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No matter what the circumstances that brought you to this search, this is the year you actually do it! You are going to homeschool your child for the very first time. You are probably feeling a mix of being afraid to homeschool and elated to experience the freedoms you have heard about from others. Your family is on the cusp of educational freedom like you have never experienced it before. You are all about to experience the benefits of homeschooling, but you want to know the details. about how to start homeschooling in Iowa.

You Have Important Questions!

Are you asking how to exit the local school districts the right way? Do you want to know how do you get started homeschooling while making sure you have covered all technical and legal requirements? At the outset of the homeschool experience, you will have questions. Those questions might be keeping you from saying “yes” to homeschooling. This article will give you a clear guide to the best way to begin homeschooling in Iowa or anywhere in the United States, today! Knowing what you need to do will help you feel confident, assured and no longer afraid to homeschool.

Breaking Down the Homeschool Facts

The best way to overcome being afraid to homeschool is asking questions and getting clear answers! Let’s break down some of the most common questions I hear from families. So many times, facts can dispel fears and help you on the way to a confident start. The truth is that, we are all nervous when we first consider homeschooling. Even teachers are anxious about each new school year. This doesn’t mean we aren’t meant to homeschool. It could mean that you are going to do what it takes to makes sure you do the work to be a great homeschool leader. That could work to your advantage.

Use the heading list to navigate to your desired topic.

• Check Your State Laws
• Choose ONLY the Service You Want
• Create Your Homeschool Calendar
• Knowing Your Why
• Consider Your Child’s Current Learning Style
• Set Up Attainable, Measurable Goals
• Start Smaller Than You Think

Check Your State’s Homeschool Laws

Home School Legal Defense HSLDA and National Home Education Research Institute NHER are both great resources to locate your state’s information and begin creating a plan for how to communicate with the appropriate agencies. Many parents are afraid to homeschool because they don’t know their rights and the laws of their state. You don’t have to be ignorant of the law and there are many organizations that are partnering to strengthen and uphold your rights.

We homeschool in IOWA which has had some major success in alleviating the burden of excessive or invasive oversight. The great place for a breakdown of your startup options is provided by Homeschool Iowa. Their site is one they should be bookmarked for every Iowa based homeschooler and is a good resource for anyone trying to navigate how to start homeschooling for the first time.

Their yearly Homeschool Convention is a great resource for curriculum choices and encouragement. The have printable forms and sample documents to help you know exactly what you need to provide to your school district.

Choose the Service You Want

Are you needing services from the local school district? College courses online, speech therapy, theater, band or athletics? Depending on your state laws, your students may be able to access these services while homeschooling. Don’t fret if you are barred from using public school services in your state. Homeschooling families have created their own network of resources and sport teams. Check with your state homeschool support group for a list of resources near you.

WE USE A COMBINATION OF SERVICES

We choose several options. If you are just beginning it might sound more confusing for me to tell you how we do it. Each depends on the services you want to use from the local school, if any at all or none. The simplest version is we are open enrolled to a neighboring school district. Iowa recently changed their laws to allow parents to choose enrolling their child for services in the district of their choice.

We are dual enrolled for athletics, therefor we choose Competent Private Instruction (CPI) option 2 with opt-in reporting. To satisfy the “reporting” element; you may choose to submit standardized test results, a portfolio evaluation by a licensed Iowa teacher, or you may submit an end of the year report from an accredited correspondence school in which your child is enrolled and send it to the district at the end of the school year.

Homeschool Iowa has this handy chart to help you see your options clearly. If you were ever afraid to homeschool, spend some time on their website. They offer plenty of resources to help you start homeschooling in Iowa, but have tons of information on their site that can help anyone.

Some of my other students are open enrolled but are NOT using services from the school currently. For these students, I send an Independent Private Instruction (IPI) form to the district in which those children are enrolled ONLY if they request one. I do not have to report to the district about those students work or test results.

This is all you need to do to fulfil the legal requirements to start homeschooling in Iowa.

