Your child must either attend a public school or be home schooled until he or she reaches the age of 16. If you are planning to home school your child, you cannot do so until you have either a high school diploma or a GED. However, you can also hire a tutor as the tutor meets the same qualifications. You must submit a yearly Declaration of Intent by September 1 and no later than 30 days after you have started home schooling. This form must include the name of your child, his or her age, the address of the home school, and the dates of the school year that you have planned for your child.
At a minimum, you must teach your child reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, and the sciences. Your child must receive four and a half hours of instruction for 180 days in the academic year, barring any physical limitations that would exempt your child from this requirement. Georgia's law obligates you to submit attendance records once a year, although you are strongly encouraged to do so on a monthly basis. Similarly, you are required to write assessment reports on your child once a year and to have your child take a standardized test measuring his or her progress at least once every three years starting at the end of the third grade.
Since Georgia's laws concerning home-school curricula are fairly minimal, you have a enormous degree of leeway in what you feel you should teach your child. Still, you should take the time to look through some of the standardized tests that your child will be required to complete and use them as inspiration for your annual curricula. However, even if you are planning to build your home schooling curriculum by yourself, you do not need to do it alone. You should take advice from other parents who have home schooled their children successfully before you and learn from their experiences whenever possible.
Home schooling your child is an enormous commitment of time and other resources, meaning that you should plan well in order to avoid wasting resources and to achieve the best results possible for your child. Building a curriculum is vital to the planning process because you will need to build your daily lesson plans around the subjects that you intend to teach in your curriculum. You should always take care to institute a daily routine, since that will help you plan your lessons, avoid disruptions, and build in breaks in order to maximize your child's attentiveness when it counts.