Launching Your Homeschool: Tips for getting started as a homeschooler

Looking at the current moral wreckage of our culture, it is apparent that the ideal education of young children today is determined by the children’s parents and remains under their control. In most cases, children learn better from caring, involved parents and guardians who are sitting next to them rather than from computer screens and keyboards. The time-tested concepts and strategies in this book are the work of a veteran teacher with decades of experience teaching in public, private and home school settings and as a tutor/mentor for families with many young children. You may dive into this book in any chapter to glean from that experience.

Here is the overview of the book, to assist your diving – and your launch of your own homeschool experience:

• Chapter 1 lays out the advantages of homeschooling; this is important, because your reasons for home schooling will in large part determine the fruit of your endeavors.
• Chapter 2 gives you the overview of where you are heading: it explains how you can become “the guide on the side” (which is the homeschool paradigm) rather than the traditional view of the teacher as “the sage on the stage“ by preparing homeschooling to-do charts that enable you to check each child’s progress throughout the school day. You are raising future adults. Closely supervised child-appropriate delegation of responsibilities helps your children become positive, powerful and spiritually sound contributors to the world.
• Homeschooling is often a challenge due to strengths and weaknesses in both the student and the teacher. Because tutoring happens one-on-one, character flaws are exposed (and are addressed) in a way that can never happen in a schoolroom with one teacher and 20 children. Chapters 3 and 12 (goofy rewards) offer you tips for motivating and rewarding your children so that they complete those daily academic tasks.
• Moving from the overview into the specifics, chapter 4 lays out the subjects to be conquered in a child’s education and explains your options in that regard. The basics of teaching (and having your children actually learn) the 3 R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) are introduced in that chapter and in chapters 5 through 8. Additional topics—drawing and musical training — follow in chapters 9 and 10. Section 2 includes tips for developing smart study skills at the elementary through middle school years.
• The third section, chapters 13-15, concludes the book with ideas for teaching a pre-K tot, teaching a child who is unusually gifted in some areas, and raising an only child. Homeschooling begins when your little child joins your family, not at some arbitrary age six years later, and is tailored to your particular needs and circumstances. Science indicates that much of the wiring of the human brain is completed by the time we reach about eight years old. The earlier we can stimulate the left- and right-brain activities, the greater that person’s abilities, influence and accomplishments can be, over a lifetime.
• The book concludes in Chapter 16 as it began—looking back at the big picture view of homeschooling. It does this by describing the two of the most common academic pitfalls for homeschoolers, and then describing the earmarks of a biblically sound educational program.