Create Your Homeschool Calendar

Depending on your state laws for attendance, you can now begin to get an idea of how you want to schedule your homeschool day. In Iowa, we must meet the minimum requirement of meeting for 148 days per calendar year, at least 37 days each school quarter. I divided 148 school days by five days a week, for a result of roughly 30 weeks of “class” time. That leaves 20+ weeks for summer, Holiday, Travel, and well-deserved breaks.

Homeschooling allows you to use your days as you need them. I started a part-time job in October of 2018. I work 20-25 hours a week away from home. The younger kids were already using a four-day school schedule and using day five for elective studies and personal projects.

To help us cut down on our workload through the week we opted to keep our four-day week. Now, three days are hands-on instruction and one day for online work, elective and personal work. This means we do school a little longer, 38 weeks out of the year. We still have 14 weeks’ worth of time to distribute throughout the year for breaks and vacation.

Are You a Working Parent? You Can Choose to Homeschool!

You can join a co-op with other homeschool families and share the teaching load. Be flexible and swap school days for weekends, swap teaching days with your partner, or another homeschooling parent. I say all of this to let you know that you can still consider homeschool as a working parent.

Homeschooling is a great fit for entrepreneurial families like mine. Our school hours as restaurant owners were always unconventional. There were years when the only way the kids saw Daddy, was when I tucked all of us in the car and headed over to the restaurant to hang out until after closing time. I am so glad I made the effort to stay connected as a family. I don’t know if we would have beaten the odds and made it twenty-six years and business owners and lovers if we hadn’t made “US” a priority.

Homeschooling allowed us to prioritize family. We would not have chosen late nights with Dad if the kids had to be up for the bus at 6:30 in the morning. We were blessed to get to experience things like Daddy coming home for lunch and the kids going to work with Dad. Do you dream of living a life that is more family oriented? Homeschooling can give you this if you are willing to make it a priority.

Questions I will ask if you are considering homeschooling…

• Would homeschool be the best education model right now?
• Would it be the best fit for your family, or most importantly, your child?
• If the answer is yes, the rest is just details. I’ll help you sort those out.

Consider Homeschooling: Know Your Why

On hard days, and we all have them, you will need a reminder of the most important thing, why you’re choosing to homeschool. Here is where you get deeply personal about your reasons. These are not boxed reasons. No one gives up their personal comfort, a good paying job, a clean house; and endures the occasional ridicule of strangers in the grocery checkout line without a deep motivation. 

Is your child struggling? Do you feel like you are losing connection as a family? Maybe you want to learn together and explore the world with enthusiasm. All of those are great reasons to homeschool. You need to know your why to help you build a plan that fits your goals.

I created a free mini-course to create your own “Why Page” that will keep you on track for years to come. I’ve created a “Why” page for our family that has served me for all fourteen years that I’ve been homeschooling.

Consider Your Child’s Current Learning Style

When we first began homeschooling our kids were all very small. In facet here is a picture of our first official day of table subject school. I had a 7, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1 and was six months pregnant.

During that season of life, what we did well was nap. Sleeping was a huge focus of every day, play, naps, food, and bedtime was pretty much it. We did do a ton of reading when everyone went down for a nap. I was very intentional about wanting my kids to love books, so when the baby fell asleep, I gathered everyone upstairs on the bunk beds and pulled out the trundle, where I would read while they all dropped off one by one. Doug, my husband, would come home for a mid-day break to find all of us sleeping away in a dog-pile. I was an amazing time.

Afraid to Homeschool to Living a Literature Rich Life

When I started thinking about how to start homeschooling, I knew I wanted to keep doing exactly what was working for us AND get school credit for it. So, I searched for a Literature Based Curriculum, one with full length books that I could read aloud covering many of our core subjects for the day. In the end, a friend recommended a curriculum she was using.

Now, we use Sonlight Curriculum and have from the start. It fit our learning goals and is perfect for multi-student families like mine. We wanted to build a library that we could keep coming back to year after year. Being rural, I like having everything we need delivered to our door at the outset of the school year.

