If your children thrived while learning at home last year, you may be ready to try your hand at traditional homeschooling. Five million American parents have decided to homeschool permanently this year — some making the decision because of surviving COVID-19 cases and the absence of masking and other precautions in place at their local schools.
If you're wondering exactly how to homeschool your kid, here's what to do next if your family has opted to not go back to in-person learning.
How to find homeschool requirements for your state
Homeschool methods and styles to consider
Many homeschool families embrace an eclectic mix of homeschool styles. This helps to create an individualized learning environment. That is the beauty of homeschooling — it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. You can tailor the experience to your child and switch things up when necessary. Here are a few of the most popular homeschool methodologies:
- Charlotte Mason homeschoolers adopt a living books approach to learning. Nature journaling, exploring nature, and narration and dictation are the hallmarks of this methodology.
- Families who adopt a Waldorf homeschool methodology incorporate music, art, dance, theater, and writing into their homeschool days. Children create their own textbooks called main lesson books and are encouraged to express themselves through their art.
- A Classical homeschool approach incorporates Latin grammar and is based on the trivium method designed to engage a child through grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The popular Classical Conversations program uses this method as do many cottage schools.
- Traditional homeschooling can be a school-at-home environment but with a curriculum that you choose for your child. You can create your own lesson plans or follow plans laid out within the curriculum.
- Unschooling is simply child-led, unstructured life-learning that may or may not use curriculum. There are as many ways to unschool as there are families.
If you like the idea of unschooling but feel uncomfortable letting your kids have the run of the house, consider a free online curriculum like EasyPeasy Homeschool or an inexpensive option like Time4Learning. Each of these provides the structure your school mindset craves with the flexibility of homeschool. Of course, it's not unschooling but, coupled with your own version of child-led learning, it's a great way to dip your toe into the homeschool lifestyle.
Brave Writer curriculum founder Julie Bogart offers sound advice to new homeschooling moms. "Don't take it to heart when you try your best to apply principles that work for everyone else. Always find your own or your version of the ones you admire," she advised on her website.
There are, of course, pros and cons to homeschooling. Some days will be amazing and you'll feel as though you did everything right. Other days you'll barely get any schoolwork done because life happened. Rest assured, learning happens all the time, even when you think it's not. Just take a breath and look for those organic learning moments; they're everywhere.
