As a parent, you taught your child during the most important, formative years of your child’s life: the preschool years. Homeschooling is a natural outgrowth of that parent/child relationship that exists for most families prior to formal schooling at age 5 or 6. As a parent, you have an advantage that no other teacher can have: you know your child’s individual abilities, weaknesses and strengths better than anyone else! As a parent, you also have a natural intuitive ability to discern when your child is needing extra encouragement or a new strategy.
 
Your child, like any child, has an eager, inborn desire to learn. Sometimes, if a public or other private school has been stressful for a child for whatever reason, that desire to learn can be frustrated for a time. But, after a short period of time, in a homeschool, natural curiosity always comes back. Your job is to respond to what your child is ready to do and to provide the opportunities for him or her to learn.
 
There are many choices in curriculum. Some of it is self-paced, where everything needed for a subject is contained in a series of booklets. For more experienced or adventurous homeschooling parents, there is unit-based curriculum which can be extremely fun and challenging for even gifted students. But it will require more parent participation. It’s all right to experiment the first semester or two. Most families eventually settle on something that is just right for their family situation.
 
For complicated, high-school level courses, many parents have found video courses or computerized curriculum helpful. With the incredible variety of materials available, homeschooling success has never been easier!