How to start up your Homeschool in 5 Easy-Steps! Are you considering homeschooling? Wondering where to start? Read over my journey below and the 5 easy tips I give to all mums I meet considering homeschooling their kids!
I want to start my blog by sharing my own personal journey of how I started homeschooling, organised my home, chores, AND all while moving to the Middle-East – more specifically Saudi Arabia!
Even though I come with a primary school teaching background (of roughly 2 years) – a job I thoroughly enjoyed at the loveliest school in London before I got married – I was nervous about homeschooling my own children. Yes believe it or not, I was nervous. It wasn’t the teaching aspect as much, but the questions that kept me wondering were – “Will my child enjoy being taught by her mama?” Will she feel a bit lonely?” “Will I realistically be able to pull this off?” I did my research and I read widely. I read what other homeschooling mums of years of experience had to say. My most inspiring read was ‘The Fitra Journal,’ a quarterly magazine written by Muslim homeschooling Mamas. After that I was motivated, I set myself a start date, teamed up with another super determined homeschooling mama (we now home-school our girls together! 🙂 ) and spent a whole month preparing. So here’s my little bit of advice to anyone who intends to start.
1. Organise your home
Organise your home unless you’ve already done so – tidy out the kitchen cupboards, label jars, organise everything in your living room – try to ensure everything has its place (trust me it helps in the long run)
2. Organise your weekly routines
Organise your weekly routines, be it kids swimming, Qur’an time, mama’s ME time, shopping for the week or any other weekly activities – organise how it fits into your week.
3. Creating a homeschooling area
This might not be easy if you don’t have a spare room – it could be at your dining table and that’s fine – however try and organise homeschooling related items – like pens, pencils, paper – try to make sure its in visible reach for your children – this all helps get them ready into a routine and means you’re more organised too. If you can redecorate a garage or spare room then really decorate it and get your kids involved too – they’ll learn to appreciate the environment as well!
4. Write out your child’s learning outcomes for the year!
This one is vital – and I’ll be shedding more light on this area – of course you can buy homeschooling programmes (which I know absolutely nothing about) – however what I can help you on is becoming aware of what you’re child actually needs to be aware of by the end of each year (according to the British Curriculum)
5. You NEED to get organised
Give yourself a month to get organised for your own piece of mind. Also I’ll be coming back to this point as I hope to share tips on how to make yearly plans for your home-school
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[…] I think this is my one advice I always give to anyone that asks about how I make homeschooling look easy. But it really helps drawing up a plan or at least a rough idea of what your year looks like. When you are busier, when you plan a holiday or even seasonal changes. It becomes easy to plan in activities too such as gardening or planting (something we plan for the winter in Saudi for example). For more on planning check out my previous blog post titled Planning for the Next Homeschooling Year – where I talk about our homeschooling themes for the year. General planning I would recommend before you start homeschooling can be found on a previous blog post titled – Behind the scenes @mamateachesme. If you are reading this and are thinking of homeschooling or starting up your own school at home, read up one of earliest blogposts titled How to start up Your Muslim-homeschool. […]