Getting Started with Homeschooling
by Laura Robinson

Summary:
A great talk on beginning the homeschool journey, presented by local homeschool mom Laura Robinson, at the 2006 Home Educators Conference in Charlottetown.

Welcome to "Beginning Homeschooling 101". You may wonder why I am reading my session; it is because usually I do an entire day on  beginning homeschooling and have condensed that information into an hour. I am going to cover a lot of information in a short  period of time and did not want to get off topic and miss anything relevant.

I want to start off with this thought: Everyone should have the  right to homeschool, but homeschooling may not be right for  everyone. I hope through this session to dispel any romantic  notions about homeschooling, as well as educate each of you to  make personal choices based on your own family to hopefully  succeed, should you choose to homeschool your children.

Many home educators fail to meet their objectives due to unrealistic  expectations. During this session I hope to give you counsel on  how to increase the success of your homeschooling experience. I  hope to share information not readily available on Internet  searches. I am not going to choose your curriculum, although I will  briefly touch on curriculum choices at the end. A simple Internet search will bring up thousands of curriculum choices; I couldn't  begin to explain each and every aspect or technical requirements  related to school board regulatory requirements.

So you want to homeschool? Well, where do you begin? How do  you do it? Why teach your children at home? When? What curriculum? Who will do it? So what's it all about anyway? Is it legal? Will they learn enough? Am I qualified? What about socialization? Is it expensive? How do you have time, I am already very busy? And the questions go on.

Today we will try to answer a few of these questions, and build a  foundation upon which you can start to begin homeschooling.  Before we begin we should address two items: 1) removing a child from the public system, and 2) your interpretation of  homeschooling. If you are removing a child from the public  system, please thank that teacher for her dedication in a very  difficult time and place to work. She cannot possibly meet all the  individual needs of her students, but has surely tried her best.

Once your child is at home, you must consider your interpretation  of homeschooling. Do you want to home school or do you want to  school in your home? Those who home school use their homes to  teach, while the other group will re-create the school environment  at home. I have used both approaches: from recess, to singing "Oh  Canada" followed by individual subjects, and the other approach of  integrated subjects and unit studies. If you go from school to home  you will need some time for your child to 'de-school' ()a term often  used to re-program the learning ability.

Publicly-educated children are taught to learn by textbooks lightly introducing topics and a teacher; a lot of home education takes  place by the student searching in books extensively for  information and making their own concise book. Subjects are not  easily divided by a bell or classroom, but intertwined by reading  historical geographically correct novels. While doing a unit on  music the child will learn essays, spelling and grammar along with  constructing the ear, playing an instrument and creating a  symphony based on a historical composer.

Allow yourself some "down time" before beginning  homeschooling, to allow the child to develop a love of learning and exploratory skills which usually follows a really long boring time of not being entertained.

So, let's begin homeschooling by considering the question: "Who"? Who are 'you', to think you  can teach your own children? Well, HSLDA (HomeSchool Legal  Defense Association who represents homeschoolers in legal  aspects as well as research and lobbying for homeschool rights) feels confident that you are quite qualified. You see, they have done research on the academic level of the parent compared to the academic level of the child. The research may surprise you. According to HSLDA, the academic level of the parent has no direct effect on the academic achievement level of the homeschooled student. However, it did matter on a publicly educated student. The explanation was that homeschooling  material relies on the student to progress at the level of the  curriculum. Most homeschooling material contains all the teaching  information needed to complete the task by the student.

In the publicly educated system, the material is dependent on the  teacher adequately passing the information to the student. With  large class sizes it would be impossible to adequately pass all of the material to each individual student at the average pace of the class, thereby the parents would need to intervene and be able to fill in any missed information. This is why tutoring has become an important aspect of public education. Parents of a lower academic standing would have a greater difficulty realizing what material was missed and how to teach that material to the student.

Home educated students are independent and have all of the  information contained in their lessons with lots of parental helps and teaching aids. With the smaller ratio of students to teacher, adequate passing of information can take place at the pace of the student, not the average class size.

So are you qualified to teach your children? The answer is yes.  Further studies by HSLDA found that children in the public  system scored in the 52nd percentile overall in SAT?s (Student  Achievement Tests test students to see where they are with in  grade equivalent to peers), while homeschoolers scored in the 75th  percentile. Translated this means that publicly educated students on average know only 52 % of the required material for their academic level while homeschoolers know 75 % of the required material for their academic level. These statistics are available through HSLDA.

