HOMESCHOOLING

Welcome to our new section dedicated to Homeschooling!

You will find here a variety of resources to help you in your role as parents and educators.

The information has been placed under the following sections:

1. Documents to read prior to sending the Notice (Avis).
2. Information and resources to help you design the Learning Project.
3. Documentation and ideas to follow-up on the Progression of Learning.
4. Support from the Central Quebec School Board.

Different acronyms will be used. Here are the definitions:

CQSB: Central Quebec School Board

CTREQ: Centre de transfert pour la réussite éducative du Québec

MEQ: Ministry of Education of Quebec

QEP: Quebec Education Program

DEM: Direction de l’enseignement à la maison (Homeschooling Department at the Ministry of Education)

1 - Documentation to read prior to the submission of the Notice (Avis)

What is Homeschooling?

In Quebec, a parent can choose to home school their child/children. By choosing homeschooling, the parent becomes entirely responsible for providing appropriate and quality teaching. The parent must meet certain criteria, such as the transmission of a written Notice to the Ministry of Education and the school board, the creation of a Learning Project, and is also responsible for the evaluation of the child. The Homeschooling Regulation gives precise information about these conditions, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the various partners in education.

For further information, please click here to consult the Ministry of Education of Québec (MEQ) website.

What should you know prior to starting Homeschooling?

The Direction de l’enseignement à la maison (DEM) produced a guide to support and inform parents who wish to start homeschooling. Click here to consult the document.

2 - Information and resources to help you design the Learning Project

What is the learner’s profile?

The learner’s profile is the portrait of the child's abilities and needs. The aim is to define strengths, interests, challenges, and the difficulties of the child to paint an accurate picture of the learner's abilities and needs according to the different areas of development.

In the Preschool Education Program, there are Five Areas of Child Development: Emotional, social, language, cognitive, physical, and motor. Each area has equal importance and influence, and they also reinforce each other. Click here to view the full document.

If you are looking for clarification and your child is older, the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services has released a document called On My Way. This resource describes what leading research reveals about the changes experienced by children between the ages of 6 and 12 regarding the five areas of development. (It is not necessary for you to refer to the Five Areas of Development should your child be a preschooler– 4 and 5 year old).

What are the different educational approaches?

In education, several terms refer to educational approaches:

• Teaching methods;
• Pedagogical methods;
• Teaching strategies;

The Canadian Centre for Home Education website presents some teaching methods. Click here to view them.

Research was conducted to find out which teaching strategies are most effective when learning to read, to write, and when learning mathematics. Bissonnette et al. have carried out mega-analyses and found that structured and directive teaching methods, such as explicit teaching, are the preferred ones for teaching basic subjects. To learn more about explicit teaching, the LD@school team published an article on their website. Click here to access.

Finally, John Hattie and Robert Marzano have conducted extensive research and identified Eight Effective Teaching Strategies as having high impact on student learning. Click here to view them.

In conclusion, several teaching approaches and/or strategies can be preferred by teachers and parent-educators. The important thing is to inform learners about what they need to learn and to put into place the modalities for them to engage actively.

What do I need to know about the Quebec Education Program?

The Quebec Education Program (QEP) defines the Learning Essentials (or essential learning) for students. It first presents the three axes of the school's mission: to educate, socialize and qualify. The QEP is essentially characterized by the development of competencies and by the attention paid to the learning process (p. 4).

Three elements make up the QEP: the Broad Areas of Learning, the Cross-Curricular Competencies, and Subject-Specific Areas. Please note, when addressing the Cross-Curricular Competencies (CCCs), they are now referred to as Certain Competencies on the child’s report card. Only a few CCCs need to be reported on during the school year.

This is the way the information appears in the QEP: the Broad Areas of Learning are listed first, then the Cross-Curricular Competencies (CCCs), and lastly, the Subject Specific Areas.

1. The Broad Areas of Learning serve as anchors for the development of the Cross-Curricular Competencies. They bring disciplinary knowledge closer to the daily concerns of students.
2. The Subject Specific Areas include the fourteen disciplinary programs grouped into five areas:

Languages

Mathematics, Science and Technology

Social Sciences

The Arts

Personal and Social Development

3. Cross-Curricular Competencies are skills-based on the effective mobilization and use of a set of resources. Their development is never complete, and they are complementary to each other. The nine cross-curricular competencies are introduced in the QEP and are grouped into four categories (Chapter 2):

Intellectual skills:
Exploiting information
Solving problems
Exercising critical judgment
Implementing creative thinking

Methodological skills:
Developing effective working methods
Exploiting information and communication technologies

Personal and social skills:
Structuring one's identity
Cooperating

Communication skills:
Communicating appropriately

Finally, each disciplinary program is competency-based. On the Ministry's website, it is possible to consult the disciplinary programs of the five areas, both for elementary and secondary school students. In these documents, you will find a description of each competency, the components, the evaluation criteria, and the end-of-cycle expectations.

Where can parent-educators find material to plan learning activities and other educational resources?

In this section, you will find Internet links to various documents that can help you develop your child's Learning Project. According to the Homeschooling Regulations, parent-educators must plan the subjects to be taught according to those that would be taught during the cycle in which the child would be attending school. To find out the disciplines for each cycle, the report card labels, the weightings for each subject, please refer to the documents Report Card Weightings and Wording available for elementary and secondary.

For the mandatory subjects required for all cycles of the elementary and secondary education, namely French, mathematics, and English as a first language, you will find more information below. To access the other disciplines, simply go to the Ministry of Education website. You can then choose the grade level of education (preschool, elementary or secondary) of your choice and then select the desired field, and finally, the subject-specific area.

