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Set Your Goal

© Cheryl Lewis

You've decided to homeschool your young child. What now? Well the first thing you need to do is check the laws of your local and state governments. You can go to the Home School Legal Defense Association's Law by State page. This will help you figure out what your state requires. In order to find out what your local government requires you'll need to call the Board of Education for your district.

I recommend that you look again at the skills lists and decide on what goals you want to set. I also found the E.D. Hirsch books to be very helpful as well.

Look over the skill lists and see if you recognize skills that your child seems to have mastered, skills that they can do but need help with and skills that they have yet to learn at all. I wrote my son's skills down on paper divided up by area of expertise.

Using that list you create and comparing to the overall skills lists you can set some goals of what you want to accomplish with your child this homeschooling year. Most parents want to accomplish each and every thing on every list. Guess what? That's not always possible. Concentrate on the items you think are most important. It has been my experience that by concentrating on what I felt was most important, the other skills seemed to fall into place.

You may also want to check out Typical Behavorial Milestones too. This is a list I found early in my parenting days when I was still teaching in a private preschool program. Knowing these milestones has helped a great deal when it comes to homeschooling my little ones.

Once you have determined what the most important skills you want to teach are, you've basically determined your goals for the homeschooling year. Now the next step is to actually write out your goals in a parent statement to go into your preschool records book which will be discussed in an upcoming article.

I can hear some of you now, "I don't need to put that in writing!". I disagree. There will be days when you wonder what in the world you are trying to accomplish. Days that you feel like chucking the whole thing in the trash can. That statement will be there for you to go back and read. It will help you remember what you doing this for. It will inspire you.

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