Homeschool curriculum swap and show 
MACOMB-Homeschoolers in the area will have the chance to attend a homeschool curriculum swap and show on June 26. The event is designed to give parents a chance to exchange, investigate and purchase curriculum materials. Prospective homeschooling parents are also invited to gather information.

National Annaul Homeschool Hike/Bike Event
NBC 25, MD - May 20, 2006—The National Homeschool Hiking/Biking annual event began in May 2005 as a way to gain recognition for homeschooling as well as getting some exercise, group …

Home-School TV Ad Encourages Parents to Keep Kids Home
CitizenLink - Jun 9, 2006As the debate continues over whether to make preschool mandatory, a home-school advocacy group is running a TV spot on the impact such a policy would have on …

A home school graduation
Monitor, TX - May 22, 2006… He talked about the love that was so evident around their table. He then talked about Annette s decision to home school their son. …

A very good article about the importance of staying organized when homeschooling. If you find organization tough, this article will help you get organized…and most importantly, stay organized!

Organizing Your Home School

by Holly Williams Urbach

Because being organized allows me more freedom to teach my children in greater depth, I have found it necessary in our home school to make organizing our materials top priority. Having five students certainly creates numerous opportunities to succeed or fail in my attempts to file and find our various school papers, books, and supplies. I do not need to spend precious time looking for the glue or the instruction sheets to an educational game we wish to play. Organization takes a fair amount of time to accomplish but a short amount of time to maintain.

At the beginning of each school year, I help my children prepare their binders. They use two-inch binders to compile each of their subjects – mathematics, language, handwriting, creative writing, spelling, science, history, Bible, and Spanish. After the dividers are put into the binders, we see that a good quantity of lined paper is inserted between each divider. My children have vinyl pencil cases that are three-hole-punched to put in the front of their binders. The pencil cases eliminate the confusion of finding pencils, pens, rulers, and erasers each day during school time. I allow my children to personalize their binders with self-stick letters from the office supply store. They enjoy putting their names and grade levels on the front covers, along with the brightly colored stickers they earn for their good grades and good attitudes during school.

After we finish readying the binders, we turn our attention to organizing their bookshelves. I use a three-tiered shoe rack that I have placed on a shelf in an old entertainment unit in our study. I have a spot labeled with each child’s name in which he stores his binders (when not in use) as well as his various textbooks or workbooks. The children rarely have to be reminded to put their books away since it is so easy to do.

Now that the students are organized, the teacher must fall into line! I prepare my own bookshelves by placing each of my teaching texts on a shelf according to grade level. I find it much easier to have the materials divided this way so I can easily locate the answer keys and curriculum when grading or lesson planning.

In addition to our individual bookshelves, I also have several school library bookcases. These are organized by subject or category. Our reference bookcase has math, science, and Bible resources on the top shelf. The second one houses our state reference books and our Childcraft encyclopedias. The third shelf houses a set of animal life reference books, and the fourth contains our adult encyclopedias. I also have two more bookcases that are stocked with my various thrift-store and library-sale finds. I have labeled the shelves fiction and non-fiction so we can locate things fairly easily. Should we add many more books to our collection, I will organize them more accurately.

Once I have the binders, teacher manuals, and bookcases completed, I turn my attention to organizing our art supplies. I purchased an organizing system called Drawers For All to control our scissors, glue, paints, etc. There are many different types of these drawers – from single drawers to drawers with eight sections. I use a three-sectioned drawer for various types of paper – lined paper in one, construction paper in another, and plain, white paper in the third. I use the four-drawer unit to give each child a “schoolbox” of his own. The children like to put their treasures in their “special drawers,” as they call them. I keep my drawer organizers in a tall stack in my laundry room – thus keeping potential coloring and painting disasters to an area that is easy to clean.

Educational toys such as puzzles, games, and felt board pieces are kept in the entertainment unit in our study. Things that the younger children use are on the lower level of the unit, and older children’s items are on the upper level. This system works well for us and makes it much easier for all of the children to clean what they have used.

Implementing organization need not be costly. If your budget is tight, begin looking around your home for items not in use that can be pressed into service to organize your home school materials. I have trimmed empty laundry detergent boxes for magazine organizers. I have covered cookie tins to use in corralling the magnetic alphabet pieces we have collected. A three-tiered shoe rack can be used to divide an existing shelf into more usable sections. In my previous home, I turned a coat closet into a school closet. Be creative and inventive with your space and resources – you may just surprise yourself!

