 You've decided to homeschool. You've figured out the NYS regs (or whatever state you're in). The big question now is what curriculum to use - or not use.
Disclaimer. We're unschoolers. I believe strongly that curiosity is as innate to being human as swimming is to fish and flying to birds. Children want to learn about their world and become functioning adults - unless they have been taught by schools that learning can only happen in ways that are boring and that they aren't good at. Check out The Heart of Unschooling, Q&A to learn more and to find out if it really prepares kids for college and real life. That said, I fully support that each family must find what works for them and few will actually unschool. When folks first think of homeschooling they think of replicating school at home. Ultimately, very few homeschoolers stay in this place. There's a very wide spectrum from school-at-home on the one hand to unschooling on the other hand. Most homeschoolers end up somewhere in the middle, finding out that reading/writing/worksheets/textbooks are not usually the most ideal way for their child to learn. In fact, research shows that children learn best when in relationship with others with multiple senses engaged in an activity that interests them. Think about when you want to learn something... I bet you seldom order a textbook, fill out worksheets, and take a test. ;) You probably Google, read a *REAL* book, talk to people who know more than you, and do some hand's on experimenting. You probably talk to people about what you're learning because you're excited about it and discuss it with other folks interested in the same topic. This is the real life way that knowledge gets reinforced and built upon. Most folks starting off want a curriculum at least for reference, but keeping an open mind to how learning can work outside of that curriculum is important too. Ask around on homeschool pages and you'll get 101 different recommendations for curriculums. Go ahead and choose one. Just hold it loosely. Use the wording I recommend in my How to Homeschool in NYS post so you can change things up if you find something else that works better. And be willing to follow your child's lead when they go down a rabbit hole and want to veer off the curriculum. That's the joy of learning happening right there! Celebrate it! See my post on some of our favorite learning resources along with our homeschool/unschool posts over the years for ideas of how subjects can be covered via real life. Here are a few ways learning has happened naturally, over the years, in our home.... in note form for each subject. Math - we skip counted, counted by 5's and 10's and 100's in the car. We made up stupid/nonsense/gross poems for the times tables. We watched the zany math antics dot com and the British Maths Mansion on YouTube. We played the Dragon Box app and the Prodigy math game. We read library story books on math topics such as Multiplying Menace. This got us through middle school math. For high school, my daughter meets weekly with a tutor. I don't do high school math! English - we read 1001 library books; we read books we own; we listened to audio books; usually I did the reading since my daughter has dyslexia and never loved to read. Now, at age 15, she reads just fine, but still prefers an audio book. We didn't label her as "learning disabled" just because her learning style was different from the school-norm. There was no need to label her at home. Vocabulary was learned through real life and reading. Grammar was learned through me gently correcting thing she said with explanations of why one way was correct - plus MadLibs. Everyone should play MadLibs with their kids and allow them to put in as many potty words as they want! ;) Your kid will be an expert on verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs in no time and you'll all be laughing hilariously! For writing, see my post on How Unschoolers Learn to Write. Social - we watched Little House and talked about what life was like in those times. We read Native American stories and stories about holidays in other cultures. We read Magic Treehouse and talked about fact vs fiction. Historical fiction - whether through books or films - has always been a HUGE part of learning history here. It's by far more engaging than the dry facts and dates in a textbook, and of course you want to look up a few facts to see what's real vs not real. Liberty Kids is great for little ones (free on YouTube). Howard Zinn's Young People's History of the US book, Crash Course videos (US History, World History, European History), and the Seeds of American Trilogy (books) are all engaging for older kids. We did use Story of the World (SOTW) for World History the first time around, but I have a lot of reservations about it, key being that it centers around "now so and so was the richest and most powerful man in the world". See my Ancient History post on how we used SOTW for discussion of who gets to write history and how we supplemented it. Science - have you ever wondered why kids learn about cells and molecules but can't tell you about the plants and animals in their neighborhood? We started with several years of natural science, focusing on feeding and identifying birds, reading stories about the lives of animals around us, learning about the seasons, learning about the migration of a hummingbird from a fictional story, going to wilderness school, foraging for wild edibles, growing a garden, and so on. Books I read to her featured heavily here - enchanting fictional stories that taught real life science about the world around us. There are so very many wonderful books! From there, Helena branched into topics like biology, regenerative ecology, and now astronomy.
