A few years ago, one of our homeschoolers picked up an encyclopaedia of birds and didn’t put it down for months. He was ten; I was still finding my feet home educating and believed learning needed teacher-led structure. What followed wasn’t anything I’d planned. He studied flight path maps, online lectures he’d found himself, Latin names for every species visible through his telescope, bird art covered most of the available wall space. He’d created his first proper interest-led project without either of us realising that’s what it was, and in doing so taught me something I come back to regularly: stepping back and letting their curiosity lead is sometimes the most productive thing a home-ed parent can do.
If you’ve read the interest-led learning post, you already know the case for following your child’s interests rather than fighting them into a curriculum that doesn’t fit. This post is the operational side of that: what a project actually contains, how you set it up without it dissolving into a pile of half-finished printouts, and how to structure it so the work becomes quantifiable as proof they’re receiving an education, should you ever have to provide that information.
A project is a folder
Not necessarily a neat one. Sometimes it’s a folder that develops its own subsections and starts to feel more like a small archive than a school assignment. That’s fine — following the rabbit holes is the point. A project is a collection of information about a topic that the learner returns to, adds to, and eventually knows well enough to talk about without prompting. Some projects run for a term with a deadline; others span years as the interest holds.
The reason it works as a format is that it’s open-ended without being directionless. Your learner has a subject and a list of things to include; beyond that, how they fill it is largely up to them. For learners who resist being told exactly what to produce, this tends to generate more genuine engagement because they can express themselves through their work. You’re giving them the freedom of home education to chase what interests them, and supporting their academic learning without it ever feeling restrictive.
What goes in
The planning sheet below (free to download) lists the six components we use. Here’s the thinking behind each one.
Background information. Every topic has a history. Before your learner can explore the detail, they need the context — think of it as the introductory paragraph of an essay. Where did this start? How did it develop? This also gives reluctant starters a way in: it’s research with a defined question, which is less overwhelming than a blank page.
Facts and figures. Every interest can be represented in data somewhere. A graph, an infographic, a list of stats — the format is flexible, but getting learners into the habit of looking for data in whatever they study pays off later in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. It also adds maths into the project without anyone noticing, which is never a bad thing.
Art in some form. This earns its place for two reasons. First, it gives learners who find extended writing difficult another way to demonstrate what they know — illustrations, diagrams, maps, storyboards, anything visual that’s relevant to the topic. Second, it tends to produce work they’re proud of, which quietly raises the standard of everything else in the folder. If you have a child who will produce a beautiful diagram but fights you on written work, let the diagram happen. The writing comes easier once they’re invested. NB. Written work doesn’t have to be handwritten if that is a struggle for your home-learner: for some students, typing takes the effort out of writing giving their brains more room for creativity.
Main text. Our minimum is one page in their own words. This requires them to read enough to reproduce a piece of writing that’s genuinely theirs (we check for copy-paste — make this clear from the start). It also builds the skill of writing to a word count, which matters as they move toward formal qualifications. If a topic is genuinely complex, two pages is better than one page that’s cramped and incomplete. More is more at this stage; self-editing comes later.
History and geography connection. Where did this start? Where in the world does it connect? These threads aren’t add-ons — they’re the mechanism that stops a project from being a bubble. Follow the interest far enough and it always connects to the wider world. Chess connects to medieval warfare and Cold War politics. Baking connects to trade routes and chemistry. Archery connects to how it’s been used across cultures and whether technology changes a sport’s integrity. The prompts in the parent guide on the planning sheet help you find the thread if it isn’t immediately obvious.
A summary or presentation. This can be written, verbal, or visual — the format is up to the learner. What matters is that they have to revisit and explain what they’ve learnt. Don’t skip this part.
On the presentation
When a project is finished, ask your learner to present it — to you, sometimes to family or a home-ed group. This does something important: it changes what they need to know. There’s a difference between work that will be glanced at and work that will be questioned. The standard rises accordingly, without you having to push for it.
Start with a question you know they can answer confidently. Let them feel competent before you get to the harder questions. If you sense they haven’t pushed the research as far as they could, questions framed as curiosity rather than assessment tend to land better: “I don’t know this, but I wonder if…” often sends them back to the folder to find out, which is exactly what you want.
Presentation skills are worth noting as a specific gap in home education. School builds them incidentally — there are assemblies, group projects, show-and-tell moments that accumulate across years. In home-ed, those opportunities don’t happen by default. Building a presentation into every project is one way to make sure those skills, and the confidence they cultivate, get practice.
Running projects with more than one child
This is where the format earns its place in a multi-child home-ed environment. A single topic can anchor a project for very different ages simultaneously. Space works for a five-year-old (the planets, what astronauts eat) and a fifteen-year-old (astronomy, orbital mechanics, the history of space exploration) at the same time. You theme around the same subject, teach to the group’s range, then extend individually through one-to-one time or their separate folder tasks.
Siblings working on a shared project also learn to divide up research, review each other’s contributions, and present together. These are not soft extras — they’re the peer-learning skills that school builds through proximity to other children, and that home-ed has to build more deliberately.
The planning sheet
The download below includes a learner planning sheet and a parent guide with thread-following prompts (history, geography, maths/data, extension) and end-of-project reflection questions. There’s also a project agreement which some learners find useful as a way of marking that this is a proper piece of work, not just a loose collection of things they found interesting. It also makes it fun, in the way that a home-ed contract, signed in quill ink, can.
The interest-led learning post covers how to identify which of your child’s interests are worth building into a project. This post is the how. The planning sheet below is the what. Between the three, you have enough to start.
