Lara wonders, “How soon would you ideally start planning for homeschooling, before starting up?”
Ideally? I would probably have started a few years ago! Barring the ability to time travel, however…
I can’t change how things happened w/ Captain Science, but I can tell you that with the Tank being 3.5, I’m already planning his first year of homeschooling — his “pre-K 4″ year. This isn’t because I think a 4-year-old needs that much in the way of formal schooling, but because I think homeschooling offers a unique opportunity to gentle phase in more structured learning.
I’ve always felt Kindergarten (particularly public Kindergarten as it currently stands) was a bit of a rude awakening for children. I mean, the classroom looks an awful lot like it did in pre-K, but suddenly there’s this mountain of expectation placed on the child. I’m all for high expectations, but the sudden leap from play to work doesn’t sit well with me.
We’ll start introducing some “curricula” gradually over the summer, starting with some phonics, tracing and cutting work (areas where Captain Science’s early Montessori education really failed him), and some basic math skills. He’s already great at counting and he can do simple addition in his head, so I think some hands-on math would be right up his alley. We’ll add a little at a time, so that by the time we reach Kindergarten age and are asking a little more of him, he’ll be used to our academic routine, he’ll have gradually worked up to the K-level materials, and I’ll have a better idea of what types of materials will be suit his needs.
Best case scenario*, I’d want to start planning a year ahead, picking out curricula for that year and trying to develop at least a rough sketch of where I’d like to go with certain subjects and when. If you don’t have that much time, start ASAP. I’m already putting together materials for next year for Captain Science and the Tank. More time is always better!
We were able to get our curricula for Cpt. Science figured out over the summer, but it was a little slapdash to begin with, which made me feel harried. It also meant we didn’t have as much time for big-picture planning as I would have liked. With the Tank, starting now means I can have a very bare-bones mental picture of the big picture from the get-go.
Your little guy is four? Now is probably the right time to get started, if your goal is to start by Kindergarten. It’s never, ever, ever too late, though. You can always make changes to your materials and routine as needed!
*Patchfire says the best case scenario is actually “as a break from reading pregnancy books.” Don’t listen to her, though. Compared to her, we’ll all doin’ it wrong. 
I reckon a year ahead is a good time to start home ed planning for a second or subsequent child. That would allow a couple of months to organise your plan and resources, and 10 months to assimilate the fact that this child will learn differently to her/his sibling! I have spent the last year and a half faffing around with ds’s schooling. I foolishly assumed that we could simply fold 4yo dd into the same plan. Um, nope! It’s like starting back at square one lol.
Cpt. Science and the Tank are so far apart in age (5.5 years) and different in temperament and talent that at least I don’t have any expectations of things going the same way! Also have the benefit of having not started homeschooling Cpt. Science until he was older, so no expectations of pre-K or K homeschooling, period!
LOL, about Patchfire and pregnancy books.
I tell you what, I wish I had worked on handwriting sooner with Ryan. He was reading at 4yo but is still torturing me with the horrid handwriting. I’m not a slacker, honest, I’m not.
Building small hand coordination! It’s a good thing.
In 100% agreement with you on the handwriting thing! I think no amount of handwriting practice at this point will compensate for those two Montessori years, where Cpt. Science wasn’t made to write correctly. Handwriting is still a struggle for him. He has great fine motor control (manipulating tiny object? using clay? no trouble!) and good gross motor control, but that middling range of writing and cutting is really weak. We’re starting the Tank w/ the Kumon tracing, probably, and then go into proper letter shaping after that.
My ds has exactly the same thing. He can hit a ball with a racket. He can thread a needle. But he can’t cut around a shape with any accuracy.
I don’t like the idea of unschooling or delaying handwriting, because they try to write whether you teach it or not, so if you don’t teach it, the child not only does not practice correct writing, but also practices in bad habits which are hard to break later on.
Captain Science did Montessori for two years. They completely deemphasize handwriting or holding the pencil correctly. The way he learned to hold the pencil is just…imagine you hands on the keyboard, stick a pencil under the second knuckle, then turn your hand sizeways so the pencil rests on your pinky. Yeah, that’s how he learned. Three years later and he still reverts to that if we aren’t looking.
