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Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen—a fascinating collection of recipes, mostly from books of the 1930s through the 1960s, for the traditional (volcano, slime, prop blood) as well as the less common (cloud chamber, Leyden jar, Tesla coil, glowing pickle).

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Homeschooling Community

LET US IMAGINE you are lucky enough to have an ideal situation for homeschooling: kids who are enthusiastic and eager, a supportive family, friends who think you and your children are amazing, a state law that is no trouble to comply with, a community full of libraries, museums, and other interesting places, and a school district that is happy to offer access to resources and activities as you want them. How could you possibly need anything more?

How could you not? No matter how supportive your family and community are, there will be days things don’t go right, days when you think you were crazy to have even attempted homeschooling. Or sometimes you’ll worry that things are actually going too well, too smoothly, so that you start to think you must have missed something, something important that you’re not dealing with. Now and then you’ll have days when only another homeschooler can tell you what you need to know or give you the perspective you need.

None of us, of course, lives in that ideal world where no one ever questions our judgment in choosing to homeschool. Occasionally, all you’ll really want is a few hours to be around people you don’t have to keep explaining things to. You’ll be tired of telling your mother that yes, her grandchild is learning to read just fine, and explaining yet again to the neighbor down the street that no, your kids don’t need to be at school today or any other day because you’re homeschoolers. And your kids will enjoy getting away from that one kid down the block who insists that they must be stupid because they don’t go to school.

Fortunately, you can get advice and support and just plain companionship from your fellow homeschoolers in many ways. You can join a local support group, a state association, or even a national organization. You can read any of a dozen homeschooling magazines or join half a dozen Internet newsgroups and mailing lists. And you can take your family off to one of the many homeschool conferences held each year, where you can wallow in being surrounded by homeschoolers who, for that weekend at least, constitute a local majority.

Local Support Groups

Local homeschooling support groups come in many flavors and styles. Finding a group that suits you depends on what type of activities you’re looking for, what kind of atmosphere you prefer, and, to a large extent, what size community you live in. Many homeschooling resource books and magazines include contact information for local support groups, although such information is sometimes out of date because of membership turnover and the tendency for groups to split and reorganize. To find current information on existing groups, try asking your state’s homeschooling organizations for regional or county contact people. You can also check your local library’s community organization file or, if your area has them, take a look through the free parenting monthlies, usually found at bookstores, grocery stores, and restaurants, for listings of local homeschool groups.

All but the smallest towns or rural areas will typically have at least two groups. Usually, one will be specifically Christian, probably fairly conservative, although not any particular denomination. The other group will not especially care about your religious beliefs, except that if your beliefs are somewhat exotic you may find yourself tapped as an interesting new educational resource.

Groups can consist of a few families or have several hundred members. They may be informal almost to the point of anarchy or highly structured. Some offer more activities each month than any one family could dream of participating in, whereas others schedule only one or two events each week. Most