Planning for Homeschool

Oh boy, where to begin? I have been researching homeschooling for months now, pulling every book available from the local libraries, looking up articles and blogs online, and trying to figure out what will work for our family.

That is the one common theme I have found from all my research- families are encouraged to homeschool in whatever way best fits their family. 

There are several "types" of homeschooling, including but not limited to:

Traditional Homeschooling
This is essentially doing school... at home. So you have the pledge, set curriculums that you purchase for each subject, and you work on them at home. Many families using this approach will have a designated school room with desks, chalkboard or white board, and it is a little school right at their house.

Charter Online Schools
This is an online charter school that will pay for your curriculum, give you access to teachers online, and send you things like microscopes as the lesson plan requires it. You teach the given curriculum at home.

Unschooling
This is the complete opposite of traditional school. Those whose unschool believe that children learn from their natural environment, so formal, "sit down" education isn't needed. They believe that you learn about fractions from cooking, and math in the weekly budget discussion during a grocery store run, etc. 

Unit Based Homeschooling
This is COOL. Some people claim that this can also be considered unschooling, but others consider it it's own category. This is where you take whatever your child is interested in, and run with it. 

This takes a LOT of parental involvement, because you are effectively creating the curriculum as you go along, AND teaching it to your child. But the retention in kids with this method is just astronomical. 

Example: Your child loves weather. So you will plot major natural disasters over the course of history, discuss the impact they had on the community, take temperatures and do the mean, median, and mode, find the temperature difference, find the average rainfall over x amount of time, all that for math. 

You study the water cycle and how things can affect that. You conduct experiments to test acidity of rain in different areas, plot on a map the weather patterns around the world, and read everything about weather. 


Eclectic Homeschooling 
This is what most homeschool families do. They put together their own little mashup of traditional curriculums, some fun units, or whatever else strikes their fancy. 

My Current Plan
Right now, we are leaning toward the eclectic homeschool. I want a set curriculum for math and maybe history, but science will for sure be unit based and child-led. Then we will dabble in whatever I feel is right for Einstein at the time.