Hello and welcome! Are you in midst of making a decision on homeschooling or have you made it and this will be your first year? Congratulations for your thinking outside the box!
I am excited for you! Whether your decision was made through prayer and listening to the Lord calling you to homeschool or you were left with no choice turning away from a school that is failing your child. I believe you can make homeschooling a successful and fun family adventure.
The first step for many is looking into learning material. What books should I buy and what subjects should I cover? Check with your state law. Several states have set out a detailed list of subjects that must be followed. I like to consider the structure of learning first.
What are the CORE subjects I will be teaching every year?
Math
Reading
Language Arts
Social Studies/History
Science
These are not all the subjects I teach or should be in a enriched curriculum IMHO. This is just the starting point.
Have you looked at homeschooling book stores or been to a convention. If you have a convention in your area it would be a good idea to go and get a hands on look at the many options available. Stores like Christian Book Distributor (cbd.com) , Rainbow Resources, Timberdoodle, there are many others including local stores you can consider. At first glance the huge amount of products can be overwhelming that is why I am encouraging you to focus on the structure subjects of your year first.
Pick the subject you are most comfortable with first, for me that is science. Then you add your child’s grade (use ability to decide this not age!). So now I look up Science, Grade 3. You can now look through the different options from a text book style Apologia or Bob Jones University (BJU). If that doesn’t suit your famiy you could look into a unit based study, or lapbooks. There is learning material available for every style of homeschooling. Look carefully at the sample pages available. Some publishers now give away samples at their page as well.
Now that you have chosen one subject you should be able to pick up the other CORE subjects easier. I chose to stay with the same publisher for other subjects. So once I had made that first decision the others fell into line. You will also be more acquainted with what material you want to use. If you chose Apologia for your science and you really enjoy having all the material laid out for you. Then you will most likely transfer that to other subjects and gather texts for math, Language arts etc. Don’t be afraid to change things up. Last year I used texts for math, spelling and history. Our other subjects were lapbooks, unit studies and real books.
In the next couple weeks I am going to talk about that first year and how to find your learning material, develop a plan of action and have a superb year!