Why This Exists

I’m not here to convince you to homeschool. If you’re reading this, you’ve already decided, or you’re seriously considering it. My job is what comes next.

Homeschool Teacher Guide is for the family who decided last month, or last week, and is staring at a wall of options that all sound equally good and equally overwhelming, or the family that already started and still feels lost. Either way, you know roughly where you want to end up. You just don’t know what to do on Monday morning, or you’re not happy with how Mondays have been going.

There’s a difference between starting, sustaining, and teaching well. The Guide gets you started, and started well. Everything I build after it either adds to that or picks up the rest: keeping it going over the years, adjusting as your children change, and a bigger piece down the road for parents who want to take teaching itself seriously as a craft.

I’m not going to push my views about life or education on you, and I’m not here to judge yours. My job is to lay the homeschool landscape out clearly enough that you can pick something, start, and adjust as you go. The right answers for your homeschool are the ones that fit your family, and probably not the ones that fit mine.

I’ve loved learning my whole life, and I held onto that more in spite of school than because of it. The thing I most want for my own boys is that they never lose theirs. I hope this helps your family protect the same thing.

Education at scale is straining, and you can see it in small moments: a third-grader who can’t get through a chapter book while the report card says “doing great,” or a parent learning at November conferences that their kid is two years behind. A good teacher with thirty kids can only do so much, and that limit is getting hit harder every year.

A parent teaching one child, or a few, works at a ratio no classroom can match. The research on tutoring, from Bloom in 1984 to the large meta-analyses since, points the same way: one-on-one and small-group instruction outperform classroom instruction, by a margin that is large by the standards of education research. The curricula already exist. Homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, with the rules varying from one to the next.

What’s missing is a clear, step-by-step starting plan for the family that wants to begin and doesn’t know how. That’s what I’ve built.

I want Homeschool Teacher Guide to be the place a beginner lands first, builds a confident starting plan in a single evening, and keeps the support to get through the hard months.

The Homeschool Starter Bundle is the starting point: enough structure to begin, with no preaching about method, curriculum, or lifestyle.

More pieces are coming. Our latest release is the free Apple Farmer Annie unit study, which is part of a bigger project. That bigger project is a critical thinking, real-life and book-based curriculum for young children.

If you want to follow along, sign up for the email list. You’ll get the free Reading Assessment as a thank-you, plus a weekly note with practical homeschool content and updates on what’s being built next.

My name’s Val, short for Valentina. Mom to my twin boys and married to Matt, who runs the back-end and the odds and ends of Homeschool Teacher Guide. I’m Canadian and grew up in Toronto, so you might see some Canadian and British spellings creeping in here and there.

My background’s somewhat eclectic. I started off in liberal arts, intent on studying history. I ended up earning an Honours Bachelor of Science in biological chemistry from the University of Toronto. I was on the research track and planned on immediately doing a PhD after my degree. Plenty of good reasons caused me to end up in tech instead. Now, I’m home full-time with my boys.

I became obsessed with homeschooling for years before I had anyone to teach. The homeschooled adults I’d met were noticeably more reflective and prepared than most people I knew, and I wanted my kids to be like them. So I had to understand why, and how.

I started reading. Months of it. Articles, blogs, books, forums, and a folder of bookmarks no one should have to make. I wanted one awesome resource with everything in one place and a clear starting plan, but couldn’t find one. So I built it. That’s the Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling and the Homeschool Starter Workbook.

The next thing I’m building is the actual critical thinking, literature-based curriculum I’d want for my little boys (the first installment is fully free here).

I’m not a veteran homeschooler. I’m a curious mom who became fixated out of pure interest and excitement to homeschool. I wrote down what I learned, so the next mom doesn’t have to start from scratch.

When I’m not building Homeschool Teacher Guide, you’ll find me outside with my family, hiking and bird watching, and quietly wishing my urban nature were a little less urban. I also do yoga, love board games, though I get a little competitive. I also love to learn, through video or books.