A large collection of homeschool resources. Online support groups, regional support groups, FAQs, discussion boards, chat, mailing lists and links: www.midnightbeach.com/hs/

HOMESCHOOLING RESOURCES (Bill Beaty’s Homepage) Some Links to Homeschool and Alternative Ed WWW sites. A to Z Homes Cool; Jon’s homeschooling page … Some Links to Education Resource Directories etc… www.amasci.com/home.html

Homeschooling Resources Links to resources, schools, and educational tools.
www.onlinemac.com/users/tobi/homeschool/

The Home School Mom’s Free Homeschool Resources A variety of free resources for home educators, from software to unit studies. Also lists academic contests, homeschooling styles, and curriculum www.thehomeschoolmom.com/

New Hampshire Homeschooling Resources Curricula and field trip ideas, legislative and bureaucratic information for homeschooling parents, and fun pages for homeschooled kids. www.nhhr.dimentech.com/ -

Favorite Resources for Catholic Homeschoolers”150 searchable pages of free information written by and for Catholic homeschoolers, book reviews, a calendar of resources, overviews of Catholic homeschool …www.love2learn.net/

Learn in Freedom! Education Reform, Home-Schooling www.learninfreedom.org/

The Canadian Homeschool Resource: www.flora.org/homeschool-ca/

Hewitt Homeschooling: www.hewitthomeschooling.com/

Homeschool Math - free worksheets and homeschooling www.homeschoolmath.net/

Books

Approach For Your Child’s Learning Style by Cathy Duffy (Paperback)

The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child: Your Complete Guide to Getting Off to the Right Start by Linda Dobson (Paperback)

The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities for Kids Ages 3-12 by Linda Dobson (Paperback)

Home Learning Year by Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School by Rebecca Rupp (Paperback)

Homeschooling for Dummies by Jennifer Kaufeld (Paperback)

Mary Pride’s Complete Guide to Getting Started in Homeschooling by Mary Pride (Paperback)

Homeschooling: The Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3- to 8- Year-Old Child by Linda Dobson (Paperback)

So You’re Thinking About Homeschooling: Fifteen Families Show How You Can Do It by Lisa Whelchel (Paperback)

Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves by Alison McKee (Paperback)
Books: See all 337 items

The Complete Home Learning Source Book: The Essential Resource Guide for Homeschoolers, Parents, and Educators Covering Every Subject from Arithmetic to Zoology by Rebecca Rupp (Paperback)

Practical Homeschooling [MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION] 6 issues/12 months
Magazine Subscriptions: See all 2 items

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson (Paperback)

Homeschooling Today [MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION] 6 issues/12 months
Magazine Subscriptions: See all 2 items

Homeschooling on a Shoestring: A Jam-packed Guide by Melissa L. Morgan, Judith Waite Allee (Paperback)

The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child’s Classroom by Mary Griffith (Paperback)

Sim Town (PC) by Maxis (CD-ROM)
Software: See all 3 items

The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices (Prima Home Learning Library) by Linda Dobson (Paperback)

The main element in successful homeschooling of your children is trust. You have to trust the children to know when they are ready to learn and what they are interested in learning. You must trust them to know how to go about the learning process.

While this may seem to be an astonishing way of looking at children, parents commonly take this view of learning during the child’s first two years of homeschooling and it works.

Children are naturally curious and have a built-in desire to learn.

In a book written by John Holt, “How Children Learn”, it describes the natural learning style of young children in the following way:

“The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense… School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning.”

Children know best how to go about learning something for them. If they are left alone, they will know automatically what method is best for them. Caring and observant parents will soon learn that it is safe and very appropriate to trust this knowledge.

The perceptive parents are also aware that there are many different ways to learn something, and they trust their children to know which ways are best for them.

Children also need multiple amounts of quiet time so that they can think. Research shows that children who are good at fantasizing are better learners and cope better with disappointment than those who do not have this ability. But creative fantasy requires time; time is the most lost commodity in our lives.