So now you should feel relaxed about your ability to teach your  children, you are more than qualified. You may be wondering why  I addressed this issue: it's important, because most people think  you need a university degree to teach. You do need a university  degree to teach a class of students from different genetic  backgrounds, different socio-economic levels, different religious  beliefs, different ethnic traditions, different values and moral  standards, some from abusive homes, some from divorced homes,  some from single parent homes, some living in poverty, and who  all have different learning styles and academic abilities.

You do not need a university degree to homeschool. This is your  child whom you are the most familiar with and understand. No one  will love your child more than you or care about his/her welfare as much as you do.

There are few more questions about who we need to address before  we move on to some other questions. Most homeschooling advice  centers around the learning styles of the children before choosing a curriculum. However, most children are 80% Kinesthetic, which  means they are hands-on learners. But only about 20% of the homeschooling population is using a kinesthetic curriculum and yet they are succeeding at educating their children. So one asks the question then who?s learning style should the homeschooling material be based on?

There are several ideas on learning styles and academic abilities. We are going to look at three general styles: kinesthetic, visual and auditory. Kinesthetic learners use their hands to translate information to their brains, visual learners need to see it and auditory learners need to hear the information.

What if we based the choice on the parent versus the child? Here is an example of what I mean: I have three boys, ages three and  under. My objective is that they have a bath and get cleaned up.  Now if I ask my daughter Brianna to bathe the boys, she fills the  tub, gets the shampoo ready, towels neatly folded on the toilet,  housecoats hanging on the bathroom door, selected toys in the tub. Now that all the 't's are crossed and the 'i's dotted, she is ready to bathe the boys and they are cleaned up with no water anywhere but the bathtub.

Now if I ask Brittany to bathe the boys, that's a whole different  story. While she if filling the tub, the boys are throwing in as many toys as will fit amongst the bubbles she has added. Towels are thrown in a heap on the floor and the boys proceed to strip down.  They then high-jump off the toilet seat into the tub, splashing bubbles everywhere. They then turn the shower on and proceed to have a bath in the rain. When they are finished bathing, they jump out of the tub and dry off racing through the house with their towels, like superheroes.

Now my question is....in both situations did I reach my objective?  Did the boys get a bath and cleaned up? Yes they did. Did they enjoy both baths? Surprisingly they did, water is fun no matter how you play in it.

Let's transpose that into curriculum and the homeschool  atmosphere. Our objective is to educate our children, correct?  Learning is fun no matter how you do it. You can teach a very  structured program and a very unstructured program and still  educate your children. What needs to be considered is the learning style of the parent.

When you already have preschoolers, laundry, housekeeping,  grocery shopping, doctors' appointments, dental appointments,  cooking, and many other tasks, ask the question: why would you  change your style or what works for you for a couple of hours  during the day?

Remember Brianna? She likes to cross her 't's and dot her 'i's. If she chooses a unit study curriculum where suggestions are given for teaching the information, she would spend hours in the evening transforming that curriculum at the expense of her relationship with her husband so that each aspect designed to be unstructured and spontaneous would become very structured and predictable because that is where she is comfortable. Yet, if Brittany chose a curriculum very structured, where everything is written down and laid out she would feel boxed-in unable to add her creativity and will likely deviate away from the curriculum. This will produce guilt at having missed something or not completing the curriculum.

We should look carefully at the learning style of the parent before we decide on a curriculum. You will not last homeschooling if you choose a curriculum you do not like because you will find excuses not to teach it and not follow through on your objective. So how do you determine your learning style?

Pretend you are doing laundry with your preschooler: both of you  walk down to the washing machine- while you are sorting the  whites, you remove a red sock and little Johnny asks, "Mom why do  you take the red sock out?" You answer, "If we put a red sock in the washer with the whites it would turn them all pink. When you mix white and red you get pink. Let me show you". Both of you proceed  upstairs: a kinesthetic learner will get out food colouring, paint and or construction paper and let the kid go wild learning about mixing colours, if you are a auditory learner you will likely start the dishes explaining colours, talking about colours with interesting facts and sharing stories about colours, a visual learner  will get out crayons and a paper and colour very neatly in the lines  showing carefully the colours blending.

See how important it is to determine your learning style? Don?t  worry about your child they are 50% your genetics so you have a  50/50 chance of having the same learning style. Who you are is  very important in determining to succeed at homeschooling. I  know far to many families who took the well meaning advice of  what worked for a friend and ended up quitting exhausted and  feeling defeated.

