Excitement and jitters set in as September approaches. The smell of new textbooks permeate a perfectly organized and well-stocked schoolroom, complete with glue sticks and paint. A carefully planned schedule is prominently displayed on the bulletin board. Everything is set and ready. All that you're waiting for is the official beginning of the school year.
Then it arrives.
You gather your little ones around the table, hand out work-sheets and crayons, and begin the instruction. Between new books, new school supplies, and maybe even some new clothes, everyone has been anticipating this day for some time. And school at home doesn't fail to impress!
Until it does... about two weeks later.
By this point, it's like pulling teeth to get the kids to participate in the brand new curriculum which cost you a small fortune. You've tried everything from bribery to threats to get them to comply, but to no avail. You feel greater and greater anxiety setting in as each day fails to align with the schedule you set up. You are falling behind already and you have no idea how you are going to make up for the lost time. Your anxiety causes you to lay into the kids a little more than usual which, of course, doesn't help at all. In the midst of the contention and tears, you find yourself wondering, "Is this really what I signed up for? This is not how I imagined it at all! How do the other homeschool moms do this for years? This can't be what homeschool is supposed to be like!"
And you'd be right!
This is NOT how homeschool is supposed to be. But sadly, it turns out this way far too often, even for veteran homeschoolers.
If you want to succeed at homeschooling, I have some principles which will help you. They won't make homeschooling magically easy, and they WILL require you do a major overhaul on your educational paradigms. But I promise that these principles are the keys to having the positive and productive experience you want out of home education.
These principles are particularly applicable to the first ten years or so of your child's life. I believe they will still continue to be pertinent after that point, but they will have to be modified and perhaps applied in different ways or to different degrees. I will explain this in more detail later.
(Keep in mind that this is only part 1 of a series of blog posts, and keep on the lookout for future installments.)
Principle #1: Keep it simple and inexpensive.
Especially when you are just beginning to homeschool and your children are very little, there is absolutely no reason to go out and spend a fortune on books, toys, supplies, or curricula.
If you determined early on that you would educate your child at home, you have the advantage of many birthdays and Christmases before you officially begin. Request educational and multipurpose toys. Ask for simple art supplies, paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, and glue. Buy your children books ranging in difficulty from very beginner to classic novels. In this way you will find it easy to gather ample resources.
If your child is already school-aged, keep in mind that all you really need is paper, pencils, the library and the internet. Seriously--that is ALL! Between the library and the internet, there is literally nothing you cannot learn. In my opinion, the best resources are absolutely free.
I suggest making weekly library visits a family tradition. Look at age-appropriate book lists, and take advantage of the holding system. Keep in mind that libraries contain more than books; there are CD's, educational movies, audio-books, magazines, and e-books. Explore the non-fiction section as well as the chapter and picture books. Check out books about math, history, science, and writing to fill out your homeschooling curriculum.
(I know this hardly needs saying, but it bears repeating. Read to your kids every day!)
As for the internet, make use of Google searches to find lots of free resources. Here are some that I literally stumbled upon in the last year: Easy Peasy All-In-One-Homeschool, Solar System Scope, ABCya, Sheppard Software, Virtual Manipulatives. And here are examples of some other more well-known but equally awesome websites: Khan Academy, TED, Starfall, Google Earth, and Kindle Cloud Reader (free classics).
I'll add more as I discover them, but I hope I've whetted your appetite for finding your own free online resources and persuaded you that homeschooling need not (and in my opinion should not) be complicated or expensive.
