Two kids, eight grades, written down.
I taught my daughter from 1st through 6th grade and my son from 4th through 8th, at home. Here is everything I wish someone had handed me on day one: the honest basics, the curriculum that actually stuck, and the unit studies our kids still talk about.
Two kids, taught at the kitchen table
I'm not an expert. I'm a mom who taught both of my kids at home while working full-time shifts in healthcare, my daughter from first through sixth grade, my son from fourth through eighth. Both of them went on to graduate high school as valedictorians, and they'll tell you it started at our kitchen table.
Everything here is what actually worked for us, told as stories, not advice. Read our full story →
The basics, minus the overwhelm
You do not need a converted classroom, a color-coded planner, or a teaching degree. When we started, I made it far more complicated than it needed to be. Here is the short version: six things to sort out, roughly in order.
Know your state's rules
Homeschool law is set at the state level and varies a lot. Some states just need a letter of intent; others ask for testing or a portfolio. Look up your state's requirements before anything else. (This is your starting point, not legal advice.)
Deschool first
If your kids are leaving a classroom, give everyone time to decompress before school starts. Read together, bake, go outside. It resets everyone.
Find your rhythm
Pick a loose daily loop instead of a rigid bell schedule. We did a morning basket of read-alouds and math, a hands-on afternoon, and left Fridays open for field trips and catch-up.
Watch how they learn
One of mine needed to move and build; the other wanted to read alone for hours. You will spot it fast. Lean into it, because homeschooling's whole advantage is teaching the kid in front of you.
Keep simple records
A single binder does it: a reading log, a few work samples per subject, and photos of projects. Even in relaxed states, a portfolio is worth keeping for your own peace of mind.
Make a "yes" space
You need a shelf, good light, and a basket per kid, not a dedicated room.
Flexibility is the whole point.
If something is not working and everyone is miserable, it is okay to pivot to something else. You are allowed to drop a curriculum mid-year, change your schedule, or scrap a plan entirely, with no guilt required. The freedom to change course the moment it stops serving your kid is the entire reason we teach at home.
Change the room, not the curriculum
The band above is the big version: if a program is wrong, drop it. But most bad days are not that. Most bad days, nothing is wrong with the lesson at all. Everybody is just bored, me included, and the fix is almost never academic.
Build a fort and school inside it
Drape blankets over the couch and a couple of chairs, crawl in, and do the exact same math you were going to do anyway. Nothing has changed except everything. This is the same trick as the iceberg, and it never stopped working.
Have a dance party
Ten minutes, loud, ridiculous, everybody up. Then sit back down. You lose ten minutes and you get the next hour back, which is a trade I would take every single time.
Put a board game on the table
Learning games count. Ours were doing math, reading, strategy, and losing gracefully, all at once, and nobody had to be talked into any of it. Some of our best mornings were a board game we picked up instead of the things we were supposed to be doing. The ones that earned their shelf space are below.
The games that earned their shelf space
None of these were bought as educational. They were bought because they are good games. That is exactly why they worked.
- Ticket to Ride geography and planning, disguised as trains
- Chess pure strategy, and it never stops teaching
- Scrabble vocabulary, and the math of a triple word score
- Apples to Apples language, argument, and being funny on purpose
- Monopoly money, negotiation, and losing gracefully
Pick an approach, then pick the books
We never settled on one curriculum. We tried a lot of them, kept what was working while it worked, and moved on when it stopped. Some of these we used for years. Some lasted a month. They are here so the names make sense when you run into them, not because you should buy any particular one.
Classical
Grammar, then logic, then rhetoric stages, with heavy memory work, history in order, and Latin later on. Structured and rigorous.
Loves structureCharlotte Mason
Short lessons, living books instead of textbooks, narration, nature study, and lots of outdoor time. Gentle but rich.
Book-loving, outdoorsyUnit Studies
Build a few weeks of learning around one theme and weave every subject through it. My favorite, and there is a whole section below.
