Jennifer Kaufeld

Homeschool media stories that tout homeschooling as expensive, elitist, and only for the wealthy are simply not true. The truth, which is that anyone can homeschool for nearly free if they need to, doesn’t make splashy headlines. © Ronnie Chua/Shutterstock.com Many people manage to homeschool their children for about $500 per child, per year, on the average or less.

Every homeschooler has fears that nag and whisper in the night. Maybe going with the flow would be better. Whether you’re contemplating taking the leap into homeschooling, you’re a first-year homeschooler, or you’ve been doing this for ages, one or more of the fears that I discuss in this list is bound to hit you sooner or later.

Homeschooling an elementary-age child can be challenging when you have to tackle a subject that they find difficult. For many children, math is a pretty ethereal subject. After all, you’re working with symbols that may (or may not) mean something to the child, and expecting him to take these symbols, read the code sign between them, and correctly come up with a new symbol.

What do you pull out when you want to play school rather than actually teach? Why, one of these games, of course! The games in this list offer you much more than Monopoly or Connect Four; in fact, you can substitute any one of these for a subject lesson once in a while with no regrets.From electrical circuits to business conglomerates and from food chains to famous battles, these games cover math, science, social studies, and language arts in the finest tradition of play.

Homeschooling can be stressful, and extreme stress pulls at a family’s seams. It tugs holes in the fabric you created when you gathered your little ones around you and taught them how to face the world together. You may find that you need to spend some time refashioning your family fashion fabric back into that sleek, gorgeous group that you used to be, before whatever stress happened that caused you to think about homeschooling in the first place.

Homeschooling is more than recreating school at home. It’s the opportunity to guide your children through their education in the best way possible for them. Turn here when you’re looking for useful homeschooling websites or inspiration and encouragement from friendly newsletters and magazines. When you feel that end-of-the-semester crunch and the method for calculating grade point averages slips your mind, you can find that here as well.

So you're thinking about leaping into homeschooling. The excitement of a new life decision always brings some jitters with it. Although the idea of homeschooling intrigues you, a few questions may still nag at the back of your mind. For one thing, what exactly does an adventure like this involve? When is the best time to begin?

Even if you use textbook curriculum for most of your homeschool studies, breaking out of the print mold and jumping headlong into a unit study is nice every now and then. For one thing, it makes your students think a little more about how the different parts of life actually fit together. For another, it gives you a break from the middle-of-the-year doldrums.