So we have answered the question of Who, now lets look at why?  Why would you want to homeschool your children? This is  important in choosing a curriculum. Why are you wanting to add  this stress and extra work to your family? You had better know  why because tough times are going to come and your answer is  what will sustain you through to success.

Many people homeschool for religious reasons, many for  academics, some for violence at school while others for moral,  ethical or ethnic reasons. There are as many reasons to homeschool as there are curriculum choices. I do not know why you are choosing to home educate your children but you do need to know. Not only do you need to know, both you and your husband need to be in agreement about the reasons. You will be living on one income, you will be around your children 24/7/365. You will be adding to your stress level and work level. You are taking on a great responsibility.

If you need to go to a hair appointment you either take the kids with you, book when your husband is home or get a baby-sitter.  If you need to go to a doctor's appointment you either take the kids, or get a baby-sitter. At the end of the day you cannot dump all the kids, supper and evening chores on his plate, he too is tired from working all day. If you had discipline problems at school you will have discipline problems at home. Learning challenges need time and patience. If you got frustrated because Johnny didn't toilet-train until he was four, unlike cousin Suzy who trained at eighteen months, you will  be frustrated that Johnny doesn't learn to read until grade five, when Suzy has been reading since kindergarten. Why you choose to home educate will determine a lot of your success and failure in your ability to  continue when times get tough.

Back in 1990, I decided I would like to homeschool our children,  but didn't really have a solid reason except maybe academics. My  husband didn't finish high school and he worked in factory jobs,  struggling to get by. Perhaps because he later went back to school causing a lot of stress on the family.

As I homeschooled along, I felt very frustrated and overwhelmed  when my son didn't read like the curriculum said. He didn't  progress in his reading at all. We started sounding out words,  C-A-T says?: Car. C-A-T cat says?: Cup. Day after day we wrestled  with reading. What I didn't know was that he had a learning  difficulty and was late maturing but instead of finding solutions I quit homeschooling beating myself up. What was I thinking? Who was I to teach my children at home? I was no professional. In 1995, I returned to homeschooling after the public and private schools could do no better for him except push him forward unable to read or write, causing him to develop low self-esteem.

After private testing we developed strategies to teach him,  understanding his learning difficulty and accepting that he would  eventually get it. He learned to read and write in grade 3/4. But I learned that whether a child reads at five or ten, by twelve they would read the same.  The Moore Foundation in British  Columbia has great materials on this and other topics; Gertrude has some books by them in the Homeschool Lending Library.

The next child to read had visual difficulties. The professionals  had told me she would never read due to her visual impairment.  Well, I am here to tell you that five years and two tutors later, my visually-impaired child reads as well as any sighted child. But I still have another visually impaired child who cannot read without a computer assisted-program. All children are different, that's the beauty of homeschooling.

During this time, my late husband was diagnosed with terminal  brain cancer, and both of us decided to continue homeschooling so  that each of our children could spend time with their father. We  progressed along until the stress overcame us and we slowed down  homeschooling to a crawl for about two years. It was through this  process that I developed my "WHY" for homeschooling. I had solid  convictions with regards to my religious beliefs. I would need this solid "WHY" to carry me through the next few years.

I discovered that knowledge doubles itself every five years and  now every two years with the Internet. So if I taught my children  everything there was to know in two years, they would only know  half of what there was. This boggled my mind, and I realized that  my goal was not to teach them everything, but to teach them how to learn. I went from pushing for 99% and perfection, to research, thinking skills, library skills, logic,cognitive skills, comprehension skills. My "WHY" was discernment of truth. Was what they were learning truth or a lie? My husband died at 36 years old. Academics are important but more important was the value of someone's life, personal goals, personal achievements.

I began to explore other curriculum choices and discovered in fact that I really did enjoyed homeschooling!  We built bug cages, swam at the local wildlife reserve, collected frog eggs and did many, many more activities. I went from a very structured highly academic setting to prove to the world that homeschooling is better, to actually having fun and learning at the same time as my children. I discovered a lot of neat ways to teach, like baking for fractions, pizza for fractions, grocery shopping for discounts and percents, spelling baseball, multiplication bingo and much more. I became confident in my ability to teach my own children.

