It’s late summer… or maybe it’s autumn already. You don’t want to put your child back in school. But you don’t have “a curriculum”, and you’re not sure where to get one, and you’re afraid that you don’t know how to teach, and what will you tell the neighbors when they wonder why your child is playing in the yard in the middle of the day, and this whole idea is starting to look scary, and will you get into trouble for this? But you really don’t want to put your child back in school…
Relax. No, really. It’s OK. You won’t mess up your kids. You won’t get into trouble. You can teach – maybe not a whole classroom of OPK’s (Other People’s Kids), but you can work with your own child, just the way you learned to when he or she was a baby.
Don’t let the calendar scare you into putting your child in school “until we’re ready”, or into buying something (“something, anything!”) just to “get started”. Homeschoolers are not required to follow the calendar of the public school. Homeschooling for formal academics takes fewer hours than your child would spend in a classroom, so he won’t “fall behind” while you’re exploring your options.
Since we aren’t required to follow the public school’s calendar, we don’t need to “start school” the week after Labor Day, either. Relax, and ease into it. Learning doesn’t actually require deadlines, pressure, or undue stress.
The first item on your agenda is to withdraw you children from the school in which they’re enrolled. See our Legal FAQ for a sample notification letter. Read the FAQ and the Legal page so that you are familiar with your rights as a parent.
If you never enrolled your children in a school, you don’t need to notify the local district. However – some districts don’t understand this, and may demand that you either enroll them in (their) school, or “prove” that they are being educated. If this happens, you write a notification letter that states that your children are being educated at home. (Read the FAQ and the Legal page so that you are familiar with your rights as a parent.)
So now you’re aware of your rights, and are able to relax a bit. But you still feel as if you should be “doing something”.
Where to start depends on the age of your child. The longer a child has been enrolled in institutionalized schooling, the more likely that he or she needs time off. In our “What is homeschooling” pages, we talk about
“Decompression” and “Deschooling” which may be needed before real learning can begin.
Tween may also need decompression time. Or they (like teens) may have a few items on their personal learning agenda, and want to continue (or start!) with them. There may be an interest in motorcycles, Vikings, cooking, birds, bugs, costumes, Legos, sculpting with clay, ballet, pollution, magnets, crafts, Harry Potter, race cars, faery tales, astronauts, horses… {::pause for breath::} … or just about anything.
Let them run with it. Encourage them to learn more. Ask questions. Ask harder questions. If they don’t know the answers, ask them, “How could you find the answer to that?”
With the youngest children, homeschooling is just a continuation of what you’ve been doing with your children all along. You introduce them to the world around them. You teach them of names of things, you teach them to count objects and you show them how the ordinary things in their lives work. If these children have never been in a school, they are ahead of the game, because they will retain the natural curiosity that all of us are born with.
(more later)
