Establishing Schedules and Curriculum

Planning for a Field Trip Give and take is part of the homeschool life. Although you will no doubt participate in field trips that other people organize and run, you should also be prepared to plan field trips in which others can participate. And...

Adding Field Trips to Your HomeschoolField trips are a great addition to your homeschool for a number of reasons, including the following:Improved learning. Field trips are a great way to make the lessons you are teaching to your students more re...

Homeschooling: Choosing the Subjects You Will Teach in a School YearThe first step in planning your school year is to select the subjects that you will be teaching each student during the upcoming year; the subjects define what you are going to t...

Building the Curricula You Will Use to HomeschoolAlthough the list of subjects is what you will teach, the curricula are how you will teach those subjects. You will need a curriculum for each subject for each student for each year. What Is a Cur...

Including Vacations in Your HomeschoolFor homeschool families, vacations are often the ultimate field trip. The great thing about using a vacation as a field trip is that your kids will be learning without even realizing it! There are many ways t...

Documenting a Field TripBefore you take a field trip, think of some ways to document your field trip. This is useful for documentation purposes and it can be useful for follow-up work that you might require your students to complete, such as a fi...

Creating Lesson Plans for HomeschoolingAfter you have identified the school days in your school year, you will be ready to start planning what you will be doing on each of those days. This is where lesson planning comes in to the equation. You w...

Creating and Maintaining a Homeschool Calendar and ScheduleNow that you know how many days of instruction (school days) you will have in a year, when the school year will start, and when the breaks will be, you are ready to create your homeschool...

Planning Your Homeschool YearAfter you have determined the number of days in your school year, you will need to decide how you want to achieve that number of days by planning your school year. You know that the year has 365 days available for sch...

Defining Your Homeschool YearIn order to start the process of lesson planning, you need to know how much time you are planning for; in other words, what is a school year for your homeschool? First, determine the total number of school days in yo...

Homeschooling: Determining Each Child's Current Education LevelThe idea here is to get a relative baseline of where your child stands in terms of grade year. This will help you determine the topics you need to teach and the resources you will use...

What Are Lesson Plans for Homeschooling and Why Are They Important?A lesson plan breaks down a curriculum for a topic into "pieces" and relates those pieces to a student for a specific period of time. In other words, a lesson plan is a map that s...

Adding Audio-Visual Equipment to Your Homeschool ClassroomThere are thousands of DVDs, videotapes, cassettes, and audio CDs available today that you will find valuable additions to your curriculum. These include documentaries on DVD, such as Ken ...

Developing a Curriculum for HomeschoolingOnce you have selected topics and understand the types of resources that are available to you, it's time to identify the curricula you need. As with the subjects you select, you will need a curricular for ...

Homeschooling: Determining Each Child's Learning Style One of the great things about us humans is that each of us has a unique personality. One of the hard things about educating humans is that each person has a unique personality; a person's per...

Getting Started in Eight StepsThe number-one question thousands of parents ask is probably your next question: How do I get started? The good news is that it is not hard to get started homeschooling, and certainly not as hard as many parents perc...

Advice from a homeschooling expert on homeschooling in the evenings. ...

Advice from a homeschooling expert for a single mom who works full-time and wants to homeschool her teen. ...