A friend shared the following with me - it comes from "No Greater Joy" a ministry website. Compare the objective to educate our children to digging a hole and putting a fence post in. There are two strategies: first, start in February and chip away at the frozen soil bit by bit.  Each month the soil will thaw and you will be able to dig a little more dirt out of the hole until May, when it's completely thawed.  Then you can put your fence post in, or you can wait until the last week of April and dig it on a  sunny afternoon and put your fence post in then. You can start reading, science and other subjects at age five like the school system does, using a lot of filler and bookwork, or you can wait until they are ready and progress twice as fast later. Did you know that the three fields of science are repeated every three years, only at more complex levels? I heard author Jay Wyle of the Apologia science texts speak in Lancaster, at Redeemer College, during the OCHEC conference in Ontario.  He was speaking to about 1500 homeschoolers about teaching science, and did not recommend formally teaching it until grade 7.

So why are you homeschooling? Is it to prove to family and friends that homeschooling is better than public schooling? Is it to get away from negative socialization? Is it to pass your beliefs on to your children? Your morals and values? Pass family traditions related to your culture? Know why you want to homeschool: it will help you  stay focused when choosing and continuing to homeschool. If you don't have a "WHY", you need to ask yourself if you are really ready to add this responsibility, stress and workload to your family.  There is a sacrifice of time and money on behalf of the dedicated parents who endeavor to take up this calling. Your "WHY" will evolve over your homeschooling experience to become a solid foundational cornerstone.

So we know who we are, we are now armed with "why", let's now look at "HOW"? You may wonder how are these questions are related to choosing a curriculum. With so many choices in curriculum we  need to narrow the field down a bit by personalizing our reasons,  accessing our space and eliminating options to get a better sense of which direction to proceed.

Remember our fence post story? Well, stress is like a frost. The more stress and frustration, the more frozen the dirt is that you're trying to dig in.  Children do not learn from stressed out, frustrated mothers or in stressful environments. If you have a lot of stress in your life you  may want to consider eliminating some of it before you attempt homeschooling. How you choose to homeschool is key to your success. How much support you have from family and friends will also dictate how you homeschool. You should not attempt to homeschool without the support of your husband. This is crucial to your marriage relationship. If it's shaky now, nothing will stand on it with out falling and breaking. I have counseled a lot of families and marriage break-ups are not uncommon when mom is over-worked, stressed out, burned out and neglecting her marital vows.

Most home educators homeschool in the dining room. They usually have a shelf, kitchen cupboard or closet nearby to store  materials. I use my dining room (I find it a little frustrating some days when we have books stacked and food on the table at the  same time) and I have shelves in the dining room, plus shelves  upstairs to hold extra 'not-used-everyday' material. I prefer a  homeschool room because it gives us greater flexibility for projects and visual displays. I have novels in each of the children's rooms plus a bookcase in the living room. I have toys in the living room for toddlers to play with while we are homeschooling. Believe me, an unsupervised toddler can do a lot of damage in a very short period of  time! Some homeschoolers have special bins of toys only played with during school time. Others have made a safe play area.

Next you need a schedule...a SCHEDULE, you ask? If you don't have a schedule of some sort, I can guarantee that you will not be  homeschooling five years from now. When I lived in Ontario, I  started a homeschooling group called SCHIL: Simcoe County  Homeschool Info Link, which produced a newsletter called  HEARING, which I ran, produced and edited. I ran the science  fair, spelling bee, speeches, beginners conference, was a board  member for the main conference of about 350 homeschoolers and  tack meet for over 100 homeschooled kids. My group had over 150 families, with well over 450 children. I eventually had to add  another phone number and an answering machine to accommodate the needs and counseling for a group that size. One of the foremost  issues was moms burning out. These mothers were physically,  emotional and spiritually exhausted and spent.

They had chosen labor-intense curricula that required an  enormous amount of prep and teaching time; I remember being  there myself. I had chosen a curriculum that was teacher-based,  teaching five subjects to three students, with three of the children being five years old and under.  My oldest was only ten so I had all the cooking, cleaning and laundry to do as well, plus a kindergartener who needed to learn to read!

Mathematically, at 20 minutes per subject, teaching and marking,  for three students at five subjects each, five hours were spent. Plus all the other responsibilities I had? Using this same program required another hour of teaching to cover all the basics in the learning to read. I got behind on the laundry: socks and underwear were at a premium, meals were boxed and processed, hardly spent any time with hubby while trying to catch up on household chores at night.  My two toddlers hardly spent any time with me except at diaper changes and feedings.

