Today I decided to homeschool... but need a little help

[MadMel]

:o I have 2 little people who would have started Kinda and Prep this year.

After a lot of thought, today I decided to just take the plunge and DO IT! :D

I have googled half the day away looking for some sort of curriculum guidelines/help that don't involve me paying for it :shrug I am wanting to get this ball rolling ASAP as school is supposed to start on the 9th Feb, and I wanted to have some idea of what I am doing!! I am contacting THEAC for the registration forms tomorrow.

Thought maybe some of you lovely mummas can help me out :)

Oh and if it matters, I am in Northern Tasmania :cool

[Ceres]

Hi Mel
Have your little ones been in the school system at all?

[MadMel]

Yes Jaidan finished Kinda last year and was headed for prep this year. Chase hasn't but he has done pre kinda :)

[Janet]

The best thing about homeschooling for me is that the kids do it, not me. :lol Are you looking at registration stuff? There's a fair bit of info on the site here and lots of parents with experience in looking like they tick all the appropriate boxes. As far as learning goes, no reason to stop the kids doing what they've always done IMO. It's stopping children from learning which is the hard bit, I think!

[MadMel]

yes I have to register my eldest this year. I have written some sort of curriculum which they should hopefully approve. More of a tick list for me, I really wanted to just wing it.

[Ceres]

If you wanted to post up your curriculum I'm sure everyone would be happy to give you some feedback on it!

[MadMel]

oki :) Well I went by a basic curriculum, then noted how we will learn some of those things, and most of it the kids already know anyway.

Social Studies
* Meanings of holidays, traditions, and customs (Christmas, Easter, Australia Day, Anzac Day etc)
* Understanding and appreciating other cultures (Talking about the world and the people in it)
* Individual's role in family, home, school, and community
* Relationship of the individual to the group
* Work and jobs (Discussions about the people he knows and what jobs they do)
* Safety rules and symbols (Stop signs, traffic lights, zebra crossings etc talked about when going for walks)
* Basic human needs
* Self-respect and self-awareness
* Awareness of others (and their feelings, talk about bullying and attend playgroups)
* Location of home and school *not school but shops/parks/places we go*
* Diagram of home and school *same as above*
Science
* Observation of everyday, familiar things (when walking, at home and on the TV)
* Common animals and plants (in books, TV and when out and about)
* Classification of living things
* Farm animals (books, drawings, go out and see animals in the paddocks around home)
* Care of pets
* Like and unlike plants
* Indoor plants (get them a plant to look after)
* The sun: our principal source of energy (library for some books on the solar system)
* Weather and seasons (drawings and talk of each season as it comes along)
* Temperature (cooking, body temperatures, checking the weather, what temperature water boils/freezes etc)
* Light
* Colors
* Senses
* Earth, moon, stars, planets (diagrams, make planets, books, docos)
* Simple measurement (cooking, using rulers, height and weight etc)
* Beginning experimentation (basic things like vinegar and bicarb, eggs floating or sinking)
Language Arts
* Phonics (games, books, sounding out words)
* Listening to music
* Nursery rhymes, fairy tales (through books, DVD's and art)
* Social listening
* Constructing visual images while listening (read a story and get them to draw things from it)
* Role play (through dressups and games)
* Paraphrasing and summarizing (asking them to repeat back what happened in a story we have just read)
* Experience stories
* Relating events and experiences using complete sentences
* Listening for correct speech habits and word usage
* Beginning writing process (learning to write more words, and improve on their letters)
Health and Safety
* Personal hygiene
* Good eating habits (vege garden)
* Good grooming
* Care of teeth
* Major body parts (learning about the human body)
* Physical fitness (walking, playing at the park, Jaidan doing little athletics and Chase doing dance)
* Safety to and from destinations (road safety, stranger danger, crossings etc)
Mathematics
* Simple counting to 20
* Concepts of more, less than, same
* Sequence of events
* Correspondence of quantities (learnt through day to day activities and cooking)
* Meaning of addition and subtraction
* Estimation
* Elementary geometry (shapes)
* Calendar and clock
* Denominations of money (pocket money, shopping)
* Basic problem-solving strategies
* Basic chart and graph concepts (charts by reading food labels)

I don't even know if I am on the right path lol

[Ayla]

I just bumped a couple of threads for you plus here are some others: http://joyouslearning.info/forums/tags.php?tag=curriculum

[Ceres]

I think that looks pretty good - you've covered the subject areas. I don't know exactly how much detail they expect you to go into in your state - I guess it will be more obvious when you receive your paperwork.

[Beatrice]

Looks great to me :)

I found one of the most useful tricks for me was redefining one stream of "social studies" as "family, community and society", so that I could stick photos of everything we did which didn't necessarily fit into neat boxes into at least one part of our portfolio ;)

[Ayla]

Good tip B!

[Penarddun]

Very good tip B , will be using that one...

[StarryOne]

THEAC are awesome, you're lucky to be in Tasmania with them! There's a homeschooling group in Launceston, none in the northeast, and i'm not sure of the western half.

I also found this the other day
http://homeeducationtasmania.blogspot.com/

I'm in QLD, but used to live in Tassie and still own a house there-so try to keep a vague track for when we go back periodically.;)

[StarryOne]

Oh, and the public library has masses of homeschooling books. Enough to keep you going for a while! They had an especially good one which was a collection of 'a day in the life of a homeschooler' recounts. I can't remember what it was called, but THEAC will send you a list of the available books with a short summary, you should be able to pick it out of there. It really helped me get my head around what homeschooling really is.