The Beginner's Guide to Homeschooling

Helen Hegener, Home Education Magazine
A great little book!

John Taylor Gatto, author Dumbing Us Down and The Underground History of American Education
A triumph of common sense!

Book Description
A brief and useful guide to the essential information, resources, and guidance you need for starting homeschooling. Questions and answewrs about homeschooling, suggestions for creating or purchasing curricula and for record keeping and evaulation, history and research, as well as lists of state and national support groups, correspondence schools, and learning materials.

From the Publisher
The author has been interviewed about this book on Catholic Family Radio (4/8/2000), and he is speaking at conferences in the US and Canada throughout the Spring and Fall.

From the Back Cover
The Beginners Guide to Homeschooling is a practical and concise overview of what homeschooling is like, who does it, how it works, and what is needed to get started. This guide emphasizes real-life stories about homeschooling, and shows how involvement in ones local community enriches the homeschooling experience. By providing a wealth of books, resources and references on homeschooling, this friendly guide is designed to help you homeschool in a way that suits your family... giving you a taste of the possibilities, and assisting you in finding resources for learning that fit into your familys budget. -Hundreds of listings for homeschooling support groups in every state, Canada, and other countries. -Hundreds of listings for learning materials, books, correspondence schools, and other resources -Curriculum, scheduling, record-keeping and evaluation issues are explained in clear, easy-to-understand language.

About the Author
Patrick Farenga has counseled and worked with homeschooling families since 1981. He is president of Holt Associates, Inc., a company dedicated to helping people learn outside of school and founded by the late author and teacher, John Holt. An international lecturer on homeschooling and learning, Patrick Farenga appears on national television and radio as a highly acclaimed homeschooling expert, and has written numerous articles, speeches, and books on the subject. He is publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine, and with his wife, Day, homeschools their three daughters.

Excerpted from The Beginners Guide to Homeschooling : 1998 by Patrick Ferenga, Patrick Farenga. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Whats a typical day of homeschooling like? Thousands of homeschoolers answer this question every day, and they probably give a thousand equally true answers. As most families will tell you, there is no typical day. Certainly you can set up your home as a school, schedule it like school, and teach like a school: resources for purchasing curricula and educational materials are provided on page 34, and on pages 5163. The Big Book of Home Learning by Mary Pride and The Christian Home Educators Curriculum Manual by Cathy Duffy have reviews from a Christian perspective about hundreds of curricular packages that you can purchase for homeschooling. But if the total school at home approach becomes stifling to you or your kids, or if, like many homeschoolers I know, you prefer to move back and forth between imposed lessons and learning from the incidents of every day life on a relaxed, individualized schedule, consider some of these other ways to help your children learn. Homeschooling children also learn through reading, through conversation, through solitary reflection, through play, through outside classes, through volunteer work and apprenticeships. Typically, children will have some time on their own at home (to read, play, build, draw, write, do a science experiment, work on math), some time with their parents (to get help with any of the above, to talk, to do some kind of focused project together), and some time with others outside the home (in a music class, in Scouts, in a homeschoolers book discussion group, in a volunteer job at a museum). Some families set aside a part of the day for focused academic work; others do not. Often this varies for each child and the family often adapts its schedule as the children grow and their needs change. It is important to remember that homeschooling doesnt have to mean that your kids stay at home all day, with only their parents, using school materials. For instance, several times a week we schedule our children to be with other friends, typically, but not exclusively, homeschoolers; we reciprocate at other times during the week. For instance, my wife ran The Detective Club, a popular meeting held every Wednesday night at our house for 8 children: 7 homeschoolers and a friend who attends public school. We also make use of field trips, History clubs, French Clubs, Drama clubs, etc. run by other homeschooling parents. Classes at the Museum of Science, area library events, religious instruction, and other resources that we find, such as the local gymnastics and dance academies our daughters attend. Indeed, in some states you can probably arrange for your child to take classes in local public schools (it never hurts to ask no matter what state you live in). Some homeschooling support groups have listings of members who are willing to help tutor or converse with children who are interested in learning more about their areas of expertise. Most importantly, homeschooling allows you to give your children time to explore and think about things on their own. Children who figure things out on their own, for their own purposes, literally do own that knowledge and can build on it. So if your child wants to learn more about, say, marine biology, and you know nothing about the topic (and perhaps have no interest in it at all!), then you can help them by locating books and materials they can read and use on their own; a friendly resource librarian at your local public library can be an invaluable ally in your homeschooling efforts for this reason alone. You can also consider calling pet stores, aquariums, and marine biologists who might be willing to talk to your child, have them visit or volunteer, or simply allow the children to observe what various aspects of marine biology are actually like. So you neednt feel you must know everything before you can teach anything; again, homeschooling doesnt have to be like regular school and you dont have to be like a typical school instructor. Instead you can be a facilitator and guide for your childrens travels to areas you dont feel particularly comfortable teaching them. Madalene Axford Murphy of Pennsylvania writes about how she did this with her son: Early on, our son Christian began to reach the limits of his fathers and my knowledge in science and math, and it became obvious that these would be major pursuits in his life. At first I cheerfully expanded my own knowledge, learning along with him, but finally I had neither the time nor the interest to keep up with him. We met this situation in a number of ways. We discovered an astronomy group that met one evening a month, and he began to attend meetings. He discovered that one of the founders of the group was giving a 12-session seminar on astronomy for adults at our local nature center. On the recommendation of the naturalist there (a friend of his), he was allowed to sign up, though he was only 11. The first evening, he came home with about ten pages of small print that had to be read for the next class. This was not going to be a warm, fuzzy retelling of myths about constellations with a few facts thrown in here and there about planets and such, but rather a no-holds-barred immersion course in technical astronomy. I was concerned, but Christian wasnt. He plowed through the reading and was disappointed when the classes were over. Did he understand everything? No, nor did many of the adults in the class, but words like parallax and gradient had become part of his vocabulary and he knew a whole lot more about telescopes and the science of astronomy than he had before. Another group, the Audubon Society, helped open up several aspects of biology for him


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