Do you need a schedule? You won't survive with out one. If you  chose a teacher-based program, you must fit the rest of your chores into your daily routine so you still have family and hubby time. All work and no play makes a very long day. Do not re-arrange your priorities to fit a curriculum into your schedule. Your hubby is first; you are going to be living with him hopefully a long time, and this requires a clean house, proper meals, clean clothes and your quality time together. Next come your children, who will all leave home to make homes for themselves someday. Teach them first to be parents, husbands and wives and then focus on academics in order for them to be able to provide for themselves and their families.

This is important for your marital relationship and your  relationship with your children. Remember the frost? Make your  schedule first then look at curriculum options with this in  perspective. If you are extremely busy, you may need to consider a self-taught program, regardless of how appealing and how well -marketed the other program looks. All things are a season. Even in  winter there can be beauty, think of a sunny winter's day after a freezing rain? Everything looks like diamonds and glistens in the light, even though it's bitterly cold.

I started with a teacher-based program, followed by another, then  self-taught, unit study, thematic student unit study-based, back- to-teacher-based with videos, and now a thematic student unit study-based curriculum. I have two sons in college, with  3.6 and 3.35 grade averages, and my daughter was recently accepted as well.

We have several schedules; every child in our house knows at  exactly what time they need to be doing something. We are up at  our house at 6:00 AM, we have devotions until 6:30, at which time  some of the children head to the barn for milking cows, one on  breakfast, one on lunch, one on baby-sitting. We prepare our lunch  at the same time we prepare our breakfast to save time and  eliminate duplicating chores later in the day. Efficiency will help you regain some wasted minutes throughout the day that end up adding up to hours. 7:30 is breakfast, 8:00 is clean up and chores, 9:00 school begins until 12:00, minor lunch prep, setting table, 12:30 clean up, 1:00 school work finished, nap time for toddlers, free time for those finished school work. 4:00 barn chores, some head to the barn, one does supper, one does baby-sitting, two are on maintenance, 5:30 is supper, 6:00 clean up, 7:00 family time, 8:00 toddlers to bed with dad (this is mommy's R&R (rest and  relaxation time), 9:00 all kids either in bed or in their rooms so mom and dad can cleave while the kids leave.

We have schedules for barn chores, maintenance, house chores,  these include lists in each room of requirements for completion,  bath schedule, laundry schedule, meal plan and a comprehensive  school schedule of subjects, pages, tests and calendars. I start in May/June to organize next year and make my school schedule. In  September after a nice summer break (I'm joking here! we live on a farm, it's our busiest time!) I am ready for school. The kids like structure because it gives them free time when they are done, eliminates you asking the better workers to do more while the slackers disappear. It keeps the ship running on course. Many of you may have seen the new movie, "Mine, Yours and Ours"? Well, I agree with the commander, a ship in chaos sinks.

Chores are a must for homeschooled children. Many hands do make light work. Mothers you cannot do it all. You must assess the work force in your house and use it. Training children to do  chores is the best training you will give them towards their adult life of obtaining and keeping employment.

Most five year olds can set a table and clear it. Get six plastic bins and colour pictures on each one. One for glasses, one for plates or bowels, one for silverware, one for food on plates, put a spatula in this bin, the other two are for washing, one with soapy water, the other the rinse. If you don't have a dishwasher consider purchasing one, used is good. This will reduce your work load. I had a stainless steel cart that held my bins, the table was cleared in the dining room and washed in the kitchen by another older child.

Some families use sleeping bags instead of sheets and comforters  to make bed making easier. Have only five outfits for play and  three for dress or shopping/outings. Reduce the amount of toys  and select educational toys such as Lego/Duplo and or other toys  which stimulate creativity. Reduce or eliminate the TV watching,  reduce computer usage to games that are educational only.  Children exposed to TV and computer games will be hard to teach  unless you use a highly graphic, exciting, nerve-stimulating  curriculum that isn't boring and does not have much repetition. Restrict Internet usage in all lower elementary grades. This will force the child to do research using books, and actually read material for the purposes of learning.  Internet may be introduced at the grade six level for research only. I offered coupons for computer and TV usage. For chores and schoolwork completed they earned 30 minutes a day to spend either watching a movie or playing an educational game on the computer. By the same token they could lose coupons for having a bad attitude, incomplete school work or incomplete chores.

Exceptional students earned a movie night with popcorn and a  special dessert night for chores and school work completed.  Remember: all work and no play make a very long day.

