BevK June 26th, 2007
Incremental move toward greater homeschool freedom in Czechoslovakia.
The Czech Education Ministry has decided to extend the chance of home education, available to pupils from the first to the fifth grades now, to include pupils in the sixth to the ninth grades, the daily Hospodarske noviny writes.
BevK June 26th, 2007
Barbara Miller gives a very good answer to that question. She’s a Christian, so her answer will be different from someone who is not a Christian. But it’s a solid answer based on years of experience homeschooling and teaching seventh grade.
Barbara Miller of Prosper: Why we choose to homeschool
BevK June 26th, 2007
If your family tends to move often, as ours did because my husband was in the military, then homeschooling is a perfect solution to the constant change of schools. Your kids will be behind or ahead in one place and the opposite in the next.
Ceetee Sheckels shares her experiences in New York and Texas and how her children blossomed under differing homeschool regulations.
BevK June 26th, 2007
John Young Brown Hood III, will be sitting in a traditional classroom for the first time in his life as a freshman at the University of Mary Washington this fall. “I am nervous, but very excited,” he said of anticipating the new experience.
John isn’t your typical homeschooler, because I don’t think any homeschooler is really typical. But he is a great example of what homeschooling looks like at the end of the course. He’s a young man with an interest in Asian history who wants to teach Latin.
The article, “Parental discretion: Homeschooling remains popular,” begins by telling us about John, but also includes some great pointers for homeschooling. Read the whole thing here.
BevK June 26th, 2007
Well, not exactly good guys and bad guys, but this article from the Boise Weekly definitely shows us those who favor homeschooling and those who think it needs to be tightly regulated to avoid educational neglect and abusive situations.
Idaho
Good Guy
Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter
“But ultimately, only the family and the individual citizen can be responsible for their own education.”
Otter described homeschooling as a fair extension of what President George Washington meant when he discussed, in his first inaugural address, the “sacred fire of liberty” that was “staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”“Think about that,” Otter said. “It doesn’t say, ‘entrusted to the hands of the public schools.’ It says, ‘entrusted to the hands of the American people.’”
Further, he said, “there can be no firmer foundation for your future than the education you have received at home.”
Parents should have ultimate control over their children’s educations. We are not property of the state.
Good Guy
Bob Forrey has been around for most of the struggle. He was there in 1984, when members of the Shippy family of New Plymouth went to jail in order to defend their right to teach their children at home. He was there when Idaho lawmakers came to him with complaints of kids getting mistreated in homeschooling situations. And for three years, it was his job to hunt down those cases for the state department of education. He was given this job by Anne Fox, a predecessor to Luna in the early 1990s.
“I followed up on every one of those individually,” Forrey said. “Not one of them was a legitimate complaint.”
People that lock their children in closets for years are not homeschoolers and they are not homeschooling. Don’t let them define themselves as homeschoolers. Homeschoolers educate their children because they have their children’s best interests at heart.
Bad Guy
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna
He wants families to choose charter schools over homeschooling and worries that homeschool students aren’t individually tracked.
Bad Guy
Sherri Wood of the Idaho Education Association
She makes the standard teacher’s union statement that parent’s can’t teach and kids aren’t socialized properly if they homeschool.
BevK June 26th, 2007
Wow, summer didn’t bring a slow down for me or the Eclectic Homeschool Online. Our database got hacked at EHO, so I’ve been fixing things. Not that the hackers did any real damage. We don’t keep people’s information, just articles about homeschooling. And fortunately these folks weren’t in to mayhem. So, it was a matter of closing some cracks. Staying ahead can be hard.
I’ve also been working on Tammy Cardwell’s new CJ Press website. It should be going live any day now. She’s been working hard on finishing up several new ebooks that you will be able to purchase straight from CJ Press. I’ll post more info on it when we take the site live.
And I’ve been working on finishing my own book that CJ Press will be publishing. It’s titled Homeschool Printables & Forms and has 112 pages of all kinds of homeschool and educational printables and forms. Thus the title. I’ll be posting more about it as it gets closer to the release date.