Take time to list the problems you are having with the storage of your materials. Make notations as to what items or areas you can use to solve the problem. Determine to work the plan and reorganize your school things. Organize one area at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. Realize that you may have to spend some time adjusting what you have done until it “fits” your needs.You will know that your organization goals have been reached when you no longer lose valuable school time looking for misplaced items. You will feel refreshed and rejuvenated as a teacher – what better gift could you give to yourself and your students?!

About the Author: Holly Williams Urbach homeschools her five children in Kyle and serves as a Smoothing the Way leader. She and her husband Joe are in their twelfth year of homeschooling.

Interesting editorial article on homeschool myths, statistics, and the effects of home schooling on the public educational system. Originally published on 8/11/05.

Home Schoolers Are Challenging the Education Monopoly
By Nathan Tabor

It is a fundamental tenet of capitalism that free market competition is good for the people and the country. That’s why Congress wisely enacted anti-trust legislation a century or so ago—to prevent big, powerful monopolies from eliminating their competition by stifling the little
guy.

But today Americans are threatened by a government-sponsored and taxpayer-funded monopoly, one that is potentially more powerful and dangerous than the old Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel operations. Like a giant octopus with long, deadly tentacles, the socialistic “Official Public Education Trust” has established a virtual stranglehold on the impressionable minds of our nation’s youth.

The Public Education Establishment in America is controlled by the Federal government through the unconstitutional Department of Education and is supported by the Left-leaning teachers’ union, the National Education Association. These power-hungry academic oligarchs desperately want their 3-Rs racket to become the only game in town. Compulsory attendance requirements and anti-truancy regulations allow the long enforcement arm of the law to stretch into homes and classrooms all over America.

The problem for these frustrated educrats, though, is the fact their failed system doesn’t work as well as the competition. The private sector has always been able to out-produce the government system. Rich folks with enough money could always buy their children a top-notch education in the pricier private schools, and that’s still true today.

But the real threat to the public school monopoly comes from the rapidly growing Home School movement in America. Why? Because the numbers prove that average Moms and Dads who take the time to teach their children themselves are able to get much better results for a fraction of the cost. The statistics compiled by both the Department of Education’s own
Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) and private researchers bear witness
to this truth.

On nationally normed standardized achievement tests, the average score for all public school students is 50 in all areas. For all home schooled students taking the same tests, the average score for the complete battery of tests was 87, a whopping difference of 37 percentile points.

For example:
Total Reading, 87;
Total Math, 82;
Social Studies, 85.

In every category, the home-schooled kids out-performed their public school peers.

Home School Movement Is Growing Rapidly

According to Bryan D. Ray, Ph.D., president of the National Home
Education Research Institute, the number of home-schoolers has been growing for the past two decades at a rate of between 7 and 15 percent per year, making this the fastest growing form of education. Close to two million American children in grades K-12 were being educated at home in the 2002-2003 school year, with similar overall success.

The education monopoly can’t dispute these figures, let alone duplicate them, although they spend approximately ten times as much per student only to get dismal results. So they try to discredit home schooling in other ways. One way is to set up a straw man called (aptly enough)
“Socialization,” and then knock it down.

“The isolation implicit in home teaching is anathema to socialization and citizenship. It is a rejection of community and makes the home-schooler the captive of the orthodoxies of the parents,” charges Dr. Dennis Evans, who directs the doctoral programs in education leadership at the University of California, Irvine.

“Schools, particularly public schools, are the one place where all of the children of all of the people come together,” explained Dr. Evans in his 2003 USA Today op-ed piece entitled “Home is no place for school.” Kids taught by parents and inculcated with their values might miss out on “an openness to diversity and new ideas,” he warned.

Yes, and they might also miss out on dangerous drugs, gang violence, sacrilegious and degrading music, peer pressure to try sex, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, to mention just a few of the more prominent aspects of “socialization” being democratically
spread through the public school system daily. Some parents might actually prefer that their children would continue to address them respectfully as “sir” and “ma’am” rather than “dude.” Or
that they might spend their free time doing something more constructive than swapping pills at Pharming parties.

Frankly, the whole socialization argument is bogus, too. Fully 98 percent of home-schooled kids are involved in two or more extracurricular activities with other kids outside the home. These just happen to be of a more wholesome type, like field trips (84 percent), Sunday School classes (77 percent), group sports (48 percent), music classes (47 percent), and volunteer work (33 percent). (To read some of the many inspiring home school success stories, visit Home School Legal Defense Association or visit this site for homeschool academic statistics.

Some states tightly regulate home schools to make sure that they toe the curricular line. Others do little or nothing to monitor home-schoolers. Either way, the academic results are statistically the same. Home-schooled kids excel across the board, whether they are scrutinized or ignored by the State.

