A comprehensive guide to designing homeschool curriculum, from one of the country’s foremost homeschooling experts—now revised and updated!   Homeschooling can be a tremendous gift to your children—a personalized educational experience tailored to each kid’s interests, abilities, and learning styles. But what to teach, and when, and how? Especially for first-time homeschoolers, the prospect of tackling an annual curriculum can be daunting. In  Home Learning Year by Year , Rebecca Rupp presents comprehensive plans from preschool through high school, covering integral subjects for each grade, with lists of topics commonly presented at each level, recommended resource and reading lists, and suggestions for creative alternative options and approaches. Included, along with all the educational basics, are techniques and resources for teaching everything from philosophy to engineering, as well as suggestions for dealing with such sensitive topics as sex education.   Now revised throughout with all-new updates featuring the most effective and up-to-date methods and reading guides to homeschool your child at all ages,  Home Learning Year by Year  continues to be the definitive book for the homeschooling parent. Rebecca Rupp and her husband, Randy, homeschooled their three sons from preschool through high school, and all grew up to be creative, kindhearted people with large vocabularies. Rebecca has published over 300 articles in national magazines and nearly two dozen books, both for children and adults. She maintains an educational resources blog and lives on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. Chapter 1 To School or Not to School Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. —Beatrix Potter Today, about two million kids in the United States are homeschooled. Reasons for homeschooling choices vary: In a 2016 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, 80 percent of parents cited concern about a negative school environment, and 61 percent were dissatisfied with the quality of public school academics. Some had moral or religious issues. Others mentioned the importance of family togetherness and the benefits of nontraditional or small-scale individualized instruction. Some choose to homeschool from the very beginning. Others make their decisions following unhappy experiences with public or private schools, variously describing emotional, physiological, and intellectual miseries—everything from temper tantrums to tummy aches to chronic academic boredom. According to the 2018 Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) poll of attitudes toward public schools, 81 percent of participants nationwide give the public schools a grade of C or lower; and in a Gallup poll of 2019, 62 percent of pollees pronounced themselves somewhat or completely dissatisfied with the quality of public education. Communities still support their local schools, and we all know many teachers who are wonderful and talented educators and dedicated troupers—but there’s no getting around the fact that public education, as practiced in the United States, has serious problems. Exactly why is a matter of contention. According to educators, reasons for the schools’ struggles include lack of funding; lack of parental involvement and support; gaping socioeconomic divides among students’ families; invasive screen and social media technology; lack of innovation in teacher education; mediocre textbooks; bullying; and the nature of school culture itself, which reinforces conformity, obedience, and the ability to shut up and sit still all day long. Another potential culprit is increasing school size: educational research indicates that bigger doesn’t always mean better. School consolidation, heavily promoted by school districts attempting to save money, makes for centralized schools catering to hundreds or even thousands of pupils—and these, with escalating discipline problems and declining levels of academic achievement, can resemble nothing so much as boot camp. Small schools may not be able to afford the splashy range of activities available at large ones, but there are real emotional advantages to small neighborhood schools, where civility rules and everybody knows your name. Academically, our current school system, despite all the effort that professional educators put into it, doesn’t seem to be doing us any favors. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), fewer than 40 percent of graduating high school seniors have adequately mastered reading and math. On the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide exam administered every three years to 15-year-olds in seventy-two different countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States is less than impressive: in 2015, for example, our kids ranked fortieth in math, twenty-fourth in reading, and twenty-fifth in science. A major part of our problem may be our obs