The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [113]
Reed, Donn. The Home School Source Book. Brook Farm, 1991.
This is one of the best resource guides for homeschoolers; it contains lots of materials, many not officially “educational.” You may not always agree with Reed’s views, but he’s always interesting to read.
Rupp, Rebecca. Good Stuff: Learning Tools for All Ages. Holt, 1997.
This Parents Choice Award winner, by Home Education Magazine’s resource columnist, is a terrific collection of recommendations for books, games, tapes, catalogs, and more, all sorted by subject area. There is little overlap with other available resource guides, and it is especially useful to unschoolers and others looking for innovative learning tools.
Sheffer, Susannah. Writing Because We Love To: Homeschoolers at Work. Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1992.
Sheffer’s account of her work helping ten- to fifteen-year-olds improve their writing is a good look at how unschoolers develop their skills.
Stillman, Peter R. Families Writing. Writer’s Digest, 1989.
Not strictly a resource guide, this is a wonderful collection of ideas for writing within your family: journals, family histories, letters, and dozens of other ideas. The emphasis is on producing writing that is meaningful to family members, not on doing such projects specifically to improve writing skills.
Wade, Theodore E., Jr., ed. The Home School Manual. Gazelle, 1995.
My favorite of the Christian resource guides: Wade covers an enormous amount of material, and his appendices (twenty-six of them!) are unequaled in thoroughness.
Teenage Homeschoolers
Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Lowry House, 1998.
No homeschooling teenager should be without this book, which will get you excited about learning, even if you’re long past your teens. Written directly to teens rather than to their parents; terrific advice for teens trying to persuade their parents to give homeschooling a chance. (Make sure you get the complete 1998 second edition—not the abridged version published a few years earlier.)
Llewellyn, Grace. Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don’t Go to School. Lowry House, 1993.
A sequel of sorts to the Teenage Liberation Handbook, Real Lives is a collection of firsthand accounts of homeschooling teens who’ve taken the initiative for their education. Included are amazing stories of not-so-extraordinary kids leading extraordinary lives.
Sheffer, Susannah. A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls. Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995.
Sheffer’s work with homeschooled teenage girls seems to show that they are significantly more self-confident and independent than their schooled peers and that they avoid the typical loss of self-esteem commonly observed in adolescent girls. An interesting look at one of the potential benefits of homeschooling.
Standardized Testing
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Norton, 1981.
This well-written and thorough historical study of the scientific basis (or lack thereof) for measuring “intelligence” has excursions through scientific racism, the heritability of intelligence, and the difference between cause and correlation. Wonderful for developing a healthy skepticism about testing.
Owen, David. None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude. Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
This is a fascinating look at testing as exemplified by the Educational Testing Service’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Robinson, Adam, and John Katzman. The Princeton Review: Cracking the System, the SAT. Villard, updated annually.
One of the better test preparation books, this book gives rules for understanding what test makers look for and tactics for choosing the “right” answers. Also available for most other major tests.
Standardized Tests and Our Children: A Guide to Testing Reform. FairTest, 1990.