The basics of homeschooling your elementary student in the day-to-day

After you teach your child to read and they have the basic foundation to the day to day – it’s time to start a real schedule. Don’t be overwhelmed, it’s not that hard. Remember with elementary kids, school is still just the foundation, so it’s not rocket science.

What does your elementary (1st-5th grade age) student need to know?

• Math
• Reading
• Writing
• Science
• Social Studies/History
• Intro to a language
• Intro to an instrument

The breakdown:

Most elementary students are young enough to begin learning the pace of a real school day and have a larger volume of organized schoolwork. However, a good way to help guide this new organized (I say that loosely since we all have our own homeschool structures) schedule is to create a type of checklist. We enjoy the checklist because it helps us stay organized and allows an easier way of checking in. And checklists also help the child take some control of their own materials and stay on task, especially those who have ADD or other accommodations etc.

Lots of structured fun activities:

Most curriculums for elementary age students are catered to capture their attention. Many of the books have fun activities and extensions available. Since they are already young, they will be receptive to many activities and games. Take advantage of this and allow them to learn without realizing they are learning by having fun and exploring. As a result, you can teach so many skills with simple crafts and games.

When you are working through Math you can use math blocks to help count and multiply, flashcards to practice adding or multiplication etc. and so many other variations.

First, Science you can use experiments and crafts, like in Apologia science or see our extra resources page.

Second, with History you can utilize many activities and resources, like in Story of the World that allows you to create foods from other countries, maps, boats and games designed around the lesson content.

Third, with Reading we utilize a core list of classic children’s literature and increase the difficulty over time. As they read, we do journaling and increase the difficulty and length of the journal entries each day. By writing and reading daily they gain those skills, improve their handwriting and begin to learn how to synthesize information.

What does this mean in the day-to-day:

Depending on how your day to day looks with scheduling and time management, a checklist allows your child to see what they need to do and gives them a direct goal. For our children, we did a scaffolding approach that was most effective by doing an increase in content each semester or year depending on the progress our child was making.

Example for Elementary Student by Grade:

A general idea of the week and lesson scaffolding per grade –

Overall Goals for Elementary

While teaching elementary students, you are mostly creating a structure and organization for your child. There are many ways you can organize our day and many subjects you can add in slowly or more quickly depending on your own personal goals for your homeschool.

Moreover, giving your child a general goal and expectation for how school will flow is important. Setting up a good structure and giving yourself time to adjust to the workload is good for both you and your elementary student.

However, once you have established this groundwork, adding in more complex and complicated lessons will allow middle school and high school structure and workload to be easier and more fluid.

These ideas and lists for structure and content should help you start the process and as you go, you can adapt and modify as you teach. That’s the joy of homeschooling.