Before You Buy Anything: What I Wish I'd Known When We Started Homeschooling

Before You Buy Anything

The first 30 days of homeschooling, and why doing less is the smartest thing you can do

Before You Buy Anything is a practical guide to your first 30 days of homeschooling - helping you slow down, notice how your child actually learns outside of school, and work out what you really need before spending a fortune on curriculum and resources.

Instead of trying to build your whole homeschool in week one, you'll move through:

Decompress → Notice → Follow curiosity → Experiment with rhythm → Look back

By the end, you won't have someone else's version of the “perfect homeschool”.

You'll have something much more useful: a clearer picture of your child, your days, what's already working, and what might actually be worth adding next.

What you get

• Before You Buy Anything - the complete guide to navigating your first 30 days without panic-buying your entire homeschool. We'll look at what to hold off buying, what learning can look like outside school, what to do when you panic, how to handle other people's questions, and how to know when it's actually time to add something.
• Your First 30 Days - a one-page printable version of the plan, so you're not flipping back through chapters when you just need the next step.
• What I'm Noticing - a simple weekly page for jotting down what your child keeps returning to, what surprised you, what frustrated them. The kind of noticing this whole approach is built on.

When we started homeschooling, I made almost every purchase you're currently tempted to make.

Grade-level workbooks in every subject. Chemistry sets. Maths and language subscriptions. Learning portals. It felt like the responsible thing to do. Most of it got used once, or not at all, while my son ended up learning through the things nobody sold me: an astronomy club, D&D, Minecraft, jigsaw puzzles, growing things.

This guide is what I wish someone had handed me before I bought any of it.

The problem isn't that you don't care enough. It's that you're trying to make decisions before you have enough information.

You don't know yet what your child will respond to, what your days will actually look like, what they'll keep coming back to, or where they might genuinely need more support.

So instead of trying to build your whole homeschool in week one, this guide gives you permission to slow down, pay attention and make those decisions from what you actually notice, rather than from panic.

Who this is for

You're about to start homeschooling, or you've just begun, and suddenly you're wondering what the hell you're supposed to do all day. Maybe you're researching curriculum, worried you're not doing enough, scared of overdoing it, or trying desperately not to recreate school at home.

You want homeschooling to feel different - you just don't quite know what that looks like yet.

That's exactly who I wrote this for.

What this isn't

It's not a curriculum, a full-year plan, or a teaching manual. It's not going to tell you exactly how your individual child should learn to read or do maths, that's not something any guide can promise. It's the reassurance and the thinking-through that I needed before I was ready to figure out any of that.

I'm not a teacher or an education expert. I'm a parent three years into this who still doesn't have it all figured out, still buys things that get used once, and has also watched learning happen in places I never would have thought to look for it.

This guide is what I've learned from getting it wrong first.



$19 AUD · Instant PDF download

Includes the full guide + both printable bonuses.