The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [87]
Growing Without Schooling (GWS) is the granddaddy of homeschooling periodicals. Founded in 1977 by John Holt, it focuses on unschooling or child-led learning. Although it includes reviews and occasionally interviews of interest to homeschoolers, the bulk of it consists of letters from homeschoolers sharing their experiences and ideas. GWS can be enormously helpful to the nervous unschooler just getting started.
Home Education Magazine (HEM) is the magazine to read if you want to know what homeschoolers across the country are talking about. HEM addresses a broader range of homeschooling styles than any other homeschooling magazine, giving its readers a bit of the flavor of the debates within a movement full of opinionated people. Mark and Helen Hegener, editors and publishers, include articles on education philosophy, the politics of education reform, curriculum ideas, along with regular columns reviewing books, movies, and software and some lively opinion columns. If you’d like an overview of the American homeschooling movement, HEM is worth a look.
Practical Homeschooling (PHS) is the flashiest of the magazines serving the Christian homeschooling market. Glossy, cluttered, and chatty, it emphasizes curricular approaches to home education. Many of its regular columnists are themselves curriculum developers or popular workshop presenters, and fully half of each issue is devoted to product reviews. Editor-publisher Mary Pride writes colorful and opinionated articles, and she sprinkles jokes and hints in the margins throughout the magazine.
Homeschooling Today, Homeschooling Digest, and The Teaching Home also serve the Christian homeschooling market. Homeschooling Today is probably the friendliest of the lot, providing lots of helpful, hands-on curriculum ideas. Homeschooling Digest is an attractively laid out quarterly (e.g., all advertising is grouped at the back) “for serious homeschoolers,” with more abstract articles on developing Christian character and moral values along with curricular and legal advice. The Teaching Home is also fairly serious, with articles on record keeping and curriculum, reviews, and a topical focus section in each issue. In many states, a supplement published by one of the state’s Christian homeschooling associations is bound into the magazine.
F.U.N. News is a quarterly newsletter for unschoolers. Editor–publishers Billy and Nancy Greer focus on a specific topic—geography, foreign languages, math, sports and fitness, and so on—in each issue, with print and Internet resources, and ideas for activities.
At Our Own Pace: A Newsletter for Homeschooling Families with Special Needs includes reviews of books, articles, materials, and methods, as well as interviews with subscribers who have children with disabilities ranging from autism and learning disorders to cerebral palsy and post polio syndrome, and letters from parents. Jean Kulczyk publishes this eight- to twenty-page newsletter irregularly; subscriptions are free, although donations are gratefully accepted.
Electronic Discussions of Homeschooling
If you’ve never participated in online discussions, you may find yourself taken aback at the energy they often generate. It’s worth “lurking” for a bit to get the feel of things before you try participating. Although there are thousands of friendly and helpful people on-line, many are also impatient, to put it mildly, with those who are less experienced. Unless you enjoy being the target of gratuitous insults, learn a bit of the “netiquette,” lest you get yourself flamed to a crisp.
Most of the commercial on-line services have forums serving homeschoolers. You can usually find boards discussing specific topics and reference libraries from which you can download files, as well as lists of other homeschooling resources such as books, Web site links, mailing lists, and much more.
If you have access to the Internet, you can drop in on several homeschooling