Starting our home education from scratch

by Susan Lott

The idea of teaching my son has both excited and terrified me since he was born. Providing a home education is important to me because it was important to my mother, who was and still is very gifted at teaching children. She prepared me for, and supplemented my public school education by providing family field trips, art and music training, and she read to me for at least an hour each day. She prepared all six of her children very well for university educations and good careers. In fact, she made it look so easy that I never gave much thought to preparing myself to teach a child - I thought every mother could just do it! In addition, I was the youngest of those six children, the next youngest being 10 years older than I. So, I hardly had any experience with children at all, beyond occasionally babysitting my nieces and nephews. When my son came along, I completely panicked (I had never even bathed a newborn, ever!). While I believed being a good mother included providing educational experiences at home, I had no idea how to begin!

The only thing I had to start our home education with was great love for my son and the desire to provide an educational atmosphere for him at home. My desire led me to acquire educational books, DVDs, and toys. As time went on, I realized that I had overlooked the obvious: he can't learn his ABCs all by himself out of a book. I realized that I needed to be actively teaching my son. I also discovered that there was a big reason I was a history research major, rather than a childhood education major: teaching children is not my favorite thing to do and I have absolutely no talent for it! Suppressing my panic and dread at this discovery, I continued to love and nurture my child the best I knew how. I began seeking help and ideas from others, like Tamsyn, who have talent, experience, and excitement about teaching children.

My biggest barrier was lack of confidence, followed by lack of excitement and lack of motivation. I mustered my courage and began to think of ways to educate, motivate, and get myself excited about teaching my child.

Three Steps to a Personalized Plan for Home Education

One word about these pages: Invaluable! Many of the websites include curriculum plans ready-made and you can just print them out. I wanted to make a few changes and personalize my plan. These sites were perfect to help me start brainstorming and asking myself questions. What different subjects does my son need to learn about? What do I like to learn about? What subjects am I naturally excited about and which will be easy for me to teach? What ideas do others have for teaching things I'm dreading (i.e. numbers and math)? What are my son's natural abilities and interests? What holiday traditions or local museums will provide hands-on learning and real life application experiences?

2. Identify several subjects to include in your personalized plan.

I came up with Art, Life Skills, Field Trips, Science, Literature, and Religious Education. My son is only 2 and a half, but doing art projects together will be a happy time, even if it's just play dough. For now, Literature will include not only books, but learning numbers and letters as well. I've thought up some fun hands-on Scienceprojects and Field Trips. Religious Education will be our Sunday activity, where I can review his Nursery Lesson with him and read from the Scripture Stories series published by the LDS church. Life skills will remind me to teach him basic things like how to dress himself (yes, I might forget to teach him that... remember I'm the epitome of inexperience!)

3. Plan a flexible curriculum to cover a specified time frame.

I just started with a plain old year calendar. For each month of the year, I identified genres or focus items I want to teach from each subject. Drawing heavily from the homeschooling pages and the links on the Resources page, I filled in things to teach for each subject. I was so proud when I actually added a few things I thought up all bymyself! For example, May's science project will be planting a garden, February's music genre will be Jazz, and August's field trip will be to an Airplane museum.

My complete April curriculum is as follows:

• Art: Watercolors, Easter eggs
• Music: Baroque period, focusing on "Spring," from Vivaldi's Four Seasons
• Field Trip: Baby Animal Days
• Life Skills: Dressing self, helping with laundry
• Literature: Beatrix Potter Stories, letters J K L, numbers 7 8
• Science: Animals and animal sounds
• Field Trip: Baby Animal Days, Willow Park Zoo
• Religious Education: New Testament Stories, Nursery Manual Lessons

There are seven subjects, one for every day of the week. We will take at least one field trip a month. It's a small and very generalized start with lots of room for improvement, but it is a start!

Hopefully, I will be adept enough to embrace teaching moments whenever they occur, about any subject. This plan simply gets me out of the worrying stage and into the action stage of the process. With a curriculum in mind, I know that I will at least get the basics done, and hopefully I will do much more as I get more comfortable with teaching my son at home.

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