Your first month

What to actually do in the first four weeks — including the week where the job is not to teach. About 5 minutes.

The shape of the four weeks

First, the thing that surprises people: Alberta sets no minimum hours and no required timetable for home education. "Hours" appears nowhere in the Home Education Regulation or the Home Education Handbook. The 950-hour figure you may have read applies to schools, not to you.

So nothing below is a rule. It is the shape that tends to work, and the one hard date is in week 4.

Week 1 — don't teach

If your child has just come out of school, the instinct is to prove the decision immediately: timetable on the fridge, workbooks open Monday. It usually backfires, because you are trying to run a system before you know the child inside it.

Spend the week watching instead. When does their attention actually arrive — 9 a.m., or 11? How long can they stay with something hard before they need to move? Do they think out loud or go quiet? None of that is visible in a classroom, and all of it decides what your timetable should look like.

On "deschooling." You will read that a child needs one month of decompression for every year they spent in school. That's long-standing advice in the home-education community, and plenty of families swear by it — but we can't point you at evidence for the arithmetic, so treat it as a rule of thumb rather than a finding. The useful part is the direction, not the number: expect an adjustment period, and don't read it as failure.

Week 2 — find the rhythm, not the timetable

A rhythm is an order of events. A timetable is an order of events at fixed clock times. Rhythms survive a bad night's sleep; timetables don't.

Try: hardest thinking first, while attention is cheap. Something physical before the slump. Reading aloud together at the same point every day, because it becomes the hinge the rest hangs off. Then stop — an at-home day that mirrors a school day hour-for-hour is nobody's goal, and one-to-one covers ground faster than one-to-thirty.

Write down what actually happened, not what you planned. By Friday you will have a rhythm you didn't design.

Week 3 — one real thing, done properly

Pick a single topic and go deeper than school would. One investigation your child actually runs: a question, a guess, a method, results that might disappoint them, and a conclusion in their own words.

Do it once, properly, and two things follow. Your child learns what real work feels like at home — which is different from finishing a worksheet. And you get your first genuine portfolio piece, which is worth more at an evaluation than three weeks of tidy pages.

Photograph it and date it. That's the habit week 4 is about.

Week 4 — the habit, and the only hard date

Two duties are yours by law from day one, not from the day someone asks:

1. Evaluate your child's progress at regular intervals, keeping a record of the methods and dates.
2. Keep dated samples of student work and a general record of activities.

They apply whether or not you are supervised. The bar is lower than it sounds — Alberta's own answer to "must I keep all of my child's work?" is "No, only dated samples." How that works, and what evaluations look like →

Start it in month one, when there is almost nothing to file. Families who start in April spend a weekend reconstructing a year.

And the date. If you want Alberta's funding this year, your supervising authority must have accepted your program no later than September 29 — their decision, not your application, and they may take up to 15 school days. If that is still ahead of you, it outranks everything else on this page. How registration works →

Four things not to do in month one

• Don't buy a full curriculum for every subject yet. You don't know how your child works at home. Two weeks of watching will change what you'd pick.
• Don't recreate the school day. If you find yourself scheduling six subjects and a bell, the model has followed you home.
• Don't measure the month by pages completed. Measure it by whether you now know when your child thinks best.
• Don't skip the records because it's early. This is the one item on the list Alberta actually requires.

Your action list

• Block week 1 out. No curriculum. Watch and take notes.
• Keep a one-line log each day of what actually happened. It becomes both your rhythm and your first record.
• Plan one real investigation for week 3, and date the photograph.
• Check your notification status against September 29 — before anything else, if it's still open.
• Ask your facilitator what they want to see at the first evaluation. Early is better; they are less busy in September than in October.

✅ Your next step → Portfolio + evaluations

Or jump to a related tool:

• Open your Memory Book →
• Open your Learning Record →

Sources: Home Education Regulation AR 89/2019 (consolidated to AR 160/2025) — s4(1)(a)–(b) for the parent's record-keeping duties, s2(3)(b) for the 15-school-day decision window; Funding Manual for School Authorities 2026/27 for the September 29 count date; Home Education Handbook (April 2025) for the "No, only dated samples" quick-reference answer; Guide to Education ECS–Grade 12 for the 950-hour figure applying to schools rather than to home education — "hours" appears nowhere in the Regulation or the Handbook. The deschooling rule of thumb is explicitly labelled community convention, not a sourced finding, and no outcome or socialization research is cited on this page. Checked 29 July 2026. Nothing here is legal advice.

Next: Portfolio + evaluations