Okay, here’s a question for you, re: organization.
If you’re planning well in advance, you’re probably buying the pieces of various and sundry curricula for subjects, also well in advance. (How do you go about storing those, btw?) In the process of organizing your year, do you grab one of those ‘teacher’ planners at Staples or whatever? So you have, essentially, lesson planning notes done up well in advance? Or do you organize your pre-planning your year somehow else?
Large book shelf OR bins to be stuck in the attic/storage closet until needed. That’s all I can offer.
I’m planning on a larger scale right now, buying books and trying to project what we’ll be working on. I’ll do the specific lesson planning as we’re wrapping up this school year, as I can’t be certain about how much progress we’ll make.
All my lesson plans are done in Excel spreadsheets. I love them sumbitches. I pick my books and decide how many weeks on each topic, but I do the specific lesson plans one topic at a time as I get closer to it, to avoid feeling frustrated if we get hung up and lag behind schedule or zoom forward and get ahead of.
Well now, how does that work? Excel for lesson planning, I mean? I always hated actual formal lesson planning – like writing out the whole thing in a science experiment proof type format… BLEH. But the teacher book planner thing I got good with, marking in which specific topics I planned to touch on in a given subject in a week… Loved it. SO MUCH EASIER than lab-report style planning. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around how to do it in Excel, and if I could make Excel work for it, and not have to use the stupid paper-book that I inevitably spill something on/in… That’d be wonderful.
I have a master spreadsheet with the schedule and short notation of what we’re doing (“ch. 2″ or “ex. 1-5″). I have subject spread sheets with columns for all manner of information, lots of color-coding. Here’s the Rome lesson plan we’re currently wrapping up. There was a way more complex one for our initial history work, but as he’s delved deeper into subjects, the number of assignments for each subject has dropped.
That (plus the so-helpfully linked copy of the daily schedule!) was incredibly helpful. It’s almost exactly like I used the planners, but much more spillproof, and pretty! Legible, too. ^_~ I had, for some reason, a thought that this sort of thing should be a dated thing, and that was driving my ability to understand right into the ground. I think that for the sake of practice I might do some tinkering around with mock-plans for something simple I have here or something… and then give some thought to what I want to do with Nathaniel both on a broad overview basis and to try to set up a routine. It’d be nice to have some kind of routine in place… Which I’ve been saying for months now, and hasn’t happened. 9.9;; Go figure. Anyhow, THANK YOU.
I like to do it by day/order, so if we miss a day, we don’t throw off the whole schedule!
Good point. That’s actually a very good point. And, of course, why my book was always in pencil. But still extremely useful, particularly if it means you can have one workbook for history, with different tabs for each subject in order, then done up as per your lovely example… Oh, my geeker joy. XD
And, hey, wait! You mean I was…helpful? I thought my blog wasn’t helpful!
Oh, shit! I forgot! SHAME, [Smrt]Mama! SHAME! You should know better than to… um… well… Make your tools available! SHAME!
XD
As God is my witness, I shall never attempt to be helpful again! Not.
Heh, I do need a break from pregnancy books.
We’ve been working in an informal way on school-related stuff for a while now, but making the jump to actual planning scares me, for some reason.
Seth can read pretty well now, thanks to Dick and Jane, and he can sound out words with help, he’s got math down very well and can cut without much trouble, but he doesn’t even try to write. I think maybe we don’t do enough art. 
He showed interest in one of those little workbooks the other day at the store, the kind where you’re supposed to trace the letters, but so far, he just draws on it and says he’s writing the letters fancy. 
I noticed the same attitude towards writing in many of the little boys this age at the daycare where I used to work. I don’t want to rush him… I guess the first step is educating myself a bit more. I’ve just been telling myself there’s plenty of time for that sort of thing for years… and now finally there’s not quite so much time as there used to be. 
The other problem is that we’re not completely sure yet whether we’re going to start out homeschooling, or let him try public school first. I guess that’s the first thing to decide.
Have you read The Well Trained Mind yet? If not, that needs to be your first stop!
I have read nothing, except, last year, a single book on the benefits of homeschooling in general.
So yep, I probably need to start that.