Here are some great tips to help new homeschool parents get started.
Homeschool and how we got started
To help you get off to a good start in setting up your own homeschool year. I am sharing what I learnt as a first time homeschooler living in Brisbane. This is a list of the lessons I learnt along the way teaching my son who has ADHD, SPD and is mildly autistic, starting with. .
1.) Where to go for good information to get started.
I also found Homeschooling Downunder.com, from the amazing Michelle Morrow to be extremely helpful when I first started. If you live in Australia, she is the help you need to navigate through the application process. Michelle has over 21 years of homeschool experience and knowledge! If you don't live in Australia, she has information and resources that are going to be a huge help. I don't know Michelle personally, but because her blog helped me and saved me my sanity. I hope she can do the same for you.
2.) There are a lot of choices of teaching methods
There are a lot of choices when it comes to teaching methods out there, for example, the Charlotte Mason method is very popular for homeschooler's, distance learning is another, although it can be very costly.
I chose to use an eclectic approach (which put simply, is a few methods bought together as one) in our first year, because I wanted to be sure of what will work before I made any commitment to one said method. click link to find out more about teaching method.
3.) Buying all my curriculum straight away, was a costly mistake
It costs a lot of money for textbooks and stationary and maybe even more so when you buy textbooks that could end up being the wrong fit for your child, what happens then is you have to go out and pay for ones that do.
My tip: Really look at their grade or year by age (They may have a different grade for some subjects too, you can find this out in their school reports.) and then by academic skill set and go by skill set.
4.) How we set our goals to focus on.
Based on where your child's academic level is (Please read tip above in 3, this is how I worked out my son's academic level.) and the curriculum for your area, you will need to set some goals. A good place to start is to ask yourself some questions. For example, what does he/she need the most help with? If they are behind in math for their grade, then they need help here and this will be your goal point. For us, math was a hard subject to tackle because the foundation (his understanding of addition, multiplication and their inverse operations) had holes so, we started here. click here to see registration criteria in Queensland.
5.) Working one on one with my child will mean I need to move everything else aside for a little while.
I was naive to think that I could sit with my son for 20 minutes and demonstrate what he should do, give my son a set of instructions and leave him to it while I tended to the dishes or whatever else I needed to do at the time. That might work for other families, but it didn't work for us. I needed to be patient and sit with him so he could really understand what the lesson was about and put it into practice. Having one on one lessons also meant that I could scaffold our lesson and break it up into digestible steps.
6.) Make reading a part of everyday in your school.
Reading is the foundation for;
· Spelling as the child will be exposed to rimes, onset patterns in words.
· It builds phonological awareness, to help your child connect the letter or letter combination to the sound it makes. For example, the alphabets consonants and vowel sounds. Then it builds to blends, diphthong's and digraphs.
· It also builds writing skills and reading comprehension.
We started off with just 20 minutes a day and built up from there as his confidence grew.
Note: Because there were gaps in Mr 14's maths and english, we have made them 1 hour a day for each subject.
7.) Looking for great like minded mum's and blogger's will be the support you need to keep going when you have hard days.
I didn't have all the answers, I am a mum and wasn't trained to be a teacher and at times needed some help. I am blessed in my circumstance to have a mother in law who is a trained teacher. I was blessed by her with really great wisdom and resources that she generously shared to help me with some of my lessons. I also found a lot of very useful resources through reading the articles on some great homeschool mum blog posts. All of this supported me and gave me the confidence to successfully teach my son.
here is a link to see my favourite bloggers and online resources for homeschooling.
8.) Try and have fun.
Learning is easier when it's fun. playing games like go fish is engaging and fun but it also teaches number recognition. When my son is having a hard time understanding a concept and where it is possible I replace the book work with a game to alleviate the stress and go back to the book work once he has had time to figure it out. Getting into some hands on activities and experiments are also useful and fun to do in our lessons.
I will add games that worked for us in future blogs.
9.) Don't compare yourself to other mum's, families and people online!
When we go on Pinterest and Youtube and even blogs, hopefully not mine. We can get the impression that these people we are seeing are perfect. We even make the mistake of comparing ourselves to them. Yes, they look so perfect and stress free. They seem to have all their shit together, perfectly lined up in a row.
But, believe me! We all have good days, (the days they show us) and bad days (the ones they don't). No one is perfect. No one gets everything right. Making mistakes is a part of learning, mistakes are unavoidable in life and when you homeschool.
Perfection is a perception it is not real! there is no such thing.
You are taking care of your family in a way that works for your family. Keep it up!
Just do you, because you are awesome!
10.) Lesson plans
OMG!!!! I had a hard time here. As the old saying goes, "Make plans, God laughs." This is so true in my case. So, what happened to make me so negative about setting up lesson plans? the truth is my problem is with setting it in stone too soon. That is one of the first mistakes I made.
I made my first plan when I applied to home school and it was (in my mind at the time.) perfect. Every subject had it's allocated times to meet curriculum standards. Every lesson, every unit and every book was laid out for each day of the term clearly and ready to go. But then, life happened and I quickly realised that my perfect lesson plan was a pipe dream not built on factors like my son needing more time to learn 3 digit subtraction or that there will be days we don't do history because someone is sick. So, now I always use a pencil and only plan a term at a time to make it easier for me if I need to make changes.
11.) My last piece of advice is. . .
Take it one day at a time. Build on from yesterday and before you know it, you will look back and be amazed at all the progress that has happened. Start out with a snap shot of where you are at from the first term. With them dated, use a math test. Reading and comprehension sheet, maybe. A photocopy of their hand writing. A unit of study. Artwork too, if you want too. This will help you see where you have made progress. Especially if you do this every term.
It will be useful later on too, because it can be used in your end of year portfolio. This is what we hand over to our home education co-ordinator to use when they are assessing your child's progress as a homeschool student. It saves you time and stress down the track if you do this. No one wants to have the stress of hunting through piles of books and papers at the end of the year. Building a folder to see our child's progress and what we have been teaching him, is so much easier if I add to it through out the year.
Over to you now boss mum's! What did you find the most helpful? Do you still have some questions that I could help you with? Please share them in the comments below.
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