As August approached, we started realizing that school was not going to look “normal.” . I kept waiting for the local school district to release some kind of plan that would carry a low enough risk to send Arthur to physical school. Unfortunately, the district never met my threshold. And so I turned my mind to really considering homeschool as an option. I started researching our state’s (Nebraska) rules and regulations when it came to homeschooling. Nebraska has a very low threshold when it comes to homeschooling. Basically you submit a form to the state with a birth certificate and you are good to go. Some states require the logging of hours, details on curriculum used, and other things. Nebraska does not. A point that I think is working in my favor (i.e. not quite having a cemented plan), but could cause large gaps in achievement for certain kids. That is a whole other debate and discussion that I’m not getting into right now. For my purposes, I submitted my documents to the state and turned to the hard parts…

How am I going to teach?

Thanks to my education degree, I did come to this question from square one. I know my education philosophy. I know mostly how Arthur learns (Q is still the wild card as he’s only 3). I had things to work from. To help me solidify my thoughts, I found a great Homeschooling Style quiz. My results were:

Score for Waldorf Education: 10 

Score for Traditional Education: -3 

Score for Unit Studies Education: 16 

Score for Montessori Education: 8 

Score for Thomas Jefferson Education: 1 

Score for Unschooling: 13 

Score for Classical Education: 11 

Score for Charlotte Mason Education: 18

I am most definitely an eclectic teacher and now homeschooler that loves to take elements from many different styles and mash them together. I will be taking some elements from Charlotte Mason, unschooling, and unit studies with a bit of Classical Education to create our plan.

Our House and Family Is:

• more interested in fostering a love of learning and a passion for knowledge than tests and grades

• atheist, but believes in learning about all cultures and religions of the world

• focused on exploration and discovery leading to more learning

• literature and primary source based (very few textbooks allowed!)

• not opposed to computer time and screen time to help support our lessons

• pro-science and rigorous inquiry

• (hopefully) going out into the world to learn

• supportive of daily free play and exploration

What will I teach?

With all these things in mind, I turned from the how to the what. My first step was to look up Scope and Sequence for first grade. This can give you a basic idea of the things taught in any given year. I pulled many S and S documents from a variety of sources and started jotting down ideas for our year. Math and Language Arts is covered in almost every plan I saw, but the other subjects are harder to find. I ended up just picking through many plans and choosing what I wanted Arthur to learn this coming year. Here’s a rough brainstorming draft from this phase of planning:

I consulted with J about my list, he added a few things (philosophy and logic), and we narrowed down the focus in a few areas. Once I had a big idea list, the next step was to research and source curriculum. And my goodness! There are so many choices out there. I’ll share what we decided on in Part 3.

Next up on the TBR pile: