Pennsylvania Homeschool Curriculum Requirements: What the Law Actually Demands

Most parents pulling their child out of a Pennsylvania public school expect the paperwork to be annoying. What they do not expect is to discover that Pennsylvania mandates one of the longest lists of required subjects for home-educated students in the entire country. Before you build a curriculum plan or commit to a co-op, it helps to know exactly what the state requires — and where the law gives you more flexibility than you might think.

What Pennsylvania Law Actually Requires

Under 24 PA C.S. §13-1327.1, the Pennsylvania home education law, every home-educated student must receive documented instruction in a specific set of subjects. The list differs by grade band.

Elementary level (grades K-6) required subjects:

• English (spelling, reading, and writing)
• Arithmetic
• Science
• Geography
• United States and Pennsylvania history
• Civics
• Safety education, including fire prevention
• Health and physiology
• Physical education
• Music
• Art

That is eleven distinct subject areas at the elementary level. Pennsylvania is routinely cited by the Johns Hopkins Homeschool Hub as having the most extensive required subject list of any state in the nation. If you assumed you could simply follow your child's interests and skip formal instruction in music or art, the law says otherwise.

Secondary level (grades 7-12) required subjects:

• English (literature, composition, speech)
• Science
• Geography
• Social studies (US and PA history, economics, civics)
• General mathematics (grades 7-8) or mathematics beyond general math (grades 9-12)
• Safety education
• Health
• Physical education
• Music
• Art
• An additional language other than English (or an elective equivalent)

The secondary list adds foreign language or an elective and expands the English and social studies requirements. It does not get shorter.

What the Law Does Not Require

This is where parents and even some co-op organizers get tripped up. Pennsylvania does not require:

• A state-approved curriculum or textbook series
• Instruction by a certified teacher (unless the student has an active IEP from a public school)
• Adherence to Common Core standards or any particular scope and sequence
• A specific number of hours per subject

The law requires that instruction happen in each subject area and that the student's portfolio demonstrate progress. How you structure that instruction — through unit studies, Charlotte Mason methods, online courses, hands-on projects, or a packaged curriculum — is entirely your decision.

The affidavit you file by August 1st each year asks for "an outline of proposed educational objectives by subject area." That outline can be broad. Many PA homeschoolers write a single paragraph per subject. The evaluator at the end of the year reviews your portfolio for evidence that instruction occurred and that the student is making progress appropriate to their age and ability level.

How Microschools Manage Eleven Required Subjects

Running a learning pod or microschool under the cooperative model means covering eleven subjects across a multi-age group without the luxury of a departmentalized teaching staff. That operational reality is what drives most Pennsylvania microschool founders toward highly integrated, family-style curricula.

The most common approach is to divide subjects into two tracks:

Pod-wide subjects — History, science, geography, art, music, and civics can be taught collectively to the entire group regardless of age spread. A unit on the Civil War covers Pennsylvania history, US history, civics, and geography simultaneously. A nature study program covers science. An art project or music appreciation lesson checks two boxes at once. This collective instruction model works especially well in multi-age groups because older students consolidate learning by teaching younger students, and discussion naturally spans multiple comprehension levels.

Individualized subjects — Mathematics and language arts (reading, writing, spelling, and grammar) need to be calibrated to each student's level. Most PA microschools address this by assigning individualized math and language arts work that students complete in-pod under the facilitator's supervision, then participate in shared instruction for the remaining subjects.

This structure allows a single facilitator to maintain legal compliance across all eleven required subjects for a mixed-age group of five to ten students without turning every day into a fragmented schedule of eleven separate lessons.

The Portfolio Documentation Piece

Covering the subjects is only half the requirement. Every family participating in a PA home education program must maintain a portfolio containing:

• A contemporaneous log of reading materials used during the year
• Samples of student work from the beginning, middle, and end of the academic year
• Standardized test scores for students in grades 3, 5, and 8

The "contemporaneous" requirement is the detail that surprises most new homeschoolers. You are expected to document instruction as it happens, not reconstruct it in June. For a microschool facilitator, this means building a documentation habit into the daily flow of the pod — logging what was covered, tagging student work to subject areas, and keeping a running record for each individual child.

Many PA microschool operators use digital portfolio tools like Seesaw or Homeschool Planet to capture work samples throughout the year and organize them by subject. This makes the end-of-year evaluator review far less stressful because the documentation exists and is organized, rather than being assembled in a panicked sprint before the June 30th deadline.

Standardized Testing at Grades 3, 5, and 8

Pennsylvania home education law requires standardized testing at grades 3, 5, and 8. This is not optional. The law does not specify which test must be used, which is an important detail. Families are not required to take the PSSA (the public school test). Commonly used alternatives include:

• The California Achievement Test (CAT), available in untimed format
• The Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS)
• The Stanford Achievement Test
• The Woodcock-Johnson (frequently used for students with learning differences)

For microschools, the group setting creates an opportunity to coordinate testing centrally. Organizations like Homeschool Boss facilitate MAP Growth testing for co-ops and pods at group rates, which reduces per-student cost and removes the administrative burden from individual families.

Any evaluator who demands PSSA scores or tells you that only the state tests count is operating outside what the law actually requires. The statute allows "any nationally normed standardized achievement test" administered by a certified evaluator or a licensed psychologist.

Why This Matters for Microschool Structure

If you are launching a learning pod or joining one as a participating family, understanding the curriculum requirements is not just a compliance exercise. It directly shapes what a well-run microschool needs to do for you.

A microschool that covers only four or five subjects and ignores safety education, art, and music is leaving participating families out of compliance, even if no one in the pod realizes it. Each family carries individual legal responsibility for their own child's compliance regardless of how the pod is structured. The superintendent does not care that the facilitator forgot to include fire safety in the lesson plan — the individual family receives the truancy notice.

The Pennsylvania Micro-School & Pod Kit includes a subject-by-subject compliance checklist mapped to Act 169's requirements, along with a ready-to-use curriculum integration framework that shows how to cover all eleven subjects across a multi-age pod without turning the school day into a fragmented mess of disconnected lessons.

Getting the Educational Objectives Right

The affidavit requires "an outline of proposed educational objectives by subject area." Pennsylvania does not provide a template for this, and the standard is interpreted differently by different school districts. Some districts accept a single sentence per subject. Others expect a paragraph. A small number of districts have historically attempted to demand detailed lesson plans, which courts have consistently found exceeds what the statute requires.

A defensible educational objectives outline for each subject area should:

• Identify the general skills or content the student will work toward during the year
• Reference the approach you plan to use (e.g., "reading instruction through a phonics-based program, independent reading from a variety of genres, and written narrations")
• Be forward-looking rather than backward-looking at filing time (you are describing what you intend to do, not reporting what you already did)

The specificity of the outline matters less than the fact that it exists and covers all required subjects. A one-paragraph description per subject, filed by August 1st, with a signed and notarized affidavit, is legally sufficient.

The Bottom Line on PA Curriculum Requirements

Pennsylvania gives homeschooling families and microschool operators genuine pedagogical freedom — you choose the curriculum, the schedule, the instructional methods, and the organizational structure. What the state does not give you is freedom to skip subjects or ignore documentation. The eleven-subject requirement is real, the portfolio requirement is real, and the standardized testing requirement is real.

For microschool operators, building a pod structure that systematically covers all required subjects and generates the documentation each family needs is the core operational challenge. Getting that structure right from the start is far less expensive than scrambling to reconstruct records or defend against a district complaint.

The Pennsylvania Micro-School & Pod Kit walks through exactly how to build that structure — from educational objectives language for the affidavit to portfolio documentation workflows that work across a multi-age group.

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