Start by deciding why you might take your child out of school. Even if it is only for one year, it’s a year that will require a complete lifestyle change, so it needs to be thought through carefully. The better the reason, the more likely it is to work.

Bad reasons to homeschool for a year:

Homeschooling is fashionable and everyone is doing it. (This is the worst reason of all.)

I’m tired of getting up early and getting the kids on the bus. (If that is too much work, educating them will be even more work.)

My best friend is doing it and we can do it together. (You probably won’t do it together all the time, and it will stop being a fun buddy project after a few weeks.)

My kids aren’t doing well in school and I don’t know what else to do. (This can work–it was my initial reason–but there has to be more.)

There was a school shooting and I’m scared. (When the fear wears off, so will the motivation.)

Good reasons to homeschool:

I love teaching–I’d love a year to teach my own kids.

My child needs a break and we need time together.

It will be a family adventure.

It’s a test run for long-term homeschooling.

I want to give my child a year to catch up, recover from a bad year, or celebrate his giftedness.

It should be noted that the good reasons only work if you are really motivated. Homeschooling is hard and you owe it to yourself and your child to give it all you have. I’m not trying to scare you off, but you do need to take this seriously. If you are really committed, if you love spending a lot of structured time with your child, and if you enjoy teaching or supervising school work…this can work.

You don’t have to be a great teacher. You just have to love helping your child learn. The rest will come with practice.

If you’re thinking about homeschooling for a year, what motivated you to consider such a drastic leap? Is there something holding you back from making the final decision?

Due to spammers, you have to register to post and first posts are moderated. We have to protect ourselves from garbage we don’t want to see.

There is an article on the website that lists things you need to consider before deciding to homeschool.

Is emergency homeschooling a good idea?

Too many people think it will be easy and they don’t give this enough thought. At some point, you’ll start to realize this really changes your life. You no longer have as much free time as you did, your social life is reduced, your income might be reduced. It might be hard to spend so much time with your children.

It was an emergency for us. I just didn’t know what else to try. Fortunately, the first time I had a summer to prepare. The second time I only had two weeks. Since I didn’t know any other homeschoolers and the Internet wasn’t around much then, I had no one to ask what it would be like, so there were a lot of surprises and I made a lot of mistakes. I hope this website will help readers avoid a lot of the mistakes I made.

When you decided to take some time off from traditional schooling, how much thought did you give it? What were you most worried about? If you’ve already started, what suprised you the most?

If you’ve already started, are you enjoying it? Would you do it another year if your child asked you to? Would you do it forever? Why or why not?

If you haven’t started yet, what do you wish somebody would tell you about this experience? What questions are you having trouble getting answered?

Your first post will be monitored, so it won’t appear right away. Once you’ve had a comment approved, you’ll be able to post anytime as long as you are polite and don’t post spam–even thinly disguised spam.

If you’re a permanent homeschooler who is friendly to temporary homeschoolers, regardless of how they homeschool, we’d love to have you here as the voice of experience. This is a safe place, so no attacks on government homeschooling or public schools or anything else controversial. There are other blogs for that sort of thing. Here we support and encourage.

Please introduce yourself. Since the blog is new (and as of today the site is up but not quite ready for primetime) so it will take a while to get things going. First post has to be approved to cut down on spam. After that, you’ll be able to post instantly as long as you play by the rules.