What to teach this homeschool year, and what to skip

Parents come to us convinced there is an official list somewhere. A sequence the schools have and they don't, and if you wander off it your kid drops through a crack that nobody finds until he is fifteen.

There isn't one. Two good schools four miles apart teach fractions in different years and both sets of children come out fine.

Three things carry the year

Reading. Everything else rides on it. Read out loud to them long past the age you think you are supposed to stop, and let them read books that are far too easy, because that is how fluency gets built. Nobody ever got fluent by being handed harder books faster.

Math, in order, nothing skipped. Math is the only subject where a gap does lasting damage, because every piece stands on the one underneath. Go slowly. Do not move on from something they have not got. A child who is solid and a chapter behind is in far better shape than a child who is on schedule and guessing.

Getting their own thoughts onto paper. Not handwriting. Taking an idea out of a head and putting it somewhere another person can follow it.

History, science, art, music, geography. All of it worth doing, none of it fragile. A kid who misses the Romans this year meets them next year and loses nothing at all.

Nobody is on grade level, exactly

Almost every child is ahead in some things and behind in others. A nine-year-old who reads like a twelve-year-old and does math like a seven-year-old is completely ordinary.

A school has to average that into one number and call it third grade, because it has to seat him somewhere. You don't. You can teach each subject at the spot where he is standing, and that is the largest academic advantage you have over the building you took him out of.

So ask it subject by subject and then teach to the answer.

You can see it in the work

Finishes fast, gets nearly everything right, looks bored. Too easy, move up.

Guessing, near tears, asking what to do at every step. Too hard, drop back until she is steady, then climb.

What you want is a bit of struggle and then getting it, and you will recognize that on sight, because it looks like satisfaction.

Write down what you did

Not for the state, though do check your state. For you, at eleven at night in March, when the doubt turns up and tells you the year has been wasted. That fear runs entirely on not knowing. A list of what your kid actually did is the only thing that shuts it up.