December 27, 2006
Unschooler is Accepted to Princeton
Posted by Julee at 07:38 AM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2005
Homeschooling on the Rise in France
The homeschooling movement seems to be starting to spread, albeit slowly, to a few other countries. According to the article more than 50,000 British children are homeschooled. (In the US, it's more than 1,000,000 children)
While less than 20,000 children in France are homeschooled the numbers are rising....
Home-schooling in France on the Rise
Posted by Julee at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2005
UC Riverside Actively Recruits Homeschoolers
UC Riverside Actively Recruits Homeschool Students
A new program allows admission through an assessment of a student portfolio
(October 17, 2005)
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- In November, as applications start pouring into the University of California system, UC Riverside will become the first UC campus to specifically recruit homeschooled and other nontraditionally educated students.
Click Here for the rest of the article
Posted by Julee at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2005
Square Dancing
Here is one family's list of 20 reasons they are homeschooling. While not everything on their list holds true for us, they are all good reasons - and funny too.
Why do we homeschool? Two words: Square dancingChristopher Smith
This month, homeschooling parents all over Tennessee have to pay homage to big Mother Government and justify their decision to educate their own children.I guess I don't mind homeschooler registration. It probably keeps a few loonies from hiring out their kids as window washers instead of educating them.
And this sort of thing just comes with the territory. Any time you step outside the norm you have to accept that you've got some explaining to do — to your family, your friends, your co-workers and that clerk at the grocery store who has an opinion on everything except the price of tea on Aisle 5.
But we're not just outside the public school norm. We're also outside the homeschool norm. Most homeschoolers around here homeschool for religious reasons — they're flat out tired of arguing with government bureaucracies about their faith.
That's not us either. Yeah, we're Christians, but that's not primarily why we homeschool.
So why do we homeschool? I'll give you 20 reasons.
1.No one, and I mean no one, has the right to teach my son how to square dance.2.Summer vacation can begin in January and end in March.
3.While I agree with the ACLU that religion has no place in public education, I don't think you can teach "character education" without it. I don't think you should teach sex education without it. And anyone who thinks you can give a child a complete education in science without discussing God doesn't know enough about the history of science. But I also believe God invented evolution, so my ideas aren't real popular among most homeschoolers either.
4.Waffle Stix, despite their standing on school lunch menus, are not food.
5.Public schools won't teach Latin to second-graders.
6.No Child Left Behind.
7.I believe history is linear.
8.I believe spelling, grammar and math have rules.
9.We know a lot of teachers, and long before we had kids we heard several earfuls about the wretched state of public education. It seems every attempt to spark a child's love of learning is beaten down by bureaucratic nonsense and disciplinary nightmares. Most teachers are saints, and it's a tragedy more parents don't acknowledge that.
10.No Child Left Behind.
11.Not every teacher is a saint. One told my niece many years ago that if a gay man sneezes on you, you die of AIDS. How's that for sex education?
12.I get to go on the field trips.
13.The public refuses to adequately support public schools. Kids should go to school to learn, not to hawk candy bars so they can buy textbooks.
14.A better student-teacher ratio.
15.No Child Left Behind. And how exactly does learning to take a test contribute to my child's education?
16.We have religious objections to waking up before dawn.
17.We can slow down and spend as much time as The Boy needs working on double-digit subtraction.
18.We can speed up and rip through spelling as fast as The Boy wants.
19.We can't afford back-to-school clothes.
20.To be ready for first grade, you have to excel at kindergarten. To be ready for kindergarten, you have to go to a good preschool. To be ready for preschool, you have to go to day care. At what point do we teach a fetus to square dance?
21.Socialization is overrated. If the socialization you get in public schools is so gosh-awful important, how did modern humanity survive its first 4,850 years without it?
22.Our complete K-12 Star Wars Curriculum. Did you know that the rise of Octavian to Augustus Caesar, Rome's first emperor, is actually based on "Star Wars," wherein Senator Palpatine twisted the Galactic Republic into an empire? Et tu, Darth Vader?