Okay: now we know who we are, we are armed and dangerously  convicted to homeschool, we have a promising schedule to achieve our objective...now we need to execute it. WHERE do you homeschool?

The dining room, a school room, the basement? The dining room is good, although you need to clean up for each meal: the basement  is usually cold in winter and gloomy during February's drab, short days.  The  living room is usually occupied by toddlers, the kitchen is busy,...hmmmm, that leaves the bedrooms, usually too many toys and distractions for kids to stay  focused.  How about the laundry room?  Here the smell or the sheer amount of  laundry would keep you out of there, so where does one  homeschool? I like a homeschool room, but I don't have one so I  use my dining room.

When I was in Ontario I moved my living room down to the  basement family room, fixed it up nice and converted the living  room upstairs to the school room. Since I entertained in the dining room and the kids played in the living/family room in the  basement, it worked out great. I didn't miss my living room and  we had great fun building, creating, putting up lots of posters, and, well, yes it was rather messy, but it was a great learning environment.

I know other homeschoolers who doubled up children in bedrooms  and converted a bedroom to a school room.  I've seen back porches and garages converted in order to make one place in the house where learning is expressed by organized chaos.

Make sure you have something to occupy the toddlers and  pre-schoolers or have a child-proof room they can be occupied in  for about an hour. Some homeschoolers have special bins with  special items during schooling times, others have their lower  kitchen shelves child-proofed (you can have alot of fun with pots & pans and lids and plastic containers!).

As you can see, we are going to have more in our house to  homeschool, which is why I addressed earlier a need to downsize  on toys, clothing and other unnecessary items. You are going to be sharing the same space every day, all day, so try to minimize clutter and maximize spaciousness.

Now would be a good time to address the "WHEN" question. I have homeschooled in the morning, the afternoon, both, and neither. I prefer the  afternoon myself, since I have pre-schoolers and toddlers who take naps, it's much quieter in the house and calmer. Because we are a large family, we do a lot of things on the large scale and make a lot of things from scratch. It's easier to spend extra hours in the morning to complete some of these tasks, and dedicate several hours in the afternoon to school. My high school students need both the AM and PM to accomplish the required work. If you are a late riser, you may want to consider the afternoon, since you're almost there by the time you have breakfast, clean up and get ready. Most late risers are night hawks so having a longer afternoon period followed by a longer evening is usually tolerated well by the children socialized in your home. We are early risers and I like getting in three hours of work before the rest of the world wakes up and starts to bug me.

So how do you homeschool? Organize your life, consider your  goals, dreams, energy level, learning style and number of children who are five and under. We now know who we are and we are confident, we know why we are homeschooling so we can stand up under the pressure and we know how, where and when we are going to accomplish that task.

Now let's look at the "WHAT" question. 'What' are we going to use to reach our  objective to educate our children? Well, just where does one begin with over a thousand choices? Let's break it down into the three learning styles we talked about earlier: kinesthetic, visual and  auditory. These are general statements to give you a very broad interpretation of the many, many curriculums available.

Kinesthetic learners choose a hands-on curriculum e.g.. Konos,  auditory/ reading-based e.g., Charlotte Mason, visual self taught, e.g.. ACE. But what if there are real differences between mother and child? Child is kinethestic while mother is visual; in that case, have a bin of crayons, highlighters and paint so he can personalize and creatively add to the bookwork. If the child is an auditory learner and the mother visual, get video material, mom will like the  bookwork aspect while the child is hearing what is needed on the tapes. If the child is visual and mother is kinesthetic, get extra bookwork  for the child to play with after lessons.

Essentially, if you understand how you learn and apply that to your home you will be excited about learning along with your child. Your child picks up on that excitement and you have a positive learning environment. Having a schedule frees you to teach while still accomplishing your daily tasks.  Having your children help you with chores creates a sense of value and belonging. Where you choose in your home will dictate how much creativity and excitement you can get going along with them. There is nothing more tantalizing than reading a good book aloud and having to stop for a meal, only to return later for the exciting ending.

If you have been teaching your children since birth, it's only natural to carry on into their formative years. Enjoy the experience and one more piece of advice: you will never pick the perfect curriculum!  Your first year will be full of trials as you learn. Just narrow down the options and pick something to learn with, and be free to modify it next year, knowing it can only get better from here.


Source: 2006 HS Conference Presentation Notes, May 6th
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