that you can see where you fit into the history into the history of our world it’s pretty neat it focuses on three stages okay
the first stage is the knowledge stage where you learn a bunch of facts and then.
the second stage is dialect or like logic like well this is where you start asking well why that is.
then third trait is rhetoric where you use the application, and you have the wisdom that you have already learned so that you can go and apply it and teach it is a lifelong learning way of homeschooling.
Charlotte Mason
so next is Charlotte Mason Charlotte Mason believes in this thing called
living books.
Living books is where instead of using a textbook that has a
little bit of information about a lot of stuff it takes a book about just sharks or just by just the brain and then you use those books that somebody was very passionate about writing and about learning about and then they write an entire book about it so then you’re not just getting bits and pieces of the information you’re getting the whole
thing but then you combined all your courses together to you to learn all the topics so there is lots of reading, lots of books.
Let me give you example.
Let’s just say the Bible, so you take the Bible maybe you have a picture Bible a beautiful picture Bible you open it up and you can find you can use your ancient history to go along with this you can copy the passages and then learn sentence structures and through the copy work you can memorize great verses and then you can if there’s pictures in it you can draw the pictures for art and then you can learn about music from that error and then they just kind of wrap everything into one it’s the it’s very easy to get a bunch of stuff in by just using one or two books
Montessori
Montessori homeschooling is very hands-on like science projects and cooking and cleaning and reading recipes and so there’s a few ways to do it it’s you can go into practical life but then there’s also like centers so you leave out you leave spots for your children to explore through hands-on experiences so there’s like practical life or sensory or math or language arts cultural music or art and then so you have a center for each of them so that that any time that they want any time of the day they can just go and play and learn do that so that’s Montessori
3. Find a local Community
now you’re on to step number three getting started homeschooling and that is finding the local community how do you get in touch with the local homeschooling community Wow there are co-ops and there are Facebook’s Facebook groups and I am going to take you on to some of the major cities and show you the different Facebook groups
let me show you where to find the local Facebook group that tell you everything that’s going on in your area
so up at the search bar just type in let’s pick some big cities let’s type in Tampa
that’s not too far from me Tampa home so let’s just say I’m in Tampa home school ok and the my guess is roots there is Tampa Bay homeschool families Tampa Bay home schoolers Tampa homeschooler okay so all of these are groups.
I’m a part of here’s one Christian homeschool family this is one of my group as I’m joined it already show you some of the things in here they show you some current events oh look here someone has a book For sale.
If you cant find a group you like, start one. I started a field trip group for my area, there wasn’t one and now there are for 250 followers in my area who wanted the exacts same thing.
4. Just wing it. Go for it, just get started.
So tip number four on how to get started homeschooling just wing it.
I that is the best advice I can give you.
The very best way to learn how to homeschool and how you’re gonna like is to homeschool and see what you want to do and what you don’t want to do is to try it. You have to try each thing and have error and trial and error and it took me a couple years to really get my grove down.
and you know what,
sometimes it changes and I want to do it a different way still but that is a luxury of homeschooling you don’t have to answer to anybody but yourself and God and so if you pray about it and God will really show you what’s best and the way that you learn patience and the way that you learn how to do things is through trial and error.
Okay so that sums up um how to get started homeschooling but I just threw a ton of information at you and we have some fun and what I want to tell you is that I have a Editable quarterly homeschool checklist, this creates independent students. That way you can spend your time diving into the information more than worrying, did they get their lessons done.
Also, here is my planner.
I have a portfolio folder you might find helpful too. At the end of the year for most states you need to provide some sort of portfolio.
(picture and link here)
And Of course your free getting started homeschooling checklist
(click here for your homeschooling checklist)
In the comments, let me know what kind of homeschooling approach you have choose.
I have choose a little bit of each of them, more on that later.
Also if this is confusing, please reach out to me in the comments.
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