Fully-scheduled school hours and extracurricular activities leave children with very little time for them to dream, to think, to invent solutions to problems, to cope with stressful experiences, and simply to fulfill the universal need for solitude and privacy.

Children are not afraid to admit to their own ignorance and to make mistakes. Homeschooling children, free from the intimidation of public embarrassment and failing marks, helps them to keep their openness to new exploration. Children learn by asking questions, not by answering them. That is your job.

Children take a great deal of joy in the values of whatever they are learning. There is no real need to motivate children through the use of rewards, such as high grades or stars, which suggest to the child that the activity itself must be too hard or horrible to do.

Think about it; a child would ask “why is a reward, which has nothing to do with the work, being offered?

Children learn best about getting along with other people through interaction with those of all ages. They also learn best about the world through first-hand experience.

Homeschoolers learn directly about the world by being in it through such events as going to museums, theatres, zoos etc. Ironically, the most common objection about homeschooling is that children are “being deprived of the real world.”

Most parents understand how difficult it is for their children to learn something when they are being rushed, threatened, or given failing grades. While infants and toddlers teach us many principles of learning, schools have adopted quite different principles due to the hardships that occur in teaching a large number of same-age children in a compulsory setting.

The structure of school (required attendance, school-selected topics and books, and constant checking of the child’s progress) assumes that children are not learners by nature; however they must be compelled to learn through the efforts of others.

Natural learners do not need to be in this type of structure. The success of self-directed learning (homeschoolers who regularly outperform their schooled peers on measures of academic achievement, socialization, confidence, and self-esteem) strongly implies that structured approaches inhibit both learning and personal development.

With this guide, you have learned everything that you need to know about successful homeschooling. If this is your chosen method of teaching your children, this guide will help. Look below for some great resources on homeschooling your children.

And the Skylark Sings With Me: Adventures in homeschooling and community-based education
by David H. Albert

Bringing Out the Best: A resource guide for parents of young gifted children
by Jacquelyn Saunders

Choosing and Using Curriculum for Your Special Child
by Lisa Rivero

Creative Home Schooling for Gifted Children: a resource guide
by Lisa Rivero

Gifted Education Comes Home: A case for self-directed learning
by Lisa Rivero

The Gifted Kids Survival Guide: A teen handbook
by Judy Galbraith, James R. Delisle

The Gifted Kids’ Survival Guide for Ages 10 & Under by Judy Galbraith, Pamela Espeland

Growing Up Gifted: Developing the potential of children at home and at school
by Barbara Clark

Hitchhiking Through Asperger Syndrome
by Lise Pyles, Tony Attwood

Home Educating our Autistic Spectrum Children: Paths are Made by Walking
by Kitt Cowlisaw and Terri Dowty

Home Schooling Children With Special Needs
by Sharon Hensley

Learning in Spite of Labels
by Joyce Herzog

• You can give your child the individual attention and custom program that best suits his or her needs in a safe and comfortable environment.

• Spending time together preserves and helps to strengthen the family bond and makes the family the primary socializing agent in your child’s life

• You can take delight in being with your child to witness and be a part of his or her learning experience

For Children with IEP’s

According to the VA DoE’s “Fact Sheet on Home Instruction,” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that is designed to meet their individual needs in conformity with the child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).

Both of the regulations and the United States Department of Education’s General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR) make it very clear that public education is not the only option for children with disabling conditions.

However, the children who are being educated in home instruction programs are still entitled to take part in any of the related services that are provided by the school division for which they are eligible to attend.

School divisions have to remain ready to serve these children when parents go in search for these services either through regular enrollment or as nonpublic students.
Of course, each county seems to determine its own interpretation of this law. Some school divisions have become tighter in provision of services to handicapped or disabled non-public students, both for at home and privately schooled.

I know that in Canada, these services are provided for free to the children in Ontario and these children can receive dividends of up to $350 per month to cover educational costs.

Here are some good tips about homeschooling “special needs” children:

• Don’t spend any of your money until you have done a lot of reading of what is covered for you or what grants you can apply for.

• Read as many books and magazines and browse as many websites as you can for information

• Relax: there are no educational emergencies that can’t be solved quickly.