The question of how to start homeschooling can not be covered without talking curriculum. “How should I teach?” is not a question I ever answer based off what we use. Our curriculum fits us for the unique set of circumstances and goals we established for our family.

How Will We Learn?

FINDING homeschool resources THAT FIT YOUR FAMILY’S LEARNING STYLE

Here are a few ways I help new homeschooling families narrow down the HUGE selection of homeschooling materials and define what their family needs most.

LITERATURE BASED CURRICULUM

•  Sonlight                      My top Literature Based Bundle pick for great content and price
•  Memoria Press           Classical Subjects Latin, Greek, Logic & Rhetoric, Streaming
•  Veritas Press              Classical Subjects, Language Arts, Live & Online too
•  Beautiful Feet             Lighter reading workload with a study guide
•  Notgrass                     Stories all in one or two big books with guide and readers optional
•  Ambleside Online      Free classical literature book links and individual lesson plans or purchase the year lesson plan
• Timberdoodle Another of my top favorites. We used this last year. Less reading and more hands-on activities for your child.

There are tons of Homeschool teaching styles. I have a friend who only uses textbooks and workbooks. She is confident in knowing that all the information she needs to cover is in one book for the year. If a textbook is overwhelming to your or your child, there are some providers that break up the whole year into packets with ten workbooks for the year for each subject.

That said…textbooks make me want to cry. Sorry, friend, but to each their own. I want you to find your best fit for your famiy, so here is a list to get you started with a search.

TEXTBOOK BASED PROGRAMS HOMESCHOOL

Here is the best of the bunch if you crave structure and assurance.

•  Abeka                         Trusted leader in Textbook style, offers Video and Full Online Instruction
•  Alpha Omega AOP     Teacher Led Textbooks, self-directed workbook, digital and full online
•  Saxon Math                Clear, time-tested, and not too much repetition, solid test prep
•  ACE Core Paces          A series of workbooks covering four subjects systematically.

OTHER RESOURCES I USE…

•  Timberdoodle for games and learning toys
• Christianbook.com for great prices on personal studies, Bibles and text books
• My Amazon Recommendations Page

Many of these curriculum providers have developed some form of online instruction, either in a live streaming an actual real-time class, or using an online go at your own pace program. Almost every one of these publishers and curriculum creators has a huge resource library, a newsletter and FAQ page that are full of helpful information. Many have blogs ad Facebook groups to follow and learn new things from all the time.

Here is the thing about starting to homeschool, you are all going to be learning at the same time. Welcome back to school!

– Amber @200fingersandtoes

Continue With What is Working

We kept a literature-based program because it was what was working in our life. We had a groove with reading, and I didn’t want to change that. I am still a little taken back when a parent posts the question, “Which curriculum should I choose?” to a room full of strangers. There is so much I would want to know before I could even begin to narrow down suggestions that I think you might find useful. That is why as a homeschool veteran, I offer consultations. Not to make money, but to narrow down the sea of options for you.

Paying for a consult is an investment, paying for a curriculum you hate six weeks from now, that is a waste. But how do you find a good fit?

If I were going to give you a consultation, I would ask these four questions…

            What is prompting you to homeschool

• Is there a problem you are trying to solve?
• Has your educational philosophy changed?
• Is your child struggling academically, emotionally, relationally. Is there a sickness of disability?
• Do they have special needs that require accommodations in your home?
• Do you want to create a different orientation around family life for you all?

Your family’s needs and any potential problem must be considered and planned for in your homeschool method and reflected in your homeschool curriculum choice.

What are the ages and learning abilities of your children?

Time for gut level honesty. You need to take the real facts into account to make a real plan. To get a clearer picture your students can take placement tests in many of the curriculum on the market to find a best level.

