A homeschool yearunit studies planned, taught and recorded

Method

1. 1

   Start the year with your state’s rules

   Read your state education department’s own page on homeschooling and note what it requires: whether you file a notice, how many days or hours you must teach, which subjects, and whether the year ends with a test, an evaluation or a portfolio. Rules differ between states and change, so do this yourself, with the page’s address and the date you read it.

   Then ask your assistant to make a shelf called Homeschool 2026–27, described as “Unit studies and lessons for the 2026–27 school year”, and paste your summary of the rules into the shelf’s notes. A new shelf each year keeps the years apart; last year’s stays as it was, and Contents shows the two side by side.

2. 2

   Have your assistant research each unit

   Before a unit starts, ask your assistant to research what a parent needs to know to teach it — the core ideas, common misconceptions, simple activities with their safety notes — on the web, and to file what it finds as a new document on the year’s shelf, one finding per point, each with its source links. This needs an assistant that can search the web; Claude and ChatGPT can, and many local set-ups cannot.

   What comes back is background for you, not a lesson for the children, and it is a first pass. Open the sources, check every claim you will teach, and correct or delete what does not hold up.

3. 3

   Have it lay out the lessons for both ages

   Give your assistant the unit’s line from your year plan and the books you will use, and ask it to create the unit document: an overview saying what the unit is for and how many weeks it runs, then a finding per lesson with two short sections, Younger (age 8) and Older (age 11). The same idea at two depths: the younger one sorts pictures of water into solid, liquid and gas; the older one draws the whole cycle and labels evaporation, condensation and runoff.

   Ask it to link each lesson to the background findings it relies on, so the reason behind a lesson is one click away.

4. 4

   Fix the plan in the editor

   Press Edit and read the unit as the person who will teach it. Cut the activities that need what you do not have, rewrite the ones that will not work at your table, and drag lessons into the order your weeks allow. Mark the lessons the rest of the unit depends on as Key, and file anything you still need to find out as a Question.

   Give each lesson a first sentence that names its people and places. The index to the shelf learns single capitalised words from lesson titles and first lines, so Nile, Mississippi, Tutankhamun and USGS gather there as the year goes on. Ordinary words such as condensation never become index terms; find them with Look up (⌘K).

5. 5

   Quiz yourself, then adapt the questions

   Ask your assistant for a quiz on Unit 3 — Rivers and the water cycle. It writes five to ten questions with know.sh’s quiz tools, each citing the lesson it came from, and you take it in know.sh. A question you cannot answer means another look at the background before Monday; the quiz comes back under Revisit after three days, a week or three weeks, depending on your score.

   The children do not take quizzes in know.sh. Use the questions as raw material: ask your assistant for an end-of-unit review in a finding, three questions to ask the younger child aloud and five for the older one to answer in writing, and put them in your own words before you use them at the table.

6. 6

   Record what happened, the same day

   After each lesson, open its finding, press Edit and add a What we did line: the date, how long it took, what worked. “Tuesday 8 September, 50 minutes. The older one finished the diagram; the younger one wanted to pour water on everything, so we moved the evaporation dish outside.” A few lines at the end of the school day is enough.

   Each finding’s revisions keep the plan as the assistant drafted it, your changes, and the record as you added it, each dated. Focus the unit you are teaching this week, and Star the ones worth teaching again when the younger child reaches the older one’s level. If your state counts days or hours, keep a School days document too, a finding per month with a table.

7. 7

   Close the year and prepare what the state asks for

   At the end of the year, ask your assistant to summarise the shelf by subject: the units, the number of lessons, the dates they ran, and the What we did lines that show each was taught. Check the summary against the lessons, then copy what you need onto your state’s forms or into the portfolio your evaluator reviews. The state’s forms are the record that counts; know.sh is where you kept the detail behind them.

   Next summer, have your assistant make Homeschool 2027–28 and, for each starred unit you mean to teach again, a new document pitched a year older. The original stays on last year’s shelf, part of that year’s record.