Hands-on, curiousUnschooling & Eclectic
Interest-led, or a custom mix of the above.
Interest-ledMath
Gr 1–8The names you will run into most.
- Math-U-See
- Saxon Math incremental, spiral review
- Teaching Textbooks self-grading, on screen
- ALEKS Math adaptive, fills gaps
- Beast Academy
- Singapore / Primary Mathematics
Reading & Phonics
Gr 1–3All of these teach phonics explicitly, which is the part that matters.
Writing & Language Arts
Gr 2–8Light early. Structure later, once they are ready to organize ideas.
Science
Gr 1–8Science does beautifully as a unit study. These are the open-and-go options for a busy week.
- Apologia young-earth, hands-on labs
- Mystery Science video-led lessons
- REAL Science Odyssey
History, Geography & Literature
Gr 1–8Read your way through it. Living books beat a textbook at this age.
- Beautiful Feet Books literature-based history
- Geography Matters trail guides and geography
- Story of the World narrative history
All-in-one curricula
Full yearEvery subject planned for you. Easier when life is busy, harder to walk away from.
- Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool complete, onlinefree
- The Good and the Beautiful gentle, beautiful, many free PDFs
- Abeka traditional, structured
- BJU Press textbooks plus video lessons
Online platforms & extras
All agesNot curricula. The sites we opened to fill a gap or print one more thing.
- Khan Academy every subject, free foreverfree
- ABCmouse early learning, ages 2–8
- Teachers Pay Teachers printables and unit-study packs
- Outschool live online classes, any subject
The well-stocked shelf
You need far less than the back-to-school aisles suggest. This is the actual list I would hand a friend starting out, grouped by where things live in our house. The single best supply is free and sits at the bottom of the first shelf.
- A simple homeschool planner or binder
- Small whiteboard and dry-erase markers
- A visual timer
- Book bins, one per kid
- Your public library cardfree
- Base-ten blocks and counting bears
- Pattern blocks and fraction tiles
- A kid-friendly microscope
- Magnet and circuit science kit
- Measuring cups, a scale, and the kitchenfree
Keep the internet a safe place to learn
So much of homeschooling now happens on a screen: a math app here, a science video there, a research rabbit hole after lunch. That is wonderful, and it also means the internet is part of your classroom. Here are the tools we leaned on to keep it safe. Start with the free built-in controls, then add more only if you need it.
- Kiddle visual safe searchfree
- KidzSearchfree
- Common Sense Media age ratings & reviewsfree
- NetSmartz safety lessons for kidsfree
Yes, homeschoolers have plenty of teammates
The most common worry I hear is about sports and friends. Honestly, a flexible daytime schedule is an advantage here. You get the empty pool, the off-peak lesson slot, and the daytime hiking group. Here is where we found ours.
Homeschool leagues
Many areas run homeschool basketball, soccer, volleyball, and track programs, often through a co-op or a community athletic association. Search "[your city] homeschool sports."
City parks & rec
Your municipal rec department is the cheapest team sport around, with seasonal youth leagues open to any kid. This was our default for team play.
Martial arts & gymnastics
Great for the kid who thrives solo but wants a group. Daytime classes are quieter and often discounted, so ask about homeschool-hour rates.
Swim, climb & skate
Individual sports fit a flexible day perfectly. The YMCA, a climbing gym, or a pool with off-peak lessons became weekly PE for us.
Hiking & nature club
Look for a local hiking or forest-school meetup. It doubles as movement and the nature study half your unit studies want anyway.
Everyday movement
Do not overthink PE for the little years. Brain-break dances, backyard time, bike rides, and a daily walk genuinely cover it in grades 1 through 4.
The books we loved most
A homeschool runs on read-alouds. These are the ones my kids begged for one more chapter of, listed roughly youngest to oldest. Nearly every one became the seed of a unit study, which is exactly what comes next.
