Here’s The First Thing You Need To Do Once You’ve Decided To Homeschool Your Kids

We have been a homeschooling family forever! My oldest daughter is 22 years old and a mom herself now. She only attended a couple of years of elementary school, then moved to homeschooling. After graduating from homeschool, she attended college with no issue. My youngest two daughters have never been to a school, they are 16 and 14 yrs old now.

A lot of people are considering homeschooling this year and have no idea where to start. Well, I’m going to try to help you out the best that I can.

The first thing that you need to do to prepare is to know the homeschool laws for your state.

Homeschooling is regulated by the state you reside in, it is not regulated by the federal government. That means each state has it’s own “rules” on how things have to be done.

To stay up to date on homeschool laws and information across the USA, I use the HSLDA website to stay up to date on laws.

You can choose your state and see all of the requirements for your state about homeschool. Some states require you to withdraw from public school a certain way. Some states have mandatory subjects that you must cover, and mandatory testing.

Thankfully, I live in Texas. Texas has some of the best homeschool laws that there are. Now, my oldest daughter I did withdraw her from public school and informed them she would be homeschooling. For the youngest two kids, I didn’t have to do anything to start. They had never been in school.

In Texas, we are considered a Private School. This gives us a lot of freedom with how we choose to educate our children. Because there are so many different styles of homeschooling, I will address those in separate posts.

Sometimes you will go through several different teaching and learning methods before you figure out what works best for you and your family.

So, to recap, your first step to homeschooling is to learn the laws for the state you live in. You got this!

One step at a time! Don’t overthink it and stress yourself out. I promise you that homeschooling is so much different than what the public schools had you doing at the end of this past school year. Let’s just refer to that as isolation schooling, it was hard for teachers, parents, and students.

Because it was an emergency situation, things were hard and confusing for everyone. But, now that you have made the decision to homeschool, you will now be in control of how it goes. You got this!