Traditional textbooks enable families to ease into a home school program. Textbook companies provide a full curriculum with lesson plans, answer keys, quiz books and answer keys, and test books and answer keys. This type of curriculum is available for preschool through high school. Your child can work at his own pace or he can work through a standard academic school year the same way public and private school students do. This option will allow a child to easily work back into a traditional school setting at a later time if so desired.
If you desire more control over what their child is learning, then choose the subjects that your child will study. Some parents feel the quality of education has suffered with the addition of too many extras in the school day. Other parents teach their children at home so they can choose a curriculum that moves their children along at a slower or faster pace. Still others choose to home school for religious purposes and like the ability to sift through and discuss information as their child learns.
Provide your child with a more interactive educational mode of study by emphasizing unit studies, which allow you to choose a certain topic and build lessons around that topic. For instance, a unit study centered on the sea might cover tides, sea life, the effect of storms and the salinity of water for the study of science. English might be covered through essays on the above topics. Grade the essays for grammar, sentence structure and cohesiveness. A history lesson might cover pirates, shipbuilding techniques and famous storms that occurred in a particular era.
Browse the offerings of curriculum companies that provide DVD and online school programs for use at home. The homeschooler watches a DVD of a teacher walking through the steps of a lesson or she can sign on to the online school site and do the same. If she chooses the DVD program, she can still set her own pace in most cases. Online schools often require that a student to maintain a certain pace, but some programs offer the flexibility of one-on-one teaching and assistance through email and video conferencing.
Take advantage of opportunities that public schools offer to home-schooled children to attend classes on a part-time basis. The home-schooled student can choose to take such harder classes as upper math and science with a public school teacher while tackling the easier subjects at home. He can also choose to participate in such extra-curricular or enrichment classes as band, sports, photography, drama and art. This enables the student to have flexibility and control over the classes he wants to take.