So You’ve Decided to Homeschool!
Now what?
D.Bradley
D.Bradley
Here is some direction for those
of you who have decided to home educate, but you don’t know where to start.
1. Start with your kids
This is going to be a boring and
fruitless endeavor if you don’t have any kids to educate.
If you do, take a look at
them. Not one of those motherly
bruise-inventories or an investigation into what they’ve been eating by
inspecting the corners of their mouths, but a good, quiet observation of
them. Think about what they’re like, what
their gifts and talents are, what they enjoy, what they don’t. Who are
they? (We know you’ve asked this
question of yourself before, like after the deafening crash at the supermarket or
after you found the harmonica-shaped hole in the living room wall, but we don’t
mean it that way now.) Who is this little person?
Fact: every child is different,
and no single approach is best for all kids.
But that’s what’s great about
homeschooling. Instruction is
individualized in a way institutional* classrooms can only dream about, by
teachers who love their students in way no institutional teacher ever can. (*Notice I said “institutional classrooms,”
and not traditional classrooms. Let us not forget that for the vast majority
of our nation’s history, and world history too, homeschooling was the traditional means of education
children.)
OK, so you’ve taken a good look
at your kids, and you still want to do this.
So let’s do it right.
2. Keep it legal
The good news is, homeschooling
is perfectly legal. Despite how your
parents reacted when you told them your decision, nobody is going to send you
off to jail or shove your screaming children into the back of some social
worker’s car and drive them off to an institutional school. Not if you do it right, at least. (Relax.
You’re forming a home-school,
not an underground-school. You’re not on the lam. It’s perfectly OK if your kids go outside and
play for a bit, or even GASP! if you have to take them with you to the supermarket
during the hours institutional schools are in session. It’s OK.
You are not in trouble for
choosing to home school. Let’s keep
it that way.)
The even better news is that
since Kentucky law does not differentiate between home-schools and any other
type of private school, you’re living in what’s considered a
“homeschool-friendly” state. There are
certain requirements, but they are relatively simple.
Instead of quoting the state laws
to you, allow us to recommend a document forged by the pioneers of
homeschooling in Kentucky, back in the days when you could get your kids taken away from you for exercising your right
to personally direct their education.
(Those of us who enjoy the freedom to home-school today owe an
inexpressible debt of gratitude to those who were willing to go to jail or meet
officials at the doorstep with shotgun in hand to keep their kids from being
taken away. Brothers and sisters, we
stand on the shoulders of giants.)
Set the Way-Back Machine to the
year 1997. Twelve representatives from
Kentucky’s two main homeschooling associations, Christian Home Educators of
Kentucky (CHEK) and Kentucky Home Education Association (KHEA), meet with an
equal number of representatives from the state’s Directors of Pupil Personnel
Association to convene a task force charged with the creation of a guideline of
“Best Practices” for establishing a “bonafide” home school. (The word “bonafide” is from the Latin bona fides, which means “in good
faith.” Nice term.)
Their product, the “Best Practice
Approach to Home School Verification,” should be read in its entirety (it’s
quite short), and is available on the CHEK website (www.chek.org) under the “Kentucky Law & Forms” tab.
Here are the highlights:
A.
Each year, you
must send a letter of notifying your local Director of Pupil Personnel of your
intent to home-school. This letter
should only include your children’s names and ages and the address at which
your school is held, and be sent within the first two weeks of the start of
your local public school. That’s
it. The great news is, once you’ve done this you are “presumed to
be in compliance with the law and operating a bonafide school.” Congratulations!
B.
Since you
just established for yourself a bonafide school, consider it as such. Do not go around feeling the need to prove
your school is valid—it is. Take a deep breath and accept that. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the
DPP to prove otherwise, should problems arise.
Remember, even if the DPP decides
to investigate you, he or she can only determine if your school is bonafide or
not. Period. He or she does not have the authority to
“approve” the education provided by your school. So any DPP asking to “review your curriculum”
to better “align your program of studies” with any “standards” is merely a DPP
that is ignorant of his or her own jurisdictions. If you are ever contacted by such a DPP,
please contact CHEK immediately.
C.
You must
offer education to your children in the following subjects: Reading, Writing,
Spelling, Grammar, History, Mathematics, and Civics. This does not mean that you need to teach a
class on each subject, but that each
subject must be covered in a class you teach. Obviously, History and Civics could be taught
together. Reading, Writing, Spelling,
and Grammar could be combined into an English class. (Speaking of English, by state law that’s the
language you must provide your instruction in.)
Note: the cross-curricular approach that homeschool affords is one of
its greatest strengths. Home educators
can focus on interdisciplinary connections that teachers and students stuck in
bell-driven class periods simply cannot afford.
Think about it: Literature needs the context of History to be
understood. Combine them. Science uses applied Math. Why teach them separately?
D. You must hold school for at least as many
instructional hours as the public school district in which you reside, which is
185 days with a minimum of 170 student instructional days. KRS158.070 1. (d). states, “Student instructional year" means at least one
thousand sixty-two (1,062) hours of instructional time for students delivered
on not less than one hundred seventy (170) student attendance days;”. So, make sure you have
documented 170 days with at least 1062 instructional hours per school year. Keeping lesson plans in a notebook
works fine. Note:
homeschooling frees you from the rigid 6-hour instructional day of the
institutional school. The
law does NOT say that you must be in session the same time the public schoolers
are in session. Some kids
are morning people. Some
are not. Some kids want to
tackle subject after subject all day and be done with it. Others need frequent breaks. You know your kids. Do what works. Just keep track of what you did.
E.
Since we’re
on the subject of documentation, you’ll
need to also keep records of attendance and grades. Attendance had better be easy. If not, there’s a problem. (If you have an AWOL kid, check behind the
hanging clothes in the closet. That’s a
great place.) Anyway, the lesson plan
notebook mentioned above is a great place to keep attendance too. Now, grades must be done at the same interval
as the public school district in which you live. (I’ve always kind of wondered about this one,
but oh well.) So if your district is on
quarterly grade reports, you are too.
Trimesters? You too. Get it?
Assign grades each grading period for every subject you teach. Note: Think about how you‘re going to
grade. Philosophies of assessment (how
you grade) are all over the place.
Nobody agrees about anything, except that effective grading informs both
the teacher and the student about progress and achievement, and that
ineffective grading can simply crush kids and the teachers who care about
them. Use grades effectively. Because
homeschooling is individualized, home school educators can teach to mastery far
more effectively than institutional teachers. Unlike teachers in public school who have
classrooms packed with students of widely disparate ability levels teaching
according to “pacing guides” that relentlessly push content forward whether all
the kids have learned it or not, home educators can teach, formatively assess
(that means quiz), reteach differently, and formatively assess over and over,
repeating the process using different strategies until the kid GETS IT and can
teach it back to you (that’s called mastery). Then summatively assess (that means test),
grade, celebrate, and move on. Nobody
gets hurt.
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