If you’re beginning the journey of homeschooling with your children this school year, congratulations! It’s a great way to be more involved in your children’s learning and to help them reach their true potential. You may also be feeling a little overwhelmed as to where to begin in the process, but don’t worry! Homeschoolfacts.com has all the resources you need to get your in-home learning off to the right start.
Where To Go for Curriculum
One of the biggest factors in proper homeschooling for your children is picking the right curriculum. This can be a general learning course or you can look into more specialized teaching models depending on how your children learn best. This is one step where you will spend the most time on, researching and ensuring the learning methods suite both your child and your needs in the long term. Word of mouth can also be beneficial for you, if you know of other parents who are currently homeschooling their kids as well. Along this same line, you’ll also need to establish a budget for the curriculum and other activities planned for the school year. Not only will you be responsible for the overall learning curriculum for your kids, but also extracurricular activities. These can involve sports, clubs, and even trips to museums and other secondary learning locations. Be realistic in your budget and even plan for a little higher than your overall goal, just in case activities or events come up as the year goes by, and you don’t want to say no to something your child is interested in visiting.
Time Commitments
Choosing in-home learning also means you’ll need to decide if you will go the traditional public school timeframe of nine months, or homeschool all year long. This will help you build the curriculum and set schedules for the coming year on when projects and homework is due. Setting up these schedules and researching projects will take up some time as well, especially if you prepare semester by semester. Homeschooling is a big time commitment, which also means you may have to cut hours at work or stay at home exclusively, depending on your current work schedule. Be sure to instill schedules early on into your homeschooling, as this is a crucial part of maintaining focus and accomplishing tasks every day. Consistency is key when teaching at home as there are so many distractions for teacher and student alike.
Onward & Upward
The effort you put into homeschooling will definitely be worth it, though, and seeing your child learning on a daily basis is a great reward for a job well done. If you still feel like you need some extra resources to begin, check out Homeschoolfacts.com. They are a vast resource on all things homeschooling, whether it’s support groups for parents, state laws surrounding homeschooling, or purchasing student ID cards, they’re your one-stop shop.
Since 2004, Global Student Network has been a leader in providing innovative online curriculum to homeschooling families and partnering schools throughout the world. GSN offers a wide range of online curriculum options. We have over 2000 course offerings including Honors, AP®, World Languages, and Career and Technical Education courses. Our program has been used by homeschool families as well as public, private, and charter schools, both nationally and internationally. Learn more about or try a demo of GSN’s curriculum here: https://globalstudentnetwork.com/curriculum
Katie Kyzivat