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 The BasicsConsidering homeschooling this year, welcome! To start, here are 6 things you should know in a nutshell.... 1. NYS does not provide or approve your curriculum. 2. You are required to teach specific subjects. The content and how your children learn is completely up to you. 3. Homeschooling does not need to look anything like school; in fact, it usually works best when it looks little to nothing like school. 4. Schools are set up so that a single teacher can assess the knowledge of 20-30 children (s)he doesn't have a deep personal relationship with. Homeschooling can be relationship based where things like casual conversation or telling Grandma what you learned can replace worksheets and tests. You know what your kids know because you know your kids - just like you knew when they were crawling, walking talking, etc. And just like they didn't need formal "how to go potty" lessons, kids at home often learn with no formal lessons and a lot of real-life involvement. If we all sent our kids to school to learn to use the potty, in a generation we'd question if they could learn without a worksheet. Can you picture it? Pick up the picture that shows the first thing you do when you go potty (child picks up picture of pulling drawers down). If this sounds super stupid it's because we've not been programmed to think kids need "school" methods to learn before age 5. Why do they suddenly need them at age 5? 5. NYS requires a Letter of Intent or LOI, an Individualized Home Instruction Plan or IHIP (pronounced eye-hip), 4 quarterly reports, and an annual assessment. They also require that your child is learning for a specific number of hours. Nobody counts those hours; we simply put that the hours were met - since learning at home occurs round the clock and on weekends and holidays too. These all go to your local school superintendent's office unless they contract out to BOCES. Ask around and people will tell you who your local point of contact is. 6. NYS does not approve your curriculum!! Some school districts don't understand this. They are only allowed to make sure you are following the regs - covering each required subject in some way and listing some sort of curricular resource for each subject. The Nitty GrittyNY requires a good deal of red-tape in terms of paperwork, but it's really quite simple once you get your head wrapped around it. You'll need to read the NYS regs for yourself (at the bottom here) but here are the requirements in everyday English.
LOI - First - you send in your letter of intent or LOI which states name, age, grade, and that you will homeschool. Sign and date it. This is due whenever you decide to homeschool. IHIP - Next, you send in an Individualized Home Instruction Plan or IHIP (pronounced eye-hip) that details the annual plan. Regs tell you when this has to be in; it's due so many days after your LOI. This can be very simple. List each required subjects. Write a sentence about what topics you will begin with or the overall goal or plan for that subject; don't be too detailed. Be sure to say "Other topics will be covered as opportunities and resources dictate". Then write "curricular resources will include but not be limited to the following" and list some resources for that subject. Those particular ways of wording things above allow you the flexibility to adjust your plan at any point in time during the year. So, if your child, for example, is suddenly obsessed with opossums and wants to learn everything there is to know about them, you can ditch what you had planned for science next and simply report a sentence or so about oppossum zoology in your quarterly reports for science and include a sentence about research in the English Language Arts (ELA) section. Without the specific wording, you are locked into adhering to your plan or reporting changes. About curricular resources - I always list a specific reference book or reference curriculum, plus videos, podcasts, YouTube videos, games, apps, field trips and things like that for curricular resources. While the book I list includes an actual title and author, I literally write "YouTube videos, podcasts, community professionals..." for the rest. Leaving it vague allows us freedom to uncover and use resources along the way. By the way... starting with things you know your kid is really into (dinosaurs for science or cooking for math) and asking kids what they want to learn about can be REALLY fun! Repeat the sentence or two summary and curricular resources for each subject. Put your child's name/grade and the date on it. Add your quarterly report dates (more below). Now you have an IHIP. (Note: Many people combine English Language Arts (ELA) into one subject; just be sure to touch on each required aspect.) That wasn't so difficult right? Quarterly reports - Think of these like report cards. Pick 4 dates about evenly spread out. For each one, you'll send in a sheet that lists each subject and includes a couple bullet points of what has been covered. State at top of the sheet that you covered the required hours and the child made satisfactory progress in all subjects. Again, less is more. The schools don't need tons of detail. They only need to hear from you that you've met the regs. Annual assessment - You turn this in with your 4th quarterly. There are two kinds of assessments - narrative and testing. Narrative assessments can be done in grades 1-3 and biannually in grades 4-8. For a narrative assessment, state that your child met or exceeded all expectations as set out in the x grade IHIP and will proceed onto the next grade. Sign. Date. Some folks add "highlights of the year included learning cursive" or something similar for most subjects. I never have. A few districts will tell you that you can't write your own narrative. When I moved to my current district, I had to have a certified NYS teacher I know sign off on it. Other times, parents make a peer-review-committee and sign off on each other's narrative assessments. Both are discussed in the regs below. A testing assessment is required in alternate grades for 4th-8th (so 4, 6, and 8 or 5 and 7). They are also required annually in high school. Most folks do the California Achievement Test (CAT) or the PASS test - both of which test basic math and ELA, like very basic. You are not required to do NYS common core testing or to test all subjects. Your child must have a cumulative score of 33rd percentile or greater meaning that they can pass if 67% (100-33 = 67) of the kids the test was normed on scored higher than them. In other words, don't sweat the tests. Below is the link for the much more complicated and verbose NYS regs. They're helpful to let you know required hours (nobody counts them bc learning happens all the time at home) and what subjects you have to cover when. I hope that provides a concise and non-scary summary for you! <3 You might not have chosen to homeschool if not for the pandemic, but this can be a super exciting and bonding experience over the joy of learning if you think outside of the school-at-home box. http://www.p12.nysed.gov/part100/pages/10010.html |
Rebecca Grace AndrewsWelcome! I'm a college professor, herbalist, writer and photographer. Archives
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