• Take some time to evaluate your method regularly and make adjustments as you see fit.

• Know that you’ll have ups and downs–they are part of the process.

You will want to plan to do handwriting on a daily basis until your child can remember how to form the letters and do it legibly. After you do that, you can have handwriting classes as they are needed and you will decide that based on how well your child is doing.

You will know that your child is doing well if:

• the letters in the words that he writes are spaced just right (a pinky finger apart).
• all of the short lower case letters are the same height.
• all of the upper case letters and tall letters reach the top line.
• his words are spaced properly.
• the letters have a similar slant.
• all of the letters are sitting on the line.

Make sure that you go gentle with the criticism of your child’s writing. You must remember that there’s a lot of time for your child to practice and become better at handwriting. I would recommend short classes. Fifteen minutes should be the most amount of time spent daily on it.

For example, each assignment in Writing Strands is spread out for a certain amount of days. If you plan this program in advance, you will have to skip several days between each assignment just in case your child needs extra days for study and review.

If you plan all of the writing classes in advance, like always, you want to use a pencil and leave plenty of days in between assignments. It may be better to plan one assignment at a time and write the lessons that you child completes in your planner as you go.

If you are going to design your own writing classes instead, you can plan one assignment for every two weeks or longer if necessary; which makes it a total of up to 16 assignments in all. This plan will give you 4 weeks of flexibility to work with, which could be just the thing you need to get your child up and running.

Reading for information purposes includes reading things like food labels, road signs, maps, newspapers, etc. Textbook reading would likely have to include learning some study skills, learning the vocabulary of the text book, speed reading, and more.

Reading for pleasure would include reading things like poetry, literature, thought provoking articles, and even comic books.

You will want to plan for your child to do plenty of reading every day. You should also plan to read out loud to your children every day. You must also listen to your child when he/she reads aloud because this will give him an opportunity or improve his reading and will give you an opportunity to help him with his pronunciation, tone, and rhythm. It can also help with easing the fear of public speaking.

Younger children can look at the book and copy the words themselves and then check it for any mistakes. Older children can also start out by copying; however, they will later switch to listening as you read the selection a sentence at a time. They will decide from hearing your voice about how to punctuate the words. Dictation is hard for anyone and you may encounter some serious complaints from your kids, but it is worth it.

There are writing and grammar lessons that can be taken after a dictation lesson. If the selection has a lot of adjectives, your children can learn what an adjective is and how to pick out the adjectives along with the nouns that the adjectives describe. You can have your child read the words out loud without the adjectives and then again with the adjectives.

Have your child compare the two to each other. For creative writing, you could have him change some of the adjectives for different ones as a fun activity. You can plan similar activities with nouns and verbs too. If you want to focus on the punctuation, try to pick selections that have plenty of punctuation such as quotation marks and commas.

Plan to do dictation as many times as you want each week. If you plan to use dictation as a way to teach grammar, then get a good college grammar reference book such as Harbrace or Warriner’s.

Unfortunately, most dictionaries do not have this. The giant tomes that come with the World Book Encyclopedia or the Britannica are usually terrific dictionaries for helping kids. I bought my dictionary used at the public library. Also, the Merriam-Webster dictionaries are good as well.

A thesaurus is also very useful for word study and is kind of fun when you play games with it. A good thesaurus to use is the Roger’s Thesaurus. If you get a small pocket thesaurus, make sure that it has (at least) the phonetic pronunciation, antonyms, and of course it will have the synonyms. It would be very nice if it also tells the part of speech for the words, and has example sentences.

You also want to make certain the type is readable and not too dark and blurry to the eye. Children enjoy owning their own thesaurus, so it is good to look for nice small ones that you can afford to buy for each child.

Plan to do vocabulary at least 2 or 3 times a week.

You’ll need to decide which word list you want to use and what activities that you want your child to do each day. Once a week you will need to make detailed lesson plans for the upcoming week. I think Spelling Power has the tools you need to teach spelling and it is more structured. You have to make a decision on the structure and how to go about creating the lessons.