23.Watching the light bulb go on in your child's eyes when he figures out the concept of division.
24.It's not necessary to have sheriff's deputies roaming the hallways of my home.
25.Learning never ends — not at 3 p.m., not after homework is done, not on weekends and not on vacation.
I don't think homeschooling is for everyone. Heck, lots of parents welcome that 9 to 3 break from their kids. And many parents are so devoted and involved, they make public schools better for everybody, and I admire that.
But I'm not that patient.
No, until our society can stop the violence, pay teachers what they deserve, fund superior classroom technology, get past the arguments about religion, tailor education to individual children, abolish the bureaucracy and define "Waffle Stix," I'd just as soon do this myself.
Besides, we enjoy teaching our children. And that's reason enough.
Posted by Julee at 10:53 PM | Comments (1)
July 21, 2005
Interesting Homeschooling Statistics
Homeschooling at a glance
Thursday, July 21, 2005
In the spring of 2003, about 1.1 million, or 2.2 percent of all students, were homeschooled in the United States, an increase from 850,000 in 1999.
The majority of homeschooled students in 2003 received all of their education at home (82 percent), but some attended school up to 25 hours per week. Twelve percent of homeschooled students were enrolled in school less than nine hours per week, and 6 percent were enrolled between 9 and 25 hours.
White children were more likely to be homeschooled than black or Hispanic children or children from other race/ethnicities, and they constituted the majority of homeschooled students (77 percent).
Eighty-one percent of homeschooled students were in two-parent households, and 54 percent were in two-parent households with one parent in the labor force.
In 2003, there were no measurable differences in rates of homeschooling among students when considering their household income or the level of their parents' education.
In 2003, the reasons for homeschooling most frequently reported by parents as being "applicable" were concerns about the school environment (e.g., safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure) (85 percent of parents); a desire to provide religious or moral instruction (72 percent); and dissatisfaction with academic instruction (68 percent).
source: National center for education statistics
From the The Beacon at TownOnline.com
Posted by Julee at 08:55 PM | Comments (1)
July 08, 2005
Is Dreaminess a Disorder
This is taken from a letter written to Utne Reader:
As a parent of two "ADHD" children, and as a professional with 20 years of experience in mental health and education, I want to give some hope to other parents. We raised our our two boys without medication, and both are doing quite well. How did we do it? We stayed as far as possible from standard elementary school classrooms, instead opting for alternative schools and homeschooling, which enabled us to emphasize our children's strengths and to work gently on their weak areas without destroying their confidence and their desire to learn. Children are ready for different skills at different times. The one-size-fits-all classroom just doesn't work.
Steve McCrea- Porland, OR
Posted by Julee at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
Article on Socialization
Even though we haven't offically started homeschooling yet. (We have 1.5 weeks of preschool left) I have already been asked the socialization question a handful of times.
Homeschoolers are at least as well-socialized as public school students – most of them better-socialized, according to Susan McDowell, author of "But What About Socialization? Answering the Perpetual Home Schooling Question: A Review of the Literature."McDowell, who received a doctoral degree in educational leadership from Vanderbilt University and has published numerous articles on homeschooling, researched 24 studies on the socialization of homeschoolers.
"It’s a non-issue today," she said. "All the research shows children are doing well."
When McDowell went to publish one of her stories on homeschooling, her publisher required her to find someone who could argue, based on research, that homeschoolers were less-socialized than traditionally schooled students.
To her surprise, she couldn’t find an academic willing to give that perspective. She had to rely on others who presented theories unsupported by research, she said.
Posted by Julee at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2005
News Article
Here is a nice article about a homeschooling family in Virginia.
Posted by Julee at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Homeschoolers' Applications Up at Penn State
According to the Assistant Director of Admissions, Anne Rohrbach, "Penn State is now considered a homeschool-friendly university." Read the whole article.
Posted by Julee at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)