Your local school district may or may not be helpful in your efforts to teach your child at home. When we decided to homeschool, I received a form letter from our local district which appeared to be helpful per se but contained lists of websites that were no longer active. Being familiar with your state’s educational requirements and devising an educational plan fall squarely on your shoulders. By law, if you come up with a sound educational plan that meets curriculum requirements, your local school district must approve your request to homeschool. In most states, you do not need to be a certified teacher to homeschool your child.First, obtain a copy of your state’s curriculum frameworks. These documents should be available online at your state’s Department of Education website. You may review the documents online or download them at no charge. For roughly $50, I purchased hard copies of the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks, which includes guidelines for all subjects, grades K through 12. I’m glad I did. I refer to these documents often.
My educational plan is based on the Massachusetts frameworks, some of the highest educational standards in the nation. If you follow the Massachusetts frameworks, you will provide your child with a solid education in the classical tradition.
Being familiar with your state’s curriculum frameworks makes you a better judge of an individual school’s curriculum. You might be surprised by how well or how poorly your child’s school adheres to the frameworks. In sixth grade, Allegra’s Language Arts class studied none of the literary classics outlined in the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks, opting instead to spend class time on four works by contemporary authors, two of whom aren’t even suggested by the frameworks. When she asked if she could read Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights for her individualized reading requirement, her teacher said it was not “on the list” and advised her to choose another work from the list, such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Pyle’s version of the King Arthur legend is, in fact, on the list provided in the state curriculum frameworks, so we are studying it this year.
Allegra's take: When I first saw the Massachussetts Curriculum Frameworks in September 2009, I was shocked at how little my former middle school had covered of the frameworks the previous year. My class had not done any of the required reading and had covered little of the mandatory history, geography and science concepts mentioned.
