Before you start buying curriculum, make sure you look into a few important things. First, you need to know what classes you are buying for. It is best to plan out what you intend to teach in your homeschool ahead of time.
What Are Your State Requirements on What to Teach in Your Homeschool
Check your homeschool laws to see which subjects your state requires you to teach. In New York, students in the lower grades must study arithmetic, English language arts (spelling, writing, reading, and grammar), physical education, art, music, science, history/geography, and health. Before 8th grade, you also need to cover state history, United States history, and the constitutions of both the U.S. and New York State.
In grades 7 and 8, you’ll add practical arts and library skills. For grades 9–12, history splits into four areas: American History, Government, Economics, and one elective. The picture below outlines New York’s homeschooling regulations. Since New York has stricter homeschool rules, your state might have different requirements.
Once you understand what your state expects, you can more easily plan your homeschool year. Personally, the hardest part for me is narrowing down what I want my daughter to learn.
Just because the regulations say you have to teach math doesn’t mean it has to be algebra. You can choose to teach finance, trigonometry, geometry, or any other math-related subject you can build a year’s worth of lesson plans around.
For science, you can follow the public school model and teach a different discipline each year, like life science, physical science, chemistry, physics, or astronomy. The possibilities are endless.
Homeschooling gives you a lot of freedom to choose what and how you teach your students.
Do You Need to Stick To Only What the State Requires for Homeschool?
No, absolutely not. State requirements simply mean you need to include those subjects in your teaching at some point. You’re not limited to only those subjects to teach. Many religious families include the Bible or other religious classes. When my daughter was younger, we added a class focused on social language skills. Because of her Autism, she struggles with figurative language and has a hard time reading social cues. We used a curriculum to help her learn some of those skills, although she still doesn’t fully grasp them to this day.
Right now, her schedule includes Bible, grammar, spelling, math (with a weekly financial literacy lesson), science, history/geography, writing (we’re working on beginning cursive), reading, and specials. Her specials are art, music, gym, library, health, and logic. Eventually, we’ll add a language class, too.
You Can Use Co-Ops to Teach Some Homeschool Courses
Co-ops are a great way to add classes to your child’s school year, especially for subjects you want them to learn but don’t have time to teach yourself. Our co-op offers classes like poetry, pottery, art, anthropology, finance and banking, cooking, music, sign language, various gym classes, and a wide range of science courses. My daughter’s favorite was herpetology, which focuses on reptiles and amphibians. The teacher brought in a different animal each week for the kids to see and touch—including baby geckos!
This semester, she’s taking an environmental science course that explores plants and pollinators, an art class, and a “Move and Groove” class that combines basic nutrition lessons with physical activity.
Teaching Lost Skills in Your Homeschool
There are also what people call “lost skills”—skills that used to be common but have largely faded from daily life. These include things like sewing, canning and food preservation, woodworking or carving, crochet or knitting, and even budgeting and balancing a checkbook. You could even argue that cursive writing counts as a lost skill, especially since it’s essential for reading old documents.
Skills like gardening and living off the land are starting to make a comeback. Mechanical skills—like fixing things around the house or doing basic auto maintenance, such as oil changes—also fall into this category. Even knowing how to interact face to face in a social setting might soon be considered a lost skill, with so many kids relying on screens to communicate.
When you teach lost skills, you’re giving your child tools to be more self-reliant in the future.
There are so many options when it comes to what to teach. You have the freedom to choose what your child studies. Have fun with it!
