How to Start Christian Homeschooling

How do I start Christian homeschooling?

Start by checking your state's homeschool law, then find out what your child can already do, then choose reading and math before anything else. A K–5 day is far shorter than a school day, commonly ninety minutes to two and a half hours. Free placement and free practice pages let you begin teaching before you buy anything.

The order is the part that saves money. A programme chosen for a grade label often turns out to sit above or below the child's actual skill, and unpicking a purchase in November is harder than placing the child in August.

Nothing in the first three steps requires payment. The reading placement is free and runs in your browser. The first three worksheets in every practice set are open to everyone. The entire Apostolic Academy — study guides, church history, Scripture memory and printables — is free. Several weeks of teaching are possible on those alone while you decide what to buy.

This page is the process, in order. If you have already decided to homeschool and only want to know which materials to open first, the Start here page routes you by situation rather than by step.

HARVEST — free reading placement Practice library — first three of every set open Apostolic Academy — free Start here

Step 1: Check what your state actually requires

Homeschooling is governed state by state, and the requirements differ more than most parents expect. Some states want a one-page notice of intent filed once. Some want an annual report. Some name the subjects that must be covered. Some set a minimum number of instructional hours per year, which changes how you keep records but almost never changes which materials suit your child.

Do this before spending anything, because it determines your paperwork rather than your teaching. A family in a notice-only state and a family in an hours-and-testing state can use identical materials and keep completely different files.

Read your own state's rules, write down the three or four things you are actually obliged to do, and put the dates in a calendar. That single page of notes removes more first-year anxiety than any curriculum decision.

Homeschooling in Texas Homeschooling in Florida Homeschooling in North Carolina Homeschooling in Ohio Homeschooling in Wisconsin

Step 2: Find out where your child actually reads and counts

A grade label is a birthday, not a skill level. Before choosing materials, find out which sounds your child knows, whether he can blend a three-sound word, and where his number sense sits. Children who left a classroom part-way through a year are especially likely to have gaps that a grade-level book will skip straight over.

HARVEST is the free reading placement on this site. It is adaptive, so it moves past what a child has already mastered; it runs entirely in the browser with nothing uploaded; and it ends in a printable report you can teach from. It covers phonemic awareness, letter names and sounds, decoding, sight words, spelling, fluency and comprehension, and takes about fifteen minutes.

For math, work backwards through the skill guides and the practice library. Print the free sheets from a set one grade below your estimate. If they are easy, move up. If they are not, you have found the starting point, and that is a useful result rather than a discouraging one.

HARVEST — free reading placement Placement tests and skill checklists Letter sounds CVC blending Numbers and counting

Step 3: Choose reading and math first — nothing else yet

In K–5, reading and math are the spine. A child who reads fluently and understands number can pick up most other subjects later; a child who does not will struggle in every subject that depends on them. Art, a second language and the rest can wait a term without damage.

Phonics, Decoding and Early Fluency is the core reading sequence, Kindergarten through Grade 5. It moves through explicit phonics into connected text, and the complete teaching guides are readable in a browser before joining, so the exact wording of a lesson is visible before any payment. Building Number Sense is the K–5 math series: sequenced and still growing, with a student text at every grade, and a coordinated practice workbook and full teaching guide at Kindergarten through Grade 2 while the Grade 3–5 workbooks and guides are in development.

If the gap is a specific phonics pattern rather than a whole grade, Foundations to Fluency is organised by pattern instead of by grade — six levels, 96 workbooks, usable at any age. Decodable Readers give 300 connected-text books built only from patterns already taught. Learning Cursive is a ten-workbook handwriting sequence that runs alongside the reading rather than on top of it.

Phonics, Decoding and Early Fluency — core K–5 reading Building Number Sense — K–5 math Foundations to Fluency — phonics by pattern, any age Decodable Readers Learning Cursive

Step 4: Build a short day and keep it

New homeschoolers usually plan too long a day and feel like failures by Thursday. Plan short and finish. A day that ends on time four days a week teaches more than one that runs three hours and collapses on Wednesday.

The weekly lesson packets run a five-day rhythm you can copy with any materials: Introduce, Reader, Handwriting, Apply, Check. Monday introduces the new pattern, Tuesday reads it in connected text, Wednesday writes it, Thursday applies it, Friday checks it. Each daily reading lesson is five pages and is recorded at ten to fifteen minutes of student work, at every grade from Kindergarten to Grade 5. The rest of your day is built around that.

Keep the hardest thinking early, while attention is best, and put practice pages and read-aloud later. Two shorter blocks beat one long one for children under eight.

A simple K–5 Christian homeschool schedule How much time homeschool takes per day Weekly lesson packets A sample week, Monday to Friday

Step 5: Decide where faith sits in the day

Decide this deliberately in the first week, because a Bible block bolted to the end of the day is the block that disappears when the day runs late. Put it first, keep it short, and let it also live inside the academic work — Scripture copywork during handwriting, biblical narrative in the reading, memory verses reviewed while the table is cleared.

"You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up." (Deuteronomy 6:7, NKJV)

Three free tools make this concrete. The Copywork Creator generates handwriting pages from any passage you type. The Bible Verse Card Maker prints memory cards. The Scripture Memory Cards are a free printable starter set. The whole Apostolic Academy — study guides, printables, a ten-volume church history and a King James Scripture memory programme — is free and open to everyone, with no membership involved.

Copywork Creator — free Bible Verse Card Maker — free Free Scripture Memory Cards Academy printables What to look for in faith-integrated curriculum

Your first 30 days, in order

If a single working list is more useful than five steps, this is it. It assumes nothing has been bought yet.

1. Read your state's requirements and diary the filing dates.
2. Run the free reading placement and print the report.
3. Print free practice sheets one grade below your estimate and confirm the level.
4. Pick a reading programme and a math programme. Nothing else.
5. Choose a start time and a five-day rhythm, and write it where the children can see it.
6. Teach two weeks on free materials before buying anything.
7. At the end of week two, note what took longer than planned, and cut it.
8. Add handwriting once the reading block is running smoothly.
9. Add a read-aloud book you enjoy — it carries vocabulary the practice pages cannot.
10. At day 30, read the placement report again and adjust the level up or down.

What this costs, and what is free

Prices are published plainly, because a parent deciding on a year of school should not have to request a quote. A great deal of what a beginning family needs is free and stays free.

All Access is one household membership covering every child in the home, at every grade where the resource exists.

Membership and pricing Frequently asked questions The practice library

What Faith Schooling covers — and what it does not

Faith Schooling is a K–5 publisher. It covers reading, phonics, decoding and early fluency, handwriting and cursive, mathematics, and daily faith formation. It does not publish science, history, geography or foreign language, and it does not go above Grade 5. Those come from elsewhere, and it is better said on the first page you read than discovered in month three.

The focus is deliberate. Literacy and number work in the early grades is the part that is hardest to repair later, so it is the part built in depth here. Many families pair this reading and math with a separate science and history spine, or with a unit-study approach, and that combination works.

The comparison pages set out where another publisher may genuinely fit a family better. They are dated and specific, and that section is the one most worth a beginner's time.

The complete curriculum map How Faith Schooling compares with other Christian publishers Start here Authors and method