New homeschooling parents should spend the first month of homeschooling assessing their student’s skills. The Teacher Consultant can provide the tools by which to accomplish that or may do an initial assessment. Some subjects like math, grammar, beginning levels of reading, writing are skill-oriented and thus, often have a natural sequence. Assessing skills in those subjects usually means finding out where the student is in the sequence and determining if there are any gaps.

It is vital for parents to spend some time with students, brainstorming specific areas/topics the student would like to address. Then, with the help of the Teacher Consultant, plan a process/project for the student’s suggested topic(s). The Teacher Consultant can help by suggesting particular learning objectives/goals, resources which help integrate learning into multiple subject areas (unit study). Effective objectives are "verb based" (actions) which suggest behaviors to be learned, ideas to be gained, insights to be formed, skills to be mastered, attitudes to be developed, tasks to be performed, products to be created.