Home education planning for beginners: your first term

Most first-term advice is written by people selling a curriculum. Here is what the first term is really like, and what is worth your energy.

One thing to sort out before anything else: what your own country, state or province requires. That varies enormously, from nothing at all to registration and regular assessment, and it shapes how much of the rest applies to you.

Do less than you think

The commonest first-term mistake is recreating school at the kitchen table: a timetable, subjects in hour blocks, a full day. It usually collapses within a month, and the collapse feels like personal failure when it is really a scheduling error.

One-to-one is enormously more efficient than one-to-thirty. There is no register, no lining up, no settling a room, no waiting for the slowest or fastest. What takes an hour in a classroom often takes fifteen minutes at home.

If your child has come out of school, expect a gap

A child who has left school, particularly one who left unhappy, usually needs a period of doing very little formal work. This is commonly called deschooling. The rough rule of thumb is a month for each year they were in school, though it varies enormously.

It looks like nothing is happening. What is actually happening is that the association between learning and anxiety is fading. Pushing formal work through that window tends to extend it rather than shorten it.

What to actually do in term one

1. Find out where they actually are. Not their school year, what they can genuinely do. Expect an uneven profile, that is normal.
2. Pick two things to be consistent about. Usually maths and reading. Everything else can be loose while you find your feet.
3. Start the record from day one. Even a line a day. Reconstructing four months later is the single most miserable job in home education.
4. Try more than you will keep. Some things will not suit your child. You cannot tell which in advance.
5. Find other home-educating families. Practical answers about your area come from people who live there.

What to ignore in term one

• Complete curriculum packages bought before you know your child at home. They are expensive and often abandoned by week five.
• Comparison with school year groups. Uneven is the norm and rarely means what people fear it means.
• Anyone who tells you there is one right method. Structured, interest-led and everything between all work, for different children and different families.
• Buying a lot of equipment. A library card and a notebook cover the first term for most families.

How Different Drums helps here

Starting from nothing is the hardest part, and the app was built to remove the blank page. You can generate a curriculum for a topic and a stage rather than designing one from scratch, and adjust it once you see how your child responds.

The learning log runs from day one, including everyday learning like trips, books and conversations, so the record is building while you are still working out what you are doing. There is a 14 day free trial and no card required, which matters when you are already spending on a hundred other things.