Planning Your Secular Homeschool Subjects

There are the 3 R’s of homeschooling the veteran homeschoolers claim you need to cover everyday. The three R’s are: Reading, ‘Righting, and ‘Rithmetic of homeschooling. I did not make that up, but around here it’s reading, language arts, and math, same thing just different words, right? But you need to decide what homeschool subjects are most important to you and your kids, those that you’ll be working on year long, and those that you may choose to add in as electives. Grab your notebook or planner and pen and get started.

Planning Your Secular Homeschool Subjects

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The subjects you decide on what you are going to teach. Initially, your subjects might be quite general: subjects like math, history, language arts, science, and so on. After you selecting the general subjects you’ll teaching, you further refine those subjects to be more focused on the specifics of each subject, such as Intro to World History, Algebra 1, Biology, and so on.

Provincial or State Laws Regarding Homeschool Subjects

One big thing to consider when planning your homeschool subjects for each year is what you are required by provincial (or state) law and/or school board to teach your children.

For example in Saskatchewan:

Language Arts – Required Grade 1-12
Math- Required Grade 1-12
Science- Required Grade 1-12
Social Studies- Required Grade 1-12
Health- Required Grade 1-12
Art and Physical Education – Required Grade 1-12
Career Education – Required 6-9

What is Covered Under Each Subject

The best part of choosing to homeschool is that you get to choose what you teach your children. For instance, gardening is science, and we get really hands on in gardening. If there is a subject that your kids really want to learn about.

For history this year my kids are interested in Dinosaurs, Early Humans, and Ancient Times. Basically we are covering Pre-historic times because that was their request. I’ll be creating unit studies to make sure we learn about what interest them the most.

Elective Subjects

As your children grow you may want to add additional subjects tailored to the topics that your children are interested in. You’ll also be changing the specific focus of each subject, moving from Intro to World History for insistence to The History of North America, and increasing the difficultly of other subjects.

The extra stuff we can do:

There is no limit on the extra things that we can teach and/or learn with our children. For example this year we’ve adding typing. An important skill is typing but it is not “required”.