Enjoy the adventure. I am happy to devise a bespoke curriculum for your family, to answer any queries and will do my best to offer support specific to your needs.
There are many reasons to start homeschooling. My family’s homeschool journey began on a whim. My five children and I had just moved from England to Botswana, and they were not happy at their new school. Homeschool was intended to be a one-term stopgap until I sought a permanent solution. If anyone had told me they would graduate to excellent colleges in America and the UK from our kitchen table under a tree in the Okavango Delta I would have rolled about laughing. Impossible. Me? You must be joking. I wouldn't know where to start. I'm not a teacher. It's not uncommon for the first steps into homeschool to be driven by circumstances beyond our control. Whatever your reason for trying homeschool there are two qualities that are essential for success. Curiosity and patience.
Being the font of all wisdom is not a requirement but being a lifelong learner is essential. My power as a teacher is my curiosity. I have a rag-bag mind full of colours and valuable snippets. Building a programme for a child is like creating a patchwork formed by individual stories and patterns. From primary age seven to seventeen our learning was always project-based. Whatever the topic I had to make sure I had the connecting threads in my hand: in maths, history, literature and science. The hard part of homeschooling is outside of class. Of course, the children would find their own paths, but a good guide must have a route mapped out.
Good preparation enables flexibility for mixed-age classes I don’t want to present a rose-tinted story. Working with mixed ages has benefits, but younger members of the team can feel either left behind or pressured to keep up at a rate that is not in line with their developmental stage. I made mistakes and there were hiccups. Three of the four children were close in age and thus grouped together. For the youngest in the trio this was not always helpful and my inexperience as a teacher concerned me. I sought advice from primary school teachers in our local town who offered me excellent guidance. Guidance and inspiration from other teachers remain indispensable for my development as a teacher.
I read book or a play to my children at the end of every ‘school’ day until they left for college. It was comforting, relaxing and unifying. Books were read for pleasure and not analysed with a fine-tooth comb. They developed as analytical thinkers under their own steam, as a result of family discussion or contemplation, rather than formulaic dissection of text.
The youngest member of my tribe didn’t officially ‘come to the table’ until he was seven. Before that, he joined hands-on science classes, end of the day storytime, and he was always welcome to join classes if they interested him, but he received no formal schooling until he was seven. By then he was keen to become part of the gang and he learned to read in a week. His writing took a bit longer but starting later by UK standards did not impede his progress. His general knowledge was outstanding and his work ethic was excellent. He wanted to do well and he was mature enough to cope with the discipline of a school morning.
We had three golden rules.
No homework until they were fourteen. Afternoons were free time. They could play, explore, chill out, come and find the lions with me, do chores in camp or feed their curiosity with self-study.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. If they were being plonkers at breakfast and I was cross that was never carried into school time. Equally a bad day at school (of course that happened) never continued into home life.
I would try my hardest to make classes, fun, interesting and surprising, and they would be present ( mindful) and engaged.
Those rules were sacrosanct. Of course, we had good days and bad days that’s just life, but we never had any major issues. If someone was stroppy it was usually because they hadn’t understood something, or I had done a bad job at planning.
To follow and curriculum or not to follow a curriculum? The whole point of home school is to be free from the constraints of a syllabus. Having said that it is very helpful to use various curricula when devising programmes. When I was teaching my children I found what I needed from South African, Uk, Australian and USA curricula. To this day I use resources from multiple countries, in particular from the USA and Australia. I mixed and matched all the time and I still do.
Tests
None of my children took formal standardised tests until the required university entry tests: the SAT for USA or A’Levels for the UK. I would create weekly informal quizzes and tests. These were helpful for me and the children alike. The results let me know what had been understood, or not, and helped to me improve and adjust the content of classes. After they graduated from homeschool to University I carried on teaching because I loved it. I’m still teaching bespoke liberal arts curricula and guiding students of all ages. Everyday student is a fresh adventure.