The Homeschool Starter Guide

The Homeschool Starter Guide is a 36-page printable for families in the United States who have decided to homeschool, or nearly have, and are stuck on how to start. It doesn’t recommend a curriculum or a method. Instead it puts the decisions in an order where each one is small enough to make, and gives most of them a page to write your answer on.

The four parts

Decision and preparation asks why you’re doing this, what time, energy and budget your family really has, which of five homeschool structures to start with, and what your family vision is. Legal and requirements is the part with real deadlines. It explains three levels of state regulation, the steps for withdrawing a child from school, in order, which records to keep from day one, three kinds of assessment and a first-year budget. Curriculum and methods compares five teaching approaches, from traditional textbooks to Charlotte Mason, classical, unit studies and self-directed learning, then walks you through choosing materials, planning core subjects and electives, the school year, a weekly schedule and realistic daily hours by grade. Daily operations covers your learning space, supplies, socialization, finding local and online community, common first-year worries and a 90-day launch plan.

How it’s meant to be used

Most families work through it over two or three evenings, the guide says, and then come back to the planning pages each term. The first three parts each end with a checkpoint page listing what should be settled before you move on. The legal pages give general information for US families and name example states for each regulation level, but the guide asks you to confirm the current rules with your state department of education before filing anything, and says plainly that it is not legal advice.

The pages are undated, so the same printout works for a second year or a younger child. Print the planners and the weekly schedule more than once, since you’ll likely redraw your first plan within a couple of months.