 Hey everybody, welcome to the Law Doc Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a let's chat. We're going to be chatting about what to do once you've decided to homeschool. I get tons of emails. I used to get tons and now I'm getting like a boo koodle of emails that goes something along the lines of help. I've decided to homeschool and I have no clue where to start. So today I'm going to give you my top few tips of where to start once you've made that decision of I want to homeschool or I'm going to homeschool. You are not going to be like how to homeschool type tips. They're just going to be a get you started on the right foot or at least the things I wish I had been told to help me get started on the right foot when we began homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. The very first thing I want you to do is take a deep breath because you just made a huge decision when it's life impacting and you feel like all of the panic setting in. Trust me, I read it in your emails all the time. I know that you're panicked, you're scared, you're worried. Your biggest fear is you are going to mess this up. Here's a secret. You actually can't mess it up. You were made to be your child's teacher. You were made to teach them everything in life and that includes reading and math. You can do this. There is nobody who is better at it or more equipped for it. Teaching degree or no teaching degree. You can do this. Take a deep breath. All right. Now let's go ahead and move on. The next thing you need to do is find out what laws are in the area you live. So if you live in the United States, every state has different laws. Some counties can even have something a little more specific, but for the most part, every state has different laws. Here in Florida, what we had to do was submit a letter of intent that basically said we intended to homeschool our child and then we have to, on the anniversary of that date, submit a evaluation of a portfolio review, which means we have to either keep a portfolio all year long and have it evaluated by a certified teacher and turn that review into the school board or we can do a standardized testing and turn the standardized testing results in. So we can choose either or to do. We personally do the portfolio review. You can see more about that here. If you would like to look at a portfolio review, you can, but don't freak out because it's not nearly as scary as that sounds either, but the best place to find out more information about the laws in your state is the HSLDA website and I'm going to link all of the things I'm talking about in the description box down below. So make sure you click there to get all of the links that I mentioned. Once you know what the laws are in your state and you've done whatever that first step is, the letter of intent, you have to let people know you're going to be homeschooling, withdrawing your kids, whatever it is, the next thing that you really, really should do is get out a pen and paper, sit down with your spouse and just jot down. This doesn't have to be fancy, but just jot down like your reasons for homeschooling and these can be totally honest. You can just straight up say I don't want them to go to school in this situation or distance learning stings. I mean, it doesn't have to be poetic and beautiful. You can be as honest as you want to be. Our reasons for homeschooling, we kind of skipped this step. So we were going backwards because we didn't decide to like write down our reasons for homeschooling until later, but our reasons for homeschooling is just because it suits our family. Our lifestyle and we love it. Like it's very, very simple for us. But once you kind of have like the reasons you're homeschooling, that's going to help you move into the next step that we're going to do, which is writing down your vision for your homeschool. Again, this can be super simple. You can just say I want my kids to survive and learn something. For us, our vision is going to sound poetic, but that's because we like dwelled on it for a long time and it is to instill a love of lifelong learning while prioritizing relationships and connections. So for us, that just means that we want her to love to learn, but we want to do that while maintaining our relationships first and foremost, which means that if it comes down to that math problem or mine and her relationship, we're going to choose our relationship. I am a mom first and a teacher second and that is something else that I highly suggest you try to remember because it's going to happen. It's going to come down to kind of one of those moments where you have to choose. Are you the mother who's going to hug that kid and tell him it's okay? Are you the teacher who's going to be like, you really need to get that worksheet done? And you can be whichever you choose to be. For me, I choose to be the mom first. Academics can wait for another day, but that's neither here nor there. The next thing after you have taken a deep breath, you have figured out the laws for your state, you've written down kind of your why for homeschooling and the vision for your homeschooling, like where you want to end up. I want you to go take a quiz and this is going to be a homeschool style quiz. I'm going to kind of put you into a method or philosophy of homeschoolers, traditional Charlotte Mason, unschoolers, unit study, et cetera. You don't even have to know what all those words mean. The only thing this is going to help you do is it's going to kind of help you set the tone for your homeschool by taking this quiz, which the questions are not like, are you a Charlotte Mason homeschooler? They're going to be very generic, like do you find that tests are important to education? Do you agree that a child can wait until they're a little bit older to begin learning academics, et cetera? They're going to be general questions. When you're done, it's going to give you your top three kind of philosophies. I believe the first time I took it, I was a very traditional homeschooler because I didn't know anything different and that's fine. Now when I take it, I score unit study, unschooler, and I believe Charlotte Mason, which fits our homeschool perfectly. So once you know that, just write those down. You don't have to know what they mean yet, but it's going to help you. Maybe you should only research those two or three and it's not going to feel as overwhelming as trying to research 12 philosophies because not that you don't have to research them. You can always research them at some point in the future. But if they don't apply to you right now, that's adding a whole lot