Different Styles of home educating
How you decide to go about your home education is between you and your child. Some families like a structured approach, some like a totally informal, interest-led approach. Many are somewhere in between. If you want to use school-type text books, at least to start with, there are a wide variety available at local bookshops. It's impossible to give recommendations since they change from year to year, and different styles appeal to different families. However in general we've found textbooks published by Ginn and Heinemann to be good quality and fairly enjoyable to use.
For more informal learning, if you are still thinking in terms of school-type topics, see my subject introduction pages: English, history, geography, science and maths. The maths page links to several other pages with ideas for introducing basic concepts in a relaxed way with children of any age. All these pages have links to useful sites with games or other learning possibilities.
Searching on the Internet will reveal thousands of pages of information on any topic your child finds interesting, many with games, interactive quizzes, or ideas for projects. Your library is another useful source - books on most topics, cassette tapes, and sometimes computer CDs to borrow, or use in the library. When reading and conversation are natural parts of daily life, rather than rushed in evenings after school, your child will learn in a relaxed way, at his own pace, when he is ready to learn.
Life and education do not need to be subject-based
However, you will soon find that life does not need to be divided into subjects, and that learning experiences come from all kinds of sources, not simply books and computers. Moreover, subjects taught in schools are only a tiny part of the broader concept of 'education'. For more about this, see my article 'What is education anyway?'
If you are feeling rather daunted because you have a teenager who already seems to know more than you do, you might find some help and resources at the pages maths and the home educated teen, or science and the home educated teen. If you have no idea how to deal with a teenager at all, see my article Are all teenagers horrible?
Unit Studies
Some home educators in the USA - and increasingly in the UK - use an approach called 'unit studies', whereby any topic of interest - from soccer World Cup to cats and kittens - is studied extensively over a period of a week or a month. Within the topic you can cover, for instance, geography (countries playing in the world cup / cats around the world), history (origins of soccer / cats in ancient times) - and whatever else appeals!
You can research on the Internet or your library for all information on the topic, perhaps write a relevant story or report, and create art or craft work based on it. This idea is often done informally in home education when a child has a particular interest, or can be followed more formally with a year plan of topics and designed unit study lessons. A useful site which explains the system more fully and gives several ideas is: Unit Studies online.
My Home Education Resources page looks at ways you can teach some National Curriculum subjects at home, if you want to, with suggestions for books and resources to help. It also gives the details for some more formal 'homeschool' curricula that can be bought for home learning.
Educating autonomously
Many British home educators, who start by using structure a bit like a school day, find themselves veering more and more to autonomous child-led learning, exploring new topics together, and following the child’s own need to learn at their own rate. Some families use this approch from the beginning, and never emulate a school model at all.
Even if it does
not seem as if you are covering much, your children will remember and
understand far more when they are interested in what they are learning,
rather than when someone else dictates their curriculum. For
some descriptions of how autonomous education can work in practice,
with or without text books and some planned structure, look at my home education in practice
pages, browse the other home
educating family sites, or read the book Free
Range Education: How Home Education Works