Getting Started

I recently wrote to a friend about beginning to base her child's education at home, and this was my penny's worth :)

There are many ways of HE, the hardest part is finding what suits your individual family and in some cases, individual child. Charlotte Mason/Montessori/unschooling/classic education are just a few methods. There are 3 styles a child can learn too; most common are visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic. You may want/need to tap into that too. It sounds very scientific :) but its not – you know your children better than anyone so just go with the flow and you will see your own style emerging.

To start with just wind down for a few weeks and have fun doing practical stuff, like walks in the park, indentifying leaves, visit the museum [lots of free sessions on over weekends/half term] visit the art gallery and talk about the paintings [worksheets available for this], grow some seeds in an old CD case and see the different parts of the plant, weigh out ingredients and bake cakes. 
Curl up watch a movie under a blanket with some cocoa (chose a literacy/historical/scientific educational genre if you like), do some crafts, listen to a piece of classical music, read a book together, do crosswords, art... anything but formal learning right now. Take some time off. 

There are tons of ‘things to do’. This will give you time to get some resources together and feel your feet.

Our unit study on the Americas lead us to a statue of Columbus

These sites are ones that I am familiar with, not necessarily the style that you would choose, but I hope there will be something of use :) You can have a play around on Google and see what you can find for yourself too. We do a combination of sorts, following the curriculum mostly for maths and English but going where ever we are led for geography, history and science projects.

 It all takes time to find your niche but best of all, you can chop and change and tweak to suit in any given period.  That's one of the charms of home based education. I deliberately use the phrase 'home based', as for a good part you will be out researching, partaking in sports, on field trips, or having a play date with some new found friends. 

Spacial awareness maths