Homeschooling is a Lifestyle | Step 2 – Crafting Your Intentional Home Instruction Plan

 One of the first things that we need to do once we’ve decided to home educate our children is to advise the school district in writing that we won’t be sending our kiddos to them for the academic year. Believe me when I say that I understand the temptation to send your forms via owl in the form of a Howler, a la Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter series, but I have concluded that it is highly ill advised to proceed from a position of antagonism. It’s pretty important to try to forge a non-adversarial relationship with your school administration; they do, after all, have what they feel are the best interests of all the children in their district at heart and we should support them in that.  Not all children can be home educated and really do need public education. Since the goal here is to ensure that you are free to allow for the flourishing and development of your children in a manner that seems most fitting with their temperaments and your family structure, then it stands to reason that keeping the district happy and out of your hair is pretty important.  

Honestly, for us, it was one of the most important things that we felt we needed to stay on top of.  File the paperwork in a timely fashion and everyone is happy. I can’t stress enough how much easier you will sleep if you know that you have done your due diligence and put in the time to get “all your ducks in a row” in terms of checking off the boxes of bureaucracy. This frees you up to actually enjoy the process of teaching and learning with your children. I won’t go into the horrors of having angry district administrator types calling you to remind you that “your paperwork is LATE, Mrs. Liscomb” and how detrimental that is to one’s health. You’ll just have to trust me on that one. So, with that in mind, let’s go over the paperwork that you must, by law in New York state, file with your district in order to educate your children at home.

First, send what is known as a Letter of Intent. This is very simple; you are advising the school district that your children will not be attending school for whatever academic year it is and letting them know that your Intentional Home Instruction Plan, aka the IHIP, will follow in a future mailing. Send this to the Office of Curriculum Development, if your school has one, and if you are just not sure whether they do or not, you can send it to the main office and let them determine who will be handling your paperwork. The first time you do this, I advise that you send it Return Receipt so that you are assured that it was received. This costs $3.05 as of today’s date and is worth every penny as you now have physical proof in your home school binder that you sent this paperwork in. Because, of course, you have created a binder that is dedicated to all of the paperwork for your child’s academic year, haven’t you? Excellent. As an aside, I had a friend who hand delivered all of her children’s paperwork to her district offices because she wanted a personal relationship with the school and an understanding on their part of who the family was. I thought it was an interesting way to handle what could feel like an egregious process, although I took the opposite approach and never set foot in the building until nearly the end of our home schooling years.

The district would like to receive this letter by July 1 of the upcoming academic year, however, if that date has passed: Do Not Panic!! Just send in the letter anyway and let them know that you will get your IHIP to them within four weeks. This is a method that I’ve used in the past when I didn’t get my letter in on time and everything was just fine. Otherwise, if you are going by the date of July 1, which is coming up quickly, by the way, the next date you will need to be aware of is August 15. This is when they want your IHIP.

Crafting your IHIP will eventually become a very individualized process that is representative of your child and your family. It will be based on how you perceive your child(ren) learn best, which will in turn, be reflected in your yearly planning. Until you’ve done this for at least one academic year, it won’t be completely clear what your goals will be and, indeed, how much you can actually get done in the time allotted. For instance, when we were educating all three children at once in the grammar school years, I was under the assumption that it would take much more time to get all of the “required” work done so we could move on to the “extra-curricular” activities, but I was completely wrong. It still only took two to three hours for all three children to finish math, spelling, reading, writing, grammar, history, geography, science, and Latin. Yes, it’s true, I promise, and yes, you can bake bread and wash dishes and fold laundry all while helping your children conjugate verbs and find the Nile on that map. Even more importantly, because home schooling in our house was the integration of life skills into what we considered to be education, baking bread becomes a math lesson and laundry becomes a science lesson. Especially if you decide to make your own laundry soap. (Recipe to follow.)

It’s important here to reflect on something that you should be very cognizant of; the law only requires that you tell them the what, how and when. This means you tell them what you are studying, (history, English, math, etc.), how you are doing it (books, online, videos, etc.) and the dates by which you will have the work completed. Let me very clear. You do not need to tell them that on Monday you are reading chapters 5-7 in The Story of The World while sitting at the kitchen counter, and doing pages 62- 63 in Saxon Math 4 while driving to the Cape. You won’t even need to be that specific on your Quarterly Reports, the next piece of paperwork that you will need to file after the beginning of your school year. We’ll talk about how to file those in a future article, and I’ll even delve into why I think offering more information on your quarterlies (as we call them in the biz…) is beneficial to your record keeping. You do need to tell them what resources you are using for the academic year, but you should also indicate that, well, you might change your minds if you don’t like it or it’s not working for your child.

Flexibility is a key factor in all that we do as home educators and I want to ensure that you understand that if you lay out the resources for an entire year, which you have either borrowed from the library or bought used or for very little money, and then it becomes obvious that your child is simply Not Going To Do Math That Way, it’s perfectly acceptable, and even necessary, to change up the methodology. Anyone who has suffered alongside a child who is not understanding a particular math concept and just needs a new way to look at it, is sure to understand that it’s okay to shelve one math book and grab another in order to try a brand new way to learn a concept. I promise you, your district has seen this. You’ll just advise the district in your next quarterly that you’ve changed resources. It’s as simple as that.

Okay, now that we’ve gone over the first two pieces of administrative reporting, I’d like to remind you that you really can do this! Cold feet, some anxiety, maybe even some terror that you’re doing the wrong thing and ruining your child’s life are all normal at this stage, but they are just lies that our subconscious likes to float out to see if we’re really serious about what we intend to do. Or, maybe it’s something else entirely, but I promise you it will pass as this becomes more familiar and you realize that you actually are the person for this job. Here’s an example of an IHIP. We used this exact form for three children, grades K-12. We adapted the curriculum, the activities, clubs and other flexible activities as the children grew. We added community college classes (more on that later), online classes, field trips and travel. Community sports like Little League, local soccer leagues, ice-skating, and skiing were all “physical education.” Feel free to copy and paste to your heart’s content.

Next week I’ll write about curriculum design and money.

And, as always, if you have any questions about this topic please don’t hesitation to shoot me an email at hliscomb@yahoo.com Individualized Home Instruction Plan Name: Age: Grade: School Year: We will follow a mixture of a participant controlled approach with the classic