So you're thinking of home schooling, part two: How much?

Ah, yes.  "It's the most wonderful time of the year" again, as that gawdawful Staples commercial tells us.  That time of year when parents joyously send their miserable kids off to school.

Or not.

For those crazy enough to actually want to keep their kids at home and *gasp* spend more time with them, home schooling is another option.

Time to write another post for those who are thinking about it, but not quite sure they're ready for it.  The first post was, Can you?

Let's now go to another question I often hear from parents.

How much does it cost?

Short answer?

As much as you're willing, or able, to spend.

It all depends on how you do it, and what's available where you live.

In one sense, home schooling can potentially be very expensive.  There are so many home school curricula out there, so many neat educational tools and toys, and so many things out there to do.  It would be so easy to blow great wads of cash on all this stuff.

Don't.

First off, check things out where you live and see what's available.  In Canada, for the most part, you're on  your own.  Even for some provinces that technically are supposed to offer resources to home schooling families, like in BC, that doesn't mean the board you're registered with will.  Or perhaps you live in a province like Manitoba, where all home schoolers are registered in one office, where you can also access grade level correspondence course (though they haven't called them that in many years), for varying costs.  Or you might live in Alberta, which actually passes on school funding to registered home schoolers, either through purchase orders or by reimbursing receipts.  Be wary of funding, though.  Funding tends to come with strings attached and government bureaucrats wanting to tell you how you can or can't teach your own kids.

Some home school support groups have a number of things available, ranging from group field trips at reduced cost to lending libraries, and even some that have equipment and resources that can be borrowed, such as scientific equipment or courses on CD or DVD.

Public libraries can have all sorts of resources as well.  My own kids have started up The Great Courses again.  These are pretty awesome.  Along with a plethora of books, audio/visual resources and software, many also have organized events and classes, book readings, lectures and so on.

If you're just starting out and not confident that you can teach to your legal requirements, packaged curricula can be useful.  Especially if home schooling is going to be a temporary thing, due to health problems or other extenuating circumstances.  They can be ridiculously expensive, though.  I've heard from way too many home schoolers who started out with visions of their kids happily at the kitchen table, working on some fantastic curriculum they bought that they just knew their kids would love, only ... it just didn't work out.  Sometimes, the curriculum didn't fit their children.  Sometimes it didn't fit the entire family.  They regretted spending all that money on curriculum, wishing instead that they'd spent the money on museum passes or whatever their kids turned out to be into.  On the other hand, I have also heard of families who found a purchased curriculum that fit their families perfectly (FIAR is one a lot of families have spoken highly of).

When it comes to packaged curricula, I would advise waiting before buying.  Especially if you're pulling your kids out of school.  Give your family some time to figure things out, then decide if a packaged curriculum is worth spending the money on.

There's one expense I would hope you don't have to shirk on, though.

Books. 

Yes, I know, electronic books are all the rage right now.  They're cheaper and you can fit many hundreds into a single reader.  That's probably quite useful.  Even so, nothing is quite the same as books. I'd still recommend getting lots of real, printed books.  Haunt the second hand stores for unique finds, or get to know a local book seller who can order the more esoteric stuff in for you.  Yes, I know you can order books online, but aside from supporting your local book store (yay, capitalism!), a real person knowledgeable in the trade is a gold  mine.  A lot of local book stores also have interesting events available, too.  Take advantage of them.

And for crying out loud, don't go using up their time to find a book, then go order it online.  That's just tacky and rude.  Very bad form.

Other things I would recommend spending money on if you can.  Family passes at museums, nature centres, science centres, art galleries, recreation centres, etc.  Some cities offer passes that include a number of facilities.  These often give you discounts in any shops they might have.  There are even national passes available. If you are low-income, you may qualify for some of these passes for free or at highly discounted prices.

Join a local support group.  Any memberships fees tend to be nominal.  Aside from networking opportunities, activities and social support, some group membership cards will also be honoured by some businesses for a teacher's discount.