In my own state of North Carolina, an abortive effort to bring home-schoolers under the control of the Department of Public Education was derailed by the protests of outraged parents last Spring. I was glad to see that happen because I know that parents — and not bureaucrats in
Washington, D.C., or Raleigh, NC — should make the final decisions about their children’s education. Elected officials should actively fight for the rights of home school parents and their children to live free from intrusive government regulations.

If liberals truly believe in tolerance then give home-schooling families a tax credit. Our children are our greatest natural resource. If parents are willing to invest the time and effort to train their children to be critical thinkers, law-abiding citizens and productive adults, then I think that we as a nation need to invest in them, too.

###

Nathan Tabor is a conservative political activist based in Kernersville, North Carolina. He has his BA in psychology and his MA in public policy. He is a contributing editor at The Conservative Voice.

Outstanding Book of Year at Washington Homeschool Convention 
Award-winning new American history book designed for homeschool teachers. (PRWEB Jun 12, 2006)

Arts & Academic Fair celebrates homeschool success
Isanti County News, MN - Jun 7, 2006… Stacie Sisterman dispelled any notion that home schooling retards a child s social skills or limits the opportunities they have to make friends. …

Homeschool styles are changing, according to a recent article published by The New York Times. A growing number of families are hiring tutors to school their children at home, instead of teaching the children themselves. Many years ago, hiring private tutors to educate one’s children was standard practice among the elite. Today, however, as more families move away from public and private schools and begin schooling at home, they may discover that outside help is needed. Home school “enrichment classes” offered by outside instructors and in-home tutors are becoming more common. The full text of the New York Times article on homeschooling is excerpted below.

The Gilded Age of Home Schooling
by Susan Saulny

In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children’s lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government’s hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles.

Lisa Mazzoni’s family splits its time between Marina del Rey, Calif., and Delray Beach, Fla. Lisa has her algebra and history lessons delivered poolside sometimes or on her condominium’s rooftop, where she and her teacher enjoy the sun and have a view of the Pacific Ocean south of Santa Monica.

“For someone who travels a lot or has a parent who travels and wants to keep the family together, it’s an excellent choice,” said Lisa’s mother, Trish Mazzoni, who with her husband owns a speedboat company.

The cost for such teachers generally runs $70 to $110 an hour. And depending on how many hours a teacher works, and how many teachers are involved, the price can equal or surpass tuition in the upper echelon of private schools in New York City or Los Angeles, where $30,000 a year is not unheard of.

Other parents say the model works for children who are sick, for children who are in show business or for those with learning disabilities.

“It’s a hidden group of folks, but it’s growing enormously,” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor.

Home schooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than others. Home-school teachers do not require certification, and the only common requirement from state to state is that students meet compulsory-attendance rules.

Scholars who study home-schooling trends, business owners who serve home-schooling families and abundant anecdotal evidence also suggest that private teaching arrangements are on the rise. Some families do it for short stints, others for years at a time.

Bob Harraka, president of Professional Tutors of America, has about 6,000 teachers from 14 states on his payroll in Orange County, Calif., but cannot meet a third of the requests for in-home education that come in, he said, because they are so specialized or extravagant: a family wants a teacher to instruct in the art of Frisbee throwing, button sewing or Latin grammar. A family wants a teacher to accompany them for a yearlong voyage at sea.

“Sailing comes up at least once or twice a year,” Mr. Harraka said.

Parents say in-home teaching arrangements offer unparalleled levels of academic attention and flexibility in scheduling, in addition to a sense of family cohesion and autonomy over what children learn. To them, these advantages make up for the lack of a school social life, which they say can be replicated through group lessons in, say, ballet or sculpture.

Jon D. Snyder, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, said his main concerns about this form of education were whether tutors and students were a good fit, and whether students got enough social interaction.

“From a purely academic standpoint, it goes back to a much earlier era,” Dr. Snyder said. “The notion of individual tutorials is a time-honored tradition, particularly among the elite.”

Think Plato, John Stuart Mill and George Washington. Philosopher kings and gentleman farmers. Because of the cost of in-home tutoring, the idea will probably not spread like wildfire, and just as well, Dr. Snyder said.

“Public education has social goals; that’s why we pay tax dollars for it,” he said. “When Socrates was tutoring Plato, he wasn’t concerned about educating the other people in Greece. They were just concerned about educating Plato.”

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Krystal and Tiffany Wheeler earn high school credits in adjacent pastel bedrooms after breakfast. The teachers come to them.

Their mother, Charlene Royce, said she wanted her girls to experience the benefits of a personalized education but did not feel comfortable teaching herself.

“I feel that education is better this way, one on one,” said Ms. Royce, whose expertise is in finding electronics companies in which to invest. “It was never an option for me to do it — I wouldn’t know how.”

For help, she turned to a Manhattan business, On Location Education, which took care of the logistics, providing her with curricula and teachers. Ms. Royce gets weekly progress reports and a visit every couple of months from a woman she calls “the mobile principal.”

To meet their social needs — and for exercise — Tiffany and Krystal attend dance and piano classes, among other things, and belong to a gym.

Lisa Mazzoni takes acting and dance classes in Hollywood. She is also enrolled in a school for distance learning that provides a curriculum for her tutor, Rob Cox, of Professional Tutors of America, to teach.

“I do love the fact that instead of waking up at 5:30 every morning I get to wake up at 8:30,” said Lisa, who is 17 and attended private school until this year.

“It makes life so much easier,” Lisa continued. “I don’t have to worry about missing tests and if I really wanted to, I could bring the work with me — because it’s all in the computer — if I’m in Florida visiting my dad or going to a boat race.”

When Nick Niell, an investment banker, and his wife, Sarah, moved to New York from East Sussex, England, for about a year in 2003, four teachers would come on weekdays to Mr. Niell’s townhouse on 69th Street near Madison Avenue to teach his three school-aged children. Mr. Niell said he could not find a British school in the city and wanted his children to study the same things they would have studied in England. A floor of the house was converted into classroom space.

“It was quite good fun,” said Mr. Niell, whose teachers came through Partners with Parents, a Manhattan in-home tutoring service.

The families embracing the one-on-one home-school model are turning the original concept on its head. Dr. Huerta said the popular notion is that home-schoolers leave schools they see as troubled, certain they can do better as teachers themselves. Hiring teachers for full-time instruction is not typical.

The new and more expansive definitions of home schooling irritate some traditionalists who want to keep the model simpler. “People use the term home schooling for all sorts of interesting things these days,” said Celeste Land, a member of the board at the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. “Obviously it’s not pure home schooling.”

But the growing number of home-school support groups has made it easier for the new model to develop. And tutoring is more in the public consciousness these days in part because of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, which includes a tutoring component, and the vast array of test prep tutoring services being pitched to an increasingly tested national student body.

Companies that supply teachers and curricula are abundant, also making it easier for families to step away from traditional schools, experts say. And though many who follow the new model are wealthy, increasing numbers of middle class families more sociologically and racially diverse have begun to school their children at home, according to education officials and tutor-service companies.

Laurie Gerber, president of Partners with Parents, said she started to get requests for in-home teachers about three or four years ago.

“Our tutoring business started to become a huge percentage of home-schooling clients, as opposed to tutoring,” Ms. Gerber said. “We started a whole home-schooling wing.”

The teachers who are hired to home school say the job is great.

“I love it; it’s a dream come true,” said Mr. Cox, who tutors Lisa Mazzoni. He is a former television and radio news reporter as well as an actor and a certified teacher.

“If you want to travel or have some other business to attend to, there isn’t a school system dependent on you being there,” he said. “It’s your own individual school that operates according to your needs.”

Tiffany Wheeler’s tutor, Nancy Falong, retired a few years ago after 32 years as a teacher in the New Jersey public schools. Now she works for On Location Education. Sitting next to Tiffany last week, their two world history books turned to the same page on the Marshall Plan, she expressed a sense of delight. “This is pure teaching.”

And Tiffany, looking relaxed with bare feet under her bedroom desk, said, “It’s fun.”

Mary Joyce has some helpful advice for choosing lesson plans…

Homeschool Lesson Plans
by Mary Joyce

Homeschool families have an abundance of homeschool lesson plans and programs
to choose from. As a homeschooling parent, whether you want a tightly knitted
curriculum package or prefer to be able to modify and develop as your personal
circumstances dictate, you will find a wide variety of homeschool lesson plans
no matter what your preferences.

Regardless of the direction you take, don’t get tied to the hip with your educational
program. Seek out hands on real life learning experiences to supplement your
homeschool curriculum. Keep your lesson plans as full of real life as you possibly
can!

Field trips that involve places and businesses in your hometown are outstanding
supplements to any homeschool program. Does you hometown have a park, a bridge,
a road, or building named after some one? Who was this person and why did the
town name this park after this person?

Get out of the four walls of your home now and again… Get some fresh air and
learn something about whatever you just drove or walked by. Taking time to
do this is both a wonderful child education tool and it offers a great break
from the homeschool classroom.

Taking the homeschool education outside of the house offers
a variety of experiences that you simply cannot teach at home. The community
in which you live (large or small) has an almost endless supply of educational
opportunity for the homeschooler.

Mary Joyce is a former educator, successful homeschool parent, and has written many articles on teaching your child at home for the Homeschool-Curriculum-4u website.