Mr. Popper's Penguins
by Richard and Florence Atwater. A house painter, a crate of penguins, and pure joy. We built an iceberg out of blankets and pillows before we read a single word, and that book went on to spark our very favorite unit study: penguins, poles, and a lot of fish math. You can see that unit just below.
See the penguin unit- Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae
- Stellaluna by Janell Cannon
- Goodnight, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann
- The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn
- Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
- Mr. Popper's Penguins ★ the iceberg one
- The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
- Wonder by R. J. Palacio
- Holes by Louis Sachar
- Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
- Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan
- Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
Let them binge the series
We used a lot of book sets. More than once a child decided they only wanted to read that one series, over and over, and nothing else. I let them. It was fine, because they were reading. A kid tearing through twelve books about the same four characters is a kid who reads, and that is the whole objective. You can chase variety later.
- Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
- Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan
- Warriors by Erin Hunter
- Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland
- Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
- The Minecraft books yes, really, and they read every one
Choose Your Own Adventure
These work differently to everything else on this page, and they are worth knowing about. Your child reads a chapter, then the book stops and asks what they would do. Each choice sends them to a different page, and the story goes somewhere else entirely. Get it wrong and it can end badly, so they flip back and try the other road.
Which means the reader is not along for the ride. They are steering. For a kid who thinks reading is something done to them, a book that will not move until they decide is a different proposition altogether.
Browse the seriesDinosaurs, volcanoes, and Jurassic Park
My son loved the National Geographic books on dinosaurs and volcanoes, so we built unit studies around both. Same method as any novel: take the thing he could not put down and grow the rest of an education out of it.
And we ended the dinosaur one with Jurassic Park. That turned out to matter more than I expected. A unit that finishes with a film your kid has been waiting weeks for is a unit they remember, and it gives the whole thing a shape: we learned the real thing, now let us go and see what Hollywood did with it. They will spend the entire film telling you what the movie got wrong, which is how you find out what stuck.
Thematic learning: one topic, every subject
This is what our kids remember most. Instead of teaching subjects in separate silos, you pick a theme and spend one to three weeks weaving math, science, reading, writing, art, and a field trip through it. Very often ours grew straight out of a book we had just finished, and it did not have to be a novel. Sometimes it was a National Geographic book about volcanoes. The kids wanted more, so that hunger became the spark. Our all-time favorite began with Mr. Popper's Penguins.
Mr. Popper's Penguins
We started by piling every blanket and pillow in the house into one big heap, climbing on, and pretending we were marooned on an iceberg. That is where we opened chapter one. Then we spun the whole book into a penguins-and-poles unit, and it is still the one they bring up years later.
Backyard Birds
Dinosaurs & Volcanoes
Ancient Egypt
The Ocean
Bread & Baking
Free printable: Backyard Birds unit study
A print-and-go week with worksheets your kids fill in. A perfect first unit and a lovely email-list freebie.
Turn any obsession into a unit in six steps
When one of my kids got fixated on volcanoes for a month, we did not fight it. We built a unit around it in an afternoon. Here is the recipe.
Start from what your kid already cannot stop talking about.
Build the world before you read. Blanket icebergs, a tent, a costume. It costs nothing and hooks them instantly.
Ask your librarian for a stack on the topic, fiction and non-fiction.
Jot one activity each for math, science, reading, writing, and art.
One thing they build, one place you go to see it for real.
End with a tiny showcase: a poster or a talk for the family.
Get the Backyard Birds unit study
Seven pages, ready to print: a tally sheet, a bar graph, a field-guide page, a nature journal, and a week of plans for you. Free, and yours to keep. I will send the occasional note when I post a new unit study or printable, and you can leave any time.
Where should I send it?
One email, one download link, no nonsense.
You are more ready than you feel.
No one is perfectly qualified on day one, and I certainly was not. You learn alongside them, you adjust, and years later you look back amazed at how much you built at your own kitchen table. Start small, follow their curiosity, and give yourself the same grace you would give a new teacher.