Join trading or exchange groups.  Many places have freecycle groups and it's amazing what you can get through them.  Some groups have book exchanges, clothing exchanges, or other types of exchanges (our group has had yarn and fabric exchanges).  For these, everyone brings stuff to contribute that are still good, but their own families have grown out of.  These get set out for everyone else to look at.  People pick what they will find useful.  Anything left over either gets taken back by their owners or donated to charity.  The big challenge with this is to not come back with more than you brought! *L*

Then there are lessons and classes. Music lessons (with the accompanying cost of buying or renting instruments), voice lessons, art classes, dance classes, cooking classes, language classes, craft lessons, and even tutoring for any areas your child might need some extra help on.  Don't forget sports - team sports, solo sports, martial arts classes, and all the necessary equipment they need, too.  It would be way too easy to spend huge amounts of money on such things.

Be very selective and creative.  If money is tight, some teachers are willing to barter for lessons (be generous with what you are offering; the teachers of these classes would be giving up income for this, so make sure it's worth it for them).  There may be programs available to cover the cost of them.  Perhaps there are family members who have skills they can pass on (and it can be a great way to get doubting family members engaged).

With our days no longer controlled by the school schedule, it can be very tempting to fill that time with all those cool things we can sign our kids up for.  Resist and be selective.  It is not beneficial to burn out the entire family, trying to get to all these lessons and classes.  You may want to try one thing per child one year, then give them the option to try something else the next.

For us, when we did take part in such things, we had one rule.  If we were going to spend money on these things and take the time out of our day to get them to and from their lessons, the girls knew they had to finish it.  Unless there was something drastically wrong, they couldn't just decide to stop in the middle of something that we've agreed to pay for for the entire year, or however long it might be.  These were things they told us they wanted to try, and sure they might decide they didn't like it as much as they thought they would.  They still had to finish.  They knew from the start that they were making a commitment for X amount of time, and part of the deal was that they'd keep that commitment.  We expected them to take full advantage of what was being offered, and not blow it off.  Sadly, this has sometimes meant that our kids were the only ones actually engaged in the class they were taking, while others in the class wasted their time.  Perhaps I can convince Eldest to add a blurb about just how "fun" the one art class she ever took turned out to be.

Aside from such things, however, the basic stuff required for home schooling can be very cheap.  After all, you are no longer required to buy a years worth of pencils, pencil crayons, binders, notebooks, glue sticks and even facial tissue (I was shocked to see that on an old neighbour's school list; each of their kids had to bring 6 boxes of facial tissue for the classroom supply cupboard), and so on.  There are no more extra fees sprung at you or fundraising events.  Oh, and you can buy your kids new clothes when they're needed, rather than because it's the start of school and they just HAVE to have the same things all their friends are getting.

Most of what you'll need, you probably already have, and what you do need to get, you can get little by little as you need them and can afford them, rather than all at once.

As you can see, there is no simple answer to how much it costs to home school our kids.  Some people manage to do it while spending almost no money at all.  Others spend thousands of dollars.

Take a bit of time to figure it out.  Get to know what's available, what your kids need, and what they want.  See what fits for the entire family.  What works for your own family is likely to be quite different from others.  That's just fine.  There are no hard and fast rules.

Instead of having a school system telling you and your family what you have to pay for, you get to take control and decide for yourselves.

Which can be pretty exciting!!

So you're thinking of home schooling, part one. Can you?

Things sure have changed since we started home schooling!

Before we had kids, we had only a vague notion about home schooling.  It was something crazy religious people did.  Or hippies.  And it was bad.  I didn't have a really defined reason for why it was bad, but it was.  It certainly wasn't something I ever thought I would do.

When we began our own home schooling journey, any preconceived notions I had about it were quickly overturned.  Then they got overturned again.  Kinda like my notions of parenting, except not so extreme.

At the time I first began exploring home schooling, there were plenty of people doing it, but you had to look for them.  It seemed most people didn't know any home schoolers, and quite a few had no idea what it was.