of extra to your plate. Just research and get to know a little bit more about what probably applies to you most. The next thing you're going to do is take a learning quiz, like a style of learning quiz. And this is going to be based off of your children. So most people are either visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. That means they either need to see it, hear it or touch it. My daughter is auditory. I am visual. My husband is kinesthetic and we are all very heavily in the area that we are in. That means that if you have a kinesthetic learner just reading aloud to them, that's probably not enough. They need to be moving their hands. If you have a visual learner, they need to see color. They need to see things popping off the page at them. So that's also going to help you make decisions in the future when we get to the curriculum portion of this video. The next thing that I want you to do before you're buying your curriculum, once you start looking at the curriculum, is to take into consideration placement test samples and trials. Most curriculum companies have them. You can either look at the samples. There's going to be video flip-throughs. There's going to be something. Go on YouTube, look up a video flip-through. Go on the company's website and look for samples or for placement tests or for trials. Let your kids try them. Do the placement test. Don't just buy something because somebody told you it worked for their kids and you just wanted to get it because of that. Because you may be a completely different style of homeschooler with completely different kids. And that's another thing you need to keep in mind that your family is unique and your homeschooling journey is going to be unique and it's not going to be like anybody else. So I can stay here and tell you that these are the best curriculum, but it's probably not going to be the same for you. So take your style of homeschooling, your type of learner, and sit down and look at all of the different curriculum. You can even type in like unschooler auditory curriculum. Type that into Google and just see which ones pop up. If you have an unschooler in auditory for math, it's probably going to be a life of Fred. And I know that only because that's what, you know, if you have like a traditional kinesthetic, it's probably going to be math you see. I know that now because I've been in the homeschool world for four to five years. If you had asked me that four or five years ago, I'd be like, what are you talking about? So just type it into like Google or you can message me and ask and you'll find something. It will narrow your results down so that you're not looking at thousands of things. You're only looking at maybe a hundred or less, hopefully. Once you've narrowed it down, then you're going to try your samples, your trials, your placement test, and you can go ahead and purchase when you feel like you're ready to purchase. But just keep in mind that it is a right of passage of all homeschoolers to buy and fail at a curriculum. So you did not fail at homeschooling. You just had to ditch a curriculum because it didn't work for your family. It's a right of passage. We all do it. You're gonna do it. So just go ahead and accept that now. So then when it happens, you don't feel as disappointed because it's going to happen. We all do it. The next thing that I highly suggest is reading one of these two books. These are my absolute two favorite homeschool books for the homeschool mom. Teaching From Rest by Sarah McKinsey. This book is a Christian perspective. So if you are not a Christian, this may not be the best read for you, although it is an amazing book. The other one I suggest is The Brave Learner by Julie Bogart. This one is not from any religious perspective. So if you just want just a regular homeschool book, this would be it. So again, teaching from rest, Christian perspective, the brave learner, no religious perspective. Okay, and then the very, very last thing that you're gonna do after you have taken your deep breath, you have checked on your laws, you have written down your why for homeschooling, your vision for homeschooling. You know what style homeschooler you might be, what type of learner your kids are. You have tried samples and trials. So you kind of have a pretty good idea of what curriculum you want to use. You've read one or two homeschool books that have kind of filled you up and made you feel like you can conquer this. You're on the top of the world, you've got this. Is don't forget to have fun. You guys, yes, we want our kids to learn, but ultimately you are home with them 24 seven now and you get to be the orchestrator of everything. So don't make everything stiff and academic and just have fun and remember that homeschool is not school, it's completely different. You don't need six hours. We get everything a six hour school, a six hour day would be in less than two for sure, probably even one. So keep that in mind. You definitely don't need to be homeschooling for six hours a day and you don't have to replicate school. Things at home are different. You have one to five kids, maybe not 25. Baking a cake can totally count as your math lesson for that day and life skills totally count as well. I mean, I took home economics in school. So just have fun, be a little bit relaxed, enjoy yourself. These are times you're not gonna get back and the last kind of like suggestion that I have is if you find yourself feeling like you're not doing enough or you're not getting to what you plan to do and that's starting to give you guilt and it's starting to really weigh on you and make you feel like you're not doing enough. Even though I promise you you are, I suggest keeping a running list of what you are getting done that's educational. They did a puzzle, check that off that counts, write it down. They played an hour on Minecraft that totally counts whether you believe it or not. It is super educational. Trust me, try it yourself and you'll see. Write that down. They watched Magic School Bus or a documentary, write that down. All of those things count as learning because homeschool learning, it's totally different than what's in a classroom and then at the end of the day or week or month, you can look at those things that you did and know that even though you might not have gotten to all the lessons you had planned, you still had tons of learning and eventually you will start helping that guilty feeling you might feel. I wish you the best of luck on your homeschool journey and do not ever hesitate to reach out to me by email if you have any further questions. Good luck.