Routines

The first two weeks: what a new homeschool should actually attempt before it tries to cover anything

A family that has chosen the curriculum, built the day, learned to read progress, selected its outside resources, and worked out what to do when a child refuses now faces the part none of that prepares it for, which is starting. The common instinct is to open on day one at the pace the family intends to hold in March, and that instinct is responsible for a large share of the collapses that arrive three weeks later. The first two weeks are not for covering material. They are for installing a routine that a family can repeat on a bad morning, and the schedule that survives that test is almost always shorter than the one written in July. Plus the policy dispatch as North Carolina extends its ESA+ offers and the Texas funding calendar turns out to work differently for homeschoolers than for private school families.

The last five issues built a working early-grades year and then addressed what to do when it meets a child who will not participate, which completes the planning and leaves the execution untouched. This issue takes up the first two weeks of an actual homeschool year and argues that they serve a different purpose than the rest of it. The failure this addresses is specific and common. A family that has prepared carefully arrives at day one with a full schedule and the intention to run it, and the preparation itself is what makes the full-speed start tempting, since the materials are bought and the timetable is written and holding back feels like waste. What that start ignores is how much is genuinely new at once. The hour is new, the working space is new, the books are unfamiliar, the relationship between parent and child inside a lesson is a role neither has occupied before, and the transitions between subjects have never been performed, which matters because transitions rather than lessons are where a young child's morning is actually consumed. A schedule that assumes every one of those works on first attempt will fail, and the family will usually misattribute the failure to the curriculum or to the child instead of to the schedule that was never tested. The issue proposes a different measure for the opening fortnight. The question at the end of two weeks is not how much was covered but whether the routine repeats without force, whether day eleven resembles day three, and a family that can answer yes has built something a bad morning cannot dismantle. The practical shape that follows is a first week considerably shorter than the target, limited to one or two subjects, anchored by a fixed start time treated as the only non-negotiable element, with explicit attention paid to the transitions between activities. Week two adds a single element at a time, which preserves the diagnostic value of the exercise, since a routine that breaks after one addition identifies its own cause while a routine that absorbs five changes at once identifies nothing. The issue then works through the four failures that surface earliest: a parent's uncalibrated sense of what a sufficient day looks like, drawn from a school model that spends most of its hours on logistics a home does not have; the younger sibling whose needs were never given a place in the schedule; a timetable with no margin, which converts any ordinary interruption into a lost morning and then into evidence of failure; and materials that live somewhere other than where the lesson happens, which quietly adds minutes to every transition. Families arriving directly from public school are treated separately, because their first two weeks are less about starting a routine than about ending one, and the adjustment period they need is real and is not idleness. The issue also notes the obligations that begin on day one whatever the academic load, since attendance and record-keeping requirements are set by state law, vary substantially, and cannot be reconstructed after the fact. Plus the policy dispatch, covering North Carolina's extension of 2026-27 ESA+ award offers on a three-week acceptance clock following the July state budget, and the Texas Education Freedom Account distribution calendar, which pays homeschool and other non-private-school accounts in full at the start of the year while reserving the installment schedule for private school awards.