Until our kids reached school age, it wasn't something that came up in conversation with other people all that much.  Certainly not with complete strangers.  As they got older, though, there were the inevitable questions about when they'd be going to school - or why they weren't in school.  On telling people we home schooled, the reactions ranged from slightly confused and mildly curious to downright offended and defensive.  I recall being in the waiting room of a dentist with Eldest, who was about kindergarten age, but not of an age where we were legally required to register her in the province we lived in at the time.  Among the toys in the waiting room was a bucket of foam tangram shapes, and she and I were playing with them together.  A woman in the waiting room with us started to chat, asking the usual sort of "so, are you looking forward to starting school?" questions we were getting at the time.  When I mentioned we planned to home school, she went from being friendly and relaxed to tense and defensive.  Angry, almost.  It turned out she was an elementary school teacher, and she spent the rest of the time we shared the waiting room going on about how much better it was for kids to go to school.

Thankfully, she had to leave soon after.

Over the years, though, things changed.

First, there were more people starting to say things like "I know people who home school.  They're doing really good, but I could never do that."

Then there were more and more people - especially older people - saying things like "I wish I'd known about home schooling when my kids were younger."  I remember one particular elderly gentleman (a Jehovah's Witness who came knocking on our door, actually) who, on finding out we home schooled, got the saddest look of regret on his face.  He told me how he wished they'd home schooled their own (now adult) children because of the incredible torment they'd experienced in school.  His kids were all grown and parents themselves and doing fine, but he would have spared them that pain, if he'd known he could.

When the girls were younger, I got a lot of people asking about high school and sort of assuming I'd start sending them to school.  I'd get questions like, "how can you teach them high school level subjects?"  Never mind that I did go through high school myself, so I kinda had the basics already, plus there are plenty of resources.  Lots of assumptions about testing and curriculum (because in high school, you just HAVE to use a curriculum, right?  And have teachers watching over you?)  Dealing with that question while also revealing that we didn't "do" school anyhow (no one seemed to know what "unschooling" was) didn't generally invoke positive results.  Interestingly, those questions stopped by the time girls actually reached their teen years, and I never get them at all now.

Now that the girls are older, and Eldest is a legal adult, things are really different.  Pretty much everyone knows about home schooling, it seems, and most people have positive associations with the term.  More parents are telling me they plan to home school their own kids, and quite a few people who don't even have kids yet have said the same.  More people seem to be aware of different styles of home schooling, or at least that it doesn't always mean school-at-home.  There are still a lot of misconceptions, but it's improved a great deal.

I do still get a lot of people saying things like "I wish I could do that."  Now, however, I'm getting more people asking, "can I do that?"  They don't mean it in a legal sense, since most people do know that home schooling is legal (even if some of them still think it shouldn't be). They know that they are allowed to do it.

No, what they're asking, in a round-about way, is "am I really good enough to teach my own kids?"

This is an interesting question.  Where did we (and I include my pre-home schooling self in there) get to the point that we feel ourselves unable to educate our own kids?  Since most of us are products of the school system ourselves, I think it's the inevitable result of going through a system that tells us learning only happens in special buildings, with specially certified people, at certain times and with information doled out at certain ages.  It's become so normal, we tend to forget that this is really unusual in human history.

What the public school system has done to a lot of us is undermine our confidence in our own abilities.  Not just in educating our children, but raising them, too.  We're increasingly pressured to send our kids away to "experts" who have been specially trained to do what used to be done by families and communities.  More and more of us grew up in daycare, followed by pre-pre-schools, then pre-schools, then kindergarten, then on through the grades.  Then after that, a lot of us went on to college or university.  Is it any wonder that we find ourselves unable to believe we can do something like educate (or even parent) our own children? 

Home schooling isn't right for everyone.  Some people just aren't in situations where they can, or should, home school.

Henry Ford said, "Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."  This is true in most things, but home schooling is a bit different.

I forget what organization looked into it, but it was found that there was little difference in how well home schooled kids did when taking into account their family dynamics.  It didn't matter if the families were rich or poor.  It didn't matter how much formal education the parents had.  Race, religion, and even style of home schooling also showed little difference.  Home schooled kids still did equally well overall, which was generally better than their schooled peers, in both academics and sociability.  This is quite different from the school system, which shows significant differences in outcomes between demographics.

In other words, even if you aren't sure of yourself, go ahead and do it anyways.  It would be very difficult to do any worse than the school system is doing.

Can you?

Yes.