School is almost upon us for the year. That means it is high time to look at your school choices.
Especially if you are unhappy with your collective school, you need to think about slipping out of that situation and readying yourself and your children for schooling at home.
I hope you’ve spent quality time thinking about your children and their future. I hope you’ve inspected a bit of curriculum and even used my curriculum guide, which begins here.
You have hardly a month for organizing your life around a new normal.
You need to start now.
Your curriculum company and your children will be grateful if you do not wait until the week before school begins (as too many other people do) to place your order, expecting it to arrive timely. Timely arrival follows timely ordering. Like, hurry…
Okay.
With that in mind, I’d like to direct you to the homeschooling posts on this site, created just for you, for inspiring, motivating, guiding, and helping you make the transition.
Oh, and if you just need a booster and wish someone would give the beginning lectures to you all over again, hey, help yourself to these! You are welcome!
Why we don’t want them there in the first place:
My Sweetest Homeschool Memories; 5 pages!
To help you with inspiration and incentive:
From Infancy to the Four-Year-Old, begins here and continues for 3 more pages.
To guide your choices and other decisions:
What Homeschooling is Like; 2 pages.
Do NOT Try Homeschooling (a trick title, but you’ll like this); 3 pages.
Is There Life After Homeschool? Yes!
To help figure out what curriculum you need:
A 5-Page Curriculum Guide by an Unbiased Person (me) (I love them ALL! and I am not to be sold.)
Okay. There is a LOT more on this site. Just use my search engine to search “homeschool” and you will find all sorts of help.
Have fun!
And don’t forget: Home’s Cool!
Home's Cool! 
The pic at the top is making me laugh– I think my reasons for homeschool cover 84% of the chart! Great post 🙂
MEEE TOOO! Thanks for this comment, friend, and WELCOME to Home’s Cool! Hope you enjoyed looking around and return often! 🙂
Thanks for sharing your insight. I am looking forward to being OUT!
I will get my curriculum early though. Good advice.
Unbiased!?? I had to chuckle on that one friend.
I am unbiased regarding homeschool curriculum types. I think each type is good for certain people. I have used each type when I fit into the category it best serves, and could recognize the benefits each provides. I do not represent any particular company, either. Although there was one particular type and one particular provider that fit our lives best, I believe it is not for everyone, and I strongly believe everyone should homeschool.
I also believe we could have produced well-educated children with any type, and that all the well-proven types are just that: proven. They all produce home-educated children who do fabulously better in life than they might have.
For those reasons, I presented a synopsis of each type for better understanding for the moms, so they can clearly and correctly place each of their children within the best curriculum for their young lives. I think that is unbiased.
That’s an interesting chart at the top – it gives me, as an outsider, an interesting picture of schooling in the States and the perceived weaknesses. We love our schools here and the education system is integrated with home life (although for many this is still only theoretical). It’s not perfect, but we are happy. If there was ever a problem I’d consider something more creative – but for now it’s a very open and creative system. They are big on parental and community involvement.
American schools do get portrayed as moral wastelands in our media and the gun thing is a cultural foible that MAKES NO SENSE to anyone in Europe.
We had one horrific massacre in 1996, banned guns and – hey – no more shootings!
Hi, Sans! Thanks for stopping by!
Our schools used to be “not perfect, but we were happy” but things changed. And as they changed, so did the results.
I was thinking as you did, that the chart shows the perceived downfallings of the system.
And we have more than one entire gunless state, but those states are the ones with the most gun-related killings. The saying here is: When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws have guns. It seems to be a true statement.
Facts are, we’ve had guns over here for far more than 200 years, but only recently have had such troubles, which maybe points back to results from the schools’ lack of morality . . . ?
It is certainly an odd and tragic phenomenon – the campus killing genre of atrocity. The perpetrators generally seem to be misfits who were failed by the system for sure – coupled with a lawlessness and inflated sense of self.
On this side of the pond, 200 years doesn’t seem very long.
I’m sure it seems odd to you. We get it, though, and more importantly, our enemies get it. Sighs.
Great article. I have been debating taking my middle son out and home and this is a great start! Thanks.
Shell, you are very welcome! Thanks for your kind comment, and welcome to Home’s Cool! 🙂
Get started now. You can always put plans on hold, but it is hard to decided at the last minute and then try to be organized. 🙂 Feel free to ask anything you need to know here. 🙂
Thank you for your homeschooling posts, Katharine. I’m not a homeschooling mama, but my husband and I keep our options open for all kinds of schooling, and take it a year—and a child—at a time. I imagine that if I did homeschool, I would do what I did as a teacher: use an eclectic mix of strategies.
What a great surprise to see you here, Rhonda!
Thanks for your kind words, and WELCOME to Home’s Cool!
Your goal of keeping all options open and re-evaluating on an annual basis is very wise, I must say, a sort of “counting the cost” although I must say I believe all children should be home schooled. 😉
Home schooling, using an eclectic mix, is a popular method among the moms who have no other responsibilities and who have much courage. Someone who’d never taught before and had five children ages ten and under needs clarity and un-complication! But you could do it!
You would be shocked at how many moms who are teachers feel they cannot transfer what they do/did in public, to their own homes. I never could understand that. But you do get the concept that the walls do not really make the school. Ha.
See ya’!
An insightful diagram. We have used a mixture of home schooling and Christian private schools for our two daughters. They are now 41 and 33 and still living ‘strong in the Lord.’ Our relationship is wonderful – they are a delight. We have added a son-in-law and 3 GKids.
If I can be frank for one second – Only a fool would send their precious God-given children to the public school system. The dangers there, for polluting the mind and heart, are potentially irreversible.
Thanks, Katherine.
I have not heard from you in SO long! It is great to have your input here! Thanks for this comment and I truly agree with you. And I know what you mean.
So many are not thinking. How can they not get this?!
I suppose, as impossible as it might sound, some just do not know what is going on?
Or they plainly don’t know what they are doing?
Yes, and it is worse today than ever. Your blog is a great resource for those parents willing to commit their time to such a great purpose.
I heard recently that Black home-schooled children out scored those in public school by more than 40 points – greater than many whites and Asians in the public schools, as well. A very encouraging statistic.
BTW – I took a long hiatus from blogging, but I’m glad to be back. As Eeyore would say, “Thanks for noticing.”
Almost all homeschooled kids are doing better than almost all public schooled kids, and have done so from the very outset. Home schooling is nearly a match to the study that showed what type of education causes the most learning. Self-motivated kids with one-on-one help as needed, with lots of reinforcements and rewards and a low-stress atmosphere—those are the ones who learn—not the ones thrown into a social pool.