3 - Documentation and ideas for monitoring the learning progress

Considering the work carried out by the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, the evaluation of learning has two objectives: To support learning and to certify prior learning. It is therefore important to remember that “the assessment of learning is not only in the form of tests or exams” (Homeschooling – Accompanying Guide, p. 26). Rather, evaluation should be an ongoing assessment process to guide the learner's progress according to the learning targets selected that are in-line with the child's needs and grade level.

What are the different ways to assess my child?

In the progress report, it is specified that “Assessments are evidence of learning that make it possible to assess the progress of the child's learning.”

Several evaluation modalities are suggested:

• Observations from parents or other educators:

Parents can make and keep track of observations made when the child performs the proposed activities. For example, a parent could use an agenda or booklet to record the activities performed and note some observed items (e.g., Nathan read the text alone, but needed help locating the answers).

• Conversations with the child:

After completing a task, parent-educators can question the child to find out what they found easy or difficult, what they would like to improve upon, what they did to choose the right answer, what they used to find the spelling of a difficult word, etc. These conversations with the child can be recorded or filmed using a mobile device and kept in a dated file.

• Samples of activities or projects (portfolio)

The portfolio is a learning file in which activities and/or photos of projects are inserted in a portfolio to keep track of the learning carried out. The portfolio can be a physical or digital version and it can have several sections.

• Tests or examinations – check the indentation as off below

In the Homeschooling Regulation, it is specified that “the school board shall take the necessary measures to allow a child who receives instruction at home to be a candidate for any test it mandates [...]. Therefore, if the school board mandates end-of-year evaluations on all students for a specific grade level, students who receive instruction at home could also do this examination under the same conditions.” Due to the pandemic, classroom practices have changed and teachers themselves choose assessment tasks based on the learning content taught.

• Report from a holder of a licence to teach

The Association québécoise pour l'éducation à domicile offers an annual evaluation assistance service and some private educational institutions may also offer this service.

• Local or Ministerial exams

As of the 2021-2022 school year, students registered in homeschooling will have to write any exam mandated by the Ministry of Education and from the associated school board, both for the uniformed and local exams. For more information on the ministerial examinations, you can consult page 34 of the Guide. When the homeschooled student enters high school, it is important to know the requirements to obtain a secondary school diploma.

REQUIREMENTS FOR A SECONDARY SCHOOL DIPLOMA

To obtain a Secondary School Diploma (SSD), homeschooled students are subject to the same certification of studies regulations as children who attend school.

STUDENTS MUST EARN AT LEAST 54 CREDITS AT THE SECONDARY IV OR V LEVEL.

AMONG 39 OF THOSE CREDITS, THERE MUST BE AT LEAST 20 CREDITS AT THE SECONDARY V LEVEL, AS WELL AS THE FOLLOWING CREDITS:

6 credits in Secondary V language of instruction
4 credits in Secondary V second language
4 credits in Secondary IV Mathematics
4 credits in Secondary IV Science and Technology or 6 credits in Secondary IV Applied Science and Technology
4 credits in Secondary IV History
2 credits in Secondary IV Arts Education
2 credits in Secondary V Ethics and Religious Culture or Physical Education and Health

• Other Resources:

Examination Guides for parents (MEQ)

To get a better idea of the expected learning to be acquired, the MEQ has produced, for each discipline, a document entitled "Progression of Learning". In these reference tools, it is possible to choose learning targets for the different competencies. Several elements are presented, and it is not always easy to to manipulate! The learning that are starred indicate that this item needs to be mastered by a specific grade level. Whereas the arrows indicate the learning is ongoing, taking more time to master. Finally, to help teachers assess their students’ competency level, proficiency level scales have been produced for each cycle for elementary and secondary education. These scales make it possible to report on the child's progress and to draw up an assessment according to the requirements of the QEP.

These scales are available on the MEQ website:

• 1st cycle of elementary education

• 2nd cycle of elementary education
• 3rd cycle of elementary education
• 1st cycle of secondary education
• 2nd cycle of secondary education

4 - Terms and conditions concerning the support offered by the Central Quebec School Board

Is it the ministry who determines how children are taught at home?

The Homeschooling Regulation specifies the roles and responsibilities of school service centres (school boards for the English sector) with respect to the support to be provided to children who receive instruction at home.

To use the services of the Central Quebec School Board, it is mandatory to obtain a certificate of eligibility for English instruction. Our staff can help you determine if your child is eligible.
Contact us at: homeschooling@cqsb.qc.ca

What resources and services does the Central Quebec School Board offer?

Some resources and services are offered free of charge by the Central Quebec School Board, at the request of the parents and according to the availability and needs of the child. Those include:

• Textbooks and teaching materials.

• Complementary services (educational and vocational guidance, psychology, psychoeducation, special education, speech and language therapy, or guidance counsellor) according to the analysis of the child's needs.
• Infrastructure (library, science laboratory, computer laboratory, auditorium, art premises, sports, and recreational facilities).
• Examinations to obtain the credits required to obtain a secondary school diploma recognized by the Ministry of Education. For more information, please refer to the Evaluation Modalities for Homeschooled Children.

What should parents do if they wish to apply for the resources and services described above?

Parents must:

• Send the written notice to the Ministry of Education and to the school board no later than July 1st of each school year.
• Proceed with the admission of their child to the school board to obtain a permanent code and a certificate of eligibility.
• Send a copy of the Learning Project, as well as forms related to the resources or services requested, to the Educational Services Department of the Central Quebec School Board (homeschooling@cqsb.qc.ca).

• Complete the service request forms as required. These forms can be found in the Management Framework for Homeschooling on the CQSB website.
• Register their child for Ministerial Examinations and other evaluations, using the 2023-2024 Examination Registration Form. (Coming soon)
• Fill out the form entitled: Request for Adapting the Conditions for Administering a Ministerial Examination, if requested.