You’re coming up on a break from intensive academic work in your homeschool. As you wrap up with your kids, you need to answer some questions:

Have my kids learned enough? How well did I teach them?

And most importantly… how do I figure that out?

A benefit of being a classroom teacher is that you teach the same concepts and skills to the same age group for years. That experience teaches you how to objectively assess how well your students learn the material and if you’ve done enough for them.

As a homeschooling parent, unless you’ve had prior teaching experience, you don’t develop that expertise until your kids are almost done with high school!

But you know what? There’s a way around that problem.

With crystal clear goal setting and taking certain steps to assess their learning, you can determine two essential things without many years of experience: how well your kids have learned what you’ve taught them and how to move forward from there.

Get clear on your homeschool’s priorities 

As parents or guardians, you obviously set goals for your homeschool before you began.

There are all sorts of learning goals parents need to set for their kids: behavioral learning, academic learning, religious learning, or whatever you feel is most important. Your values and your life experience will quickly inform you of what you want for your kids.

You want your kids to be happy, well-rounded and successful. There’s a lot to think about!

Take some time to write down the most essential learnings you want your kids to get from their homeschooling experience. Put them in a safe place, and revisit them every few months. Adjust them if necessary.

Sometimes life takes unexpected twists and turns. It can be easy for priorities to be set aside or temporarily forgotten. By writing down the most essential learnings for your homeschool, you’ll always revisit them and be reminded of what’s most important for your family.

Academics: learning demonstrated v. material covered 

Covering academic material - concepts and skills learning - doesn’t necessarily mean your kids have learned it. Academic learning goals must include a demonstration of the learning achieved.

After you decide on your overarching priorities, discussed in the prior section, set smaller learning goals every week that lead to the overarching goal. 

We always use the mastery learning goals model for those smaller week by week goals. Mastery goals are one sentence statements that state what your kids will know and be able to do and how they’re going to demonstrate that learning. You might want to create 1 to 3 mastery goals per week in your homeschool.

It takes a little time to get accustomed to writing in the mastery goal format, but take the time to do so. They’ll give your homeschool academics a huge amount of focus and clarity.

When I was a classroom teacher, instead of posting a daily agenda (which is essentially a to-do list) I had three mastery goals on my board every day for kids to read as soon as they came in the room, so everyone knew exactly where we were headed. At the start of class, I’d introduce the activities or projects we were going to work on to achieve those goals.

With mastery goals in front of you and your kids for the week, you’ll all quickly know whether or not a learning has been achieved.

Please be reminded that you MUST review your kids’ daily work as soon as possible. Don’t make the mistake of allowing your kids to learn something incorrectly (i.e. long division or multiplication with decimal points) and have that incorrect learning ingrained as a habit before you catch and correct it.

A step beyond for more depth of learning 

For more important learnings in your homeschool -- those concepts or skills that you decide are essential for your kids, you’ll want to determine and/or develop their depth of understanding.

After meeting the initial mastery goal, you’ll want your kids to do two things for deeper learning:

1) Apply the learning to different situations, and
2) Ask them to teach it to someone else.

If you’re been homeschooling for a while, you know the depth of understanding required to teach a subject to someone, especially a struggling student!

What to do if your kids don’t reach the learning goal 

At times you’ll find that your kids haven’t been able to reach their learning goal. They might not be ready or able to absorb the material yet, even if your curriculum or your peers tell you that they should be. Everybody’s a little different.

Here are two ways to deal with this issue when it occurs:

1) First, break down the skill or concept into smaller parts and teach those parts. Can you determine what aspect of the overall learning is hard for them?
2) Put it aside and revisit it later. Kids become more complex thinkers at different ages.
3) Connect the learning to something they already know. It’s always easier to learn something new if they can see a relevant context to the new learning.

Try these goal setting and instructional ideas out in your homeschool. Together they make an excellent way to track your kids' progress over the years, and they'll show you how much and how well they're learning.

Lily Iatridis is the founder of Writing Rockstars, an online writing program that prepares teens for college level writing.