Placement Tests Can Help You DISCOVER…

• If your child is reading below grade level,
• Need work in specific topics, like failing to thrive in subjects like math or science,
• If they need to change pace to meet graduation requirements
• Discover if your students are ahead in school and need more challenging material
• Know levels will help you to group students to save teaching time

How is your relationship with your child?

Listen, I would rather you choose a soft workload and spend the year building up a loving relationship built on trust and mutual respect than have you both butting heads trying to leap forward three levels in reading. Family is the core of homeschool, this is where you must begin.

What does your kid love?

Find a way to make it count for school in a positive way. Homeschooling allows you to let areas they excel in shine. My son was a gamer. I challenged myself to allow his passion for games to count as a real skill. When I did, I saw thousands of things he was learning from cooperative gaming. He even joined the competitive electronic gaming team at the University he attended for his undergrad program.

Knowing your child’s passions can go a long way in creating a homeschool that helps your child develop a love of learning. My daughter is a writer, so we jumped into NaNoWriMo and wrote 50k words one November. We both completed the challenge and ended the month with rough draft of a novel, and a great experience as mother and daughter.

You know your child best. Find ways to connect real life skills they currently have, or ones they want to learn with learning experiences in your homeschool. Learning can be relevant, experiential and personalized in your homeschool.

Set Up Attainable, Measurable Goals

Once you know what curriculum you are going to use you are ready to start homeschooling in Iowa. Now, you will want to be clear about what you want to accomplish this year, find a way to make it measurable.

Is there an academic struggle you can do a pre and post-tests for record keeping. Do you want to have more actual fun with your own kids. Could you keep a scrapbook of your year. Plan for a way to measure your goals. Let older kids set some academic goals for themselves too. I go over our year end test score with my older boys, so they see in real context where they need to put in more work and where they are doing well.

Start Smaller Than You Think

Doing anything from start-up is hard. It is natural to be afraid to homeschool. If this is your first-time homeschooling, acknowledging that it will be a season of fine tuning will help you. You will plan on using this year for finding your way. Give yourself permission to start smaller and make changes sooner.

When we begin the school year we typically start in August. I give us a month to come up to full steam. We begin with just our core subjects, Math, Reading (our reading book subjects cover History, Social Studies, Geography and can even Science), Language Arts. By September, we incorporate Bible, Writing assignments, current events, and the full science curriculum. By reading great books we sneak in a lot of learning time.

We all work from 10 to 2pm most school days. There is plenty of time to play and pursue other interests if they get right to work and stay on task. If they give me my school hours, I generally promise not to take their free time. I can keep my word because there is no homework for us to do at night.

Can You Set Your Own Hours?

My school hours are different. I choose to fit my needs because I am a mother of ten, and a writer. To continue working as a writer, I have always kept mornings as my personal quiet time and writing hours. You don’t have to conform to the traditional school setting. Homeschooling doesn’t mean you have to give up your personal and business goals. You can actually help your entrepreneurial life grow while you homeschool.

“School hours” are set for the adults working in the field of education. It is conducive to operate their business while parents are also working. It serves the community best, so it works. If you work during the week, a monday-friday school week might not serve your family best. You cna change your school hours to fit your family. There are tons of options. Four day weeks, block schedules, schooling on the weekends or evenings. All of these are possibilities that are acceptable for you to choose.

We began with school year round, which enabled my oldest children to graduate early and earn a ton of credits. As our schedule changed and we did more outside activities, we switched to a traditional school year. Even before I began working outside of the house, we switched to a four day schedule. We used our day FIVE, for Science Labs, outside lessons, batting and pitching practice and electives. Now, we keep that day open for catch up and independent work.

Now it is Your Turn to Research

I hope this gives you some places to do more research. If you decide this is the year for you to begin your homeschool journey, let me know. You don’t have to be afraid to homeschool for another minute! I want to cheer you on! If you have any other questions drop me a comment. The 200 Fingers & Toes blog is for you. It is full of resources, encouragement, reviews of tools and curriculum that we used in our home so we could share it with you.

Consider it a welcome to homeschooling gift to you from me.

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