When you decide to homeschool your kids, make sure you have an ample library full of good literature. You can even categorize or Dewey Decimal your shelves if you’re so inclined.

Make sure you have the basics of math down…addition, subtraction, fractions, multiplication, maybe even some simple algebra.

Have a good grasp on your calendar; you’re going to need a good scheduling system.

You’ll want to have a firm confidence with your computer skills and a good Wi-Fi connection; you’ll be relying on both for all the days and all the years.

Desks are optional as the kitchen table works well, but it’s nice for them to have a place of their own, even if it’s just a little crate in the corner to store their books or a side table with a chair nestled underneath for them to do their math.

A whiteboard isn’t a necessity, but it’s a good thing to have if your husband happens to haul one home from the scrap heap at work and screws it up on the wall that night; diagramming sentences happens so much better when the words can be written big for all the students to see.

Make sure you’re comfortable reading aloud and that you can do characters; you’ll be spending a lot of time in stories, and your students will be depending on you to keep the voices straight.

Have a mathematician on speed dial, or a good problem solver to help you figure out those tricky ones that clogged you up in high school.

Keep a coffee mug full of one-dollar bills and pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters so you can teach them money and how to count change.

Be prepared for questions about sex and where babies come from and what makes a heart beat and how the blood goes from there to the brain to fingers to toes and what makes muscles move.

Have a big sturdy bowl in your kitchen and a big box of baking soda and a huge jug of vinegar to make a volcano and show them about chemistry and geology all at the same time.

Keep your bed cozy because there may be days when you are heavily pregnant and need a nap, but the reading time isn’t over, so they’ll want to snuggle up with you until your eyes get funny, so make sure to bring a stack of books with you on those days so they can keep reading while you take a little catnap.

Have a globe at the ready and teach them about other states and nations and the oceans and how the tides flow around the planet to bring the sea life to the shores on which you walk and hunt for agates.

You may want the calendar to the local school on hand for the first year or two, and you may even keep a daily schedule written down (especially if you have a whiteboard, and maybe you’ll even write it out in 15-minute increments), but you’ll soon learn after the first year that the public school schedule doesn’t pertain to you, and 15-minute increments don’t always work when it comes to school-at-home, so have a pencil and a piece of scrap paper at the ready and jot down what they learned that Saturday or that Tuesday afternoon in July.

Have calculators for each of them and teach them how to use them.

Find someone who can teach any musical instrument they are interested in and make sure they practice, and delight yourself in the sound of your home filling up with music, even when it is painful to your ears.

Print the standardized tests and show them how to fill in the correct bubble with a black pen.

Keep a well-seasoned cast iron griddle on your stove and teach them how to make pancakes on Fat Tuesday, or on Saturday mornings.

Have a checkbook and teach them how to write out a check, and if you’re daring, how to forge your name if ever they need to.

Teach them how to grocery shop to feed a family using coupons and sales and how to keep enough reserved back for fresh flowers on the table for birthdays and dinners out for extra special family times.

Always have a muffin tin and bags of dry beans in your kitchen so your younger students can count and sort while you’re teaching your older students higher math.

Make sure to know something about poetry: how to read it, how to write it, what makes a good poem…and teach them what you know. Challenge them to write poems and read their work back to them, just like you read Robert Frost to them at the breakfast table.

Grammar rules will come in handy, and you’ll need to show them what makes a good sentence, what makes a good paragraph, what makes a good paper, what makes a good novel.

And then, when you’re all done knowing those things, it’s most important that you know when it’s time to have a big trailer load of dirt delivered to your yard, or when it’s time to declare it brush-burning season, because some spring day, you may decide that you and your students are all tired and burnt out on schedules and that you’d like to end your school year in late April and just sit around the bonfire and toast marshmallows and read Black Beauty beginning-to-end, or you may decide to just let them be kids and play in the dirt pile a little longer.

This piece is dedicated to my forever sister, Lisa, who taught me much about being a woman and a mother, and who showed me that I had things to teach as well.

“Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” – Mark Twain