Step 1
How to start homeschooling. The very first thing you should do before beginning homeschooling is to check your state homeschooling laws. These vary widely state to state and this will definitely indicate what your first steps should be. https://hslda.org/content/laws/ This is an amazing resource, which says exactly what the laws are for all 50 states and also gives a scale of how lenient to how strict it is, to give you a comparison.
Step 2
The next step would be to take a deep breath! If you are coming upon homeschooling unexpectedly, please do not rush out and buy a curriculum. If your child has been in school, both of you need some time to do what is called “deschool.” This means just going to the park and reading lots of library books. During this time, you could start researching and talking to other homeschool moms about homeschool curriculum. Here is the the thing though, what works for their child may not work for your child and that is okay. Honestly, what worked for one of my children may not work for one of my other children. I would also advise against buying boxed curriculum with all the subjects, because I found I would really love one or two subjects and hate the rest.
Step 3
Find community!! I cannot stress this enough. Find either a co-op or local homeschool group. You will join thinking it is for your kids, but it is for you as well. Homeschooling can be hard, you need to meet others to encourage you in this journey. Homeschooling is growing rapidly and there are so many amazing groups out there. You will need to limit how many groups you join though because you will need to actually get some schooling done.
Step 4
Do the next thing. What do I mean by this? Some days will be amazing, some days will be downright hard. Your kids won’t want to do their work and you won’t want to help them, but do the next thing! We want our kids to learn how to do hard things. Guess what? We need to do hard things too. Some days you won’t want to do school or everyone needs a little break. I have two schedules in our homeschool. One is our regular everything gets done day. With six kids, this can go from 8-4 and it is not always fun. I also have an essentials schedule. This is when we have doctor appt. or playdates or anything else. Each of the kids have their own school box with the essentials. When we do this schedule we are done by 1 or 2, but I can rest assured that we did enough. Years ago, I didn’t have this contingency plan and if we had anything out of the house, school was not getting done. I would feel as if I had failed. So any if your day isn’t going how you hoped, do the next thing. These small daily things add up to big things over the course of a year.
These are the best tips I have for how to start homeschooling!