All that to say that blogging time has been scarce. I’ll try to do better in the coming weeks.
BevK June 15th, 2007
Summer seems like the perfect time to go exploring, so our focus with this update is exploring. We start out by publishing an updated version of our Exploration Unit Study Resources article that’s been offline for a couple of years. Our own family spent half a year on exploration, which incorporates history and science. The resources in this unit study are truly for all ages up through high school.
A Real Life Education
What do you do when life interrupts homeschooling? Perhaps the answer lies in the definitions of “homeschooling” and “interruptions.”
Too Busy to Hurt
Homeschooling and raising a family is definitely a hectic lifestyle. Trying to balance teaching children with keeping a home is a challenge for every mother. Some of us are better at it than others.
Exploration Unit Study
Exploration is a topic that can take you in many directions. You can easily incorporate science, history, and geography. In this Unit Study, we have included a variety of resources covering six sub-topics. Within each sub-topic you will find fiction and nonfiction books, as well as picture books, links to information and curricular websites carefully selected to represent the very best available on the Internet, and a variety of other useful resources such as software, videos and hands-on learning kits
Focus - Exploring
Exploring can mean so many things exploring the library for good books, exploring your back yard as a child, or exploring a new found interest, We’ve put together some resources that embody the desire to explore.
Exploring Science through Everyday Living
When my family began its homeschooling adventure several years ago, I quickly became frustrated with packaged science curricula and textbooks. Time and again, I read glowing descriptions and reviews for seemingly perfect science programs that sounded as if they were written with my family in mind. I cannot tell you how many of these wound up sitting on already overcrowded bookshelves collecting dust. So, the story goes for many homeschoolers. That is how my family discovered “real life science.”
Reviews
Exploration Resources
Visit our new Exploration Unit Study Resources article for many more resources available in our bookstore or online.
Science Spot
A Stormy History
A new analysis suggests that the number of severe hurricanes we’ve seen recently is normal. The current trend seems extreme only because there was an unusual dip in storm frequency in the 1970s and 1980s.
New Reviews
* Art Adventures in Narnia
* The Barefoot Fisherman
* The Chamber Music of Mozart (DVD)
* Easy 2 Draw Dolphins and Reef Animals with Cordi (DVD)
* Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day
* Famous Men of Rome - with color illustrations
* Famous Men of Rome Student Guide
* Famous Men of Rome Teacher Guide with Key
* Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Children
* Great Masters: Beethoven - His Life and Music (DVD)
* Grumpy Mr. Grady
* Rough, Tough, Charley
* A Treasury of Goops: Timeless Manners for Every Generation
* World History Made Simple: Matching History with the Bible
* Writing for 100 Days
Featured Resource June
Geometry: Seeing, Doing, Understanding
by Harold R. Jacobs
$77.95
Since its publication, nearly one million students have used this legendary text. Suitable for either classroom use or self-paced study, it uses innovative discussions, cartoons, anecdotes, examples, and exercises that unfailingly capture and hold student interest.
More New Resources
Close to the Wind: The Beaufort Scale
by Peter Malone
$13.25 - 22% Off
In 1810, a British naval officer and surveyor named Francis Beaufort developed a scale to give sailors a common language for describing the wind. From 0 (calm) to 12 (hurricane), stunning artwork and jaunty prose show what life at sea must have been like for a young boy serving as a midshipman in the 1800s. As William sails from Naples to the Caribbean, we learn intriguing historical information and nautical terminology, and witness how the wind affected day-to-day life on a ship. Detailed illustrations show the wind at work, and readers will be engrossed and fascinated as they watch the storm develop in magnificent full-color paintings.
Sacagawea
by Liselotte Erdrich, Julie Buffalohead
$13.22 - 22% Off
A beautifully illustrated biography of the Shoshone girl, Sacagawea, from age eleven when she was kidnapped by the Hitdatsa to the end of her journey with Lewis and Clark, plus speculation about her later life.
The World of Exploration
by Philip Wilkinson
$8.95
The World of Exploration is packed full of voyages of discovery and the struggle to survive in the world’s wildest places. Readers will thrill to the daring adventures of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Roald Amundsen, and many more of the world’s greatest explorers in this authoritative reference.
Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
$23.76 - 34% Off
Explorers forged the infrastructure of global history, first by finding the routes of migration that sundered human cultures, then - after millennia of divergence - by finding the routes that linked them up again.
Pathfinders tells the epic story of how the route-finders did it: who they were, where they came from, where they went, how they coped with the unknown, how they developed the techniques and technologies they needed, how they paid for it, how they suffered for it, and - perhaps most curious of all - why they bothered.
From the earliest migratory wanderings that scattered human societies across the planet to the great voyages of discovery that started linking them up again, and finally to the conquering of the final geographical frontiers in the twentieth century, Fernández-Armesto reveals the real flesh-and-blood, the vainglory and fantasy that motivated the pathfinders of the world.
Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration
by Fergus Fleming
$12.00 - 25% Off
On John Franklin’s 1820 expedition to find the North-West Passage, Michel Teroahaute cannibalized two team members and was preparing a third when he was caught and killed. When Rene la Salle set off for the Mississippi Delta in 1684, he missed the target by five hundred miles, but on landing immediately built a prison for those who fell asleep on watch. Consummate storyteller Fergus Fleming brings together these and forty-three other gripping stories in Off the Map.
Spanning three ages of exploration, it is a uniquely accessible and supremely entertaining history of adventure and endeavor. Off the Map recounts episodes both classic and forgotten: the “classics” are brought to life in more vivid colors than ever before; the lesser-known stories offer accounts of feats that are no less heroic or extraordinary but have long lain hidden in the undergrowth of history. From the Renaissance golden age of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan to the twentieth-century heroics of polar explorers such as Peary, Scott, and Amundsen, this is an unforgettable journey into the annals of adventure.
Cool Stuff Science Kit
by DK Publishing
A hands-on complement to DK’s hit title Cool Stuff and How it Works, this kit is packed with wires, lights, tubes, chemicals, and more than 20 cool experiments that give kids a hands-on look at the forces that power our world.
Thank you for using the EHO Resource Center to purchase your homeschool books and supplies. We are affiliated with Amazon.com, so anything you could buy there including shoes, magazine subscriptions, and hardware…so much…you can buy through our store by using one of our search boxes or links into Amazon. In fact, when you do so, you support EHO. We receive a small percentage of every purchase, whether the item was listed on our page or not. That small percentage equals a big blessing for EHO. We operate on a shoestring, and our Amazon revenues are a major part of that shoestring.
Look for our Shop Amazon - Fund EHO Link posted throughout the EHO website or visit the EHO Resource Center main page at http://eclectichomeschool.org/store/
Eclectic Homeschool Resource Directory
Four new listings have been added to our Resource Directory, which brings our new total to 539 listings in 87 categories. If you’re interested in listing your business in the directory, please visit the following page to submit a commercial or non-commercial website.
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Stop by TammyCardwell.net for the latest offerings from CJ Press and access to all Tammy’s articles about homeschooling and Christian living. Currently, CJ Press is offering God Doesn’t Want Volunteers as a free eBook and has just published Some Successful Americans, a collection of biographies of self-made, successful Americans, as an eBook. You can find both books at http://tammycardwell.net
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The Lord bless and keep you,
Beverly Krueger
Eclectic Homeschool Online
http://eclectichomeschool.org
If you have a friend that would like to start receiving this newsletter, they can subscribe at
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BevK June 15th, 2007
Julie at Forgotten Classics podcasting classic stories. She’s just gotten started.
Episode 1: A Tale of Three Tales
Episode 2: Topper
Hat Tip: The Anchoress
BevK June 6th, 2007
JOHN Taylor Gatto attracted his fair share of attention in three decades teaching in some of New York’s toughest schools.
In 1991 he was named New York Teacher of the Year, making even bigger headlines when he used his acceptance speech to resign from the profession.
But it’s in his retirement that the former English teacher has generated the most interest, travelling the world speaking out against compulsory schooling. All this has made him a controversial critic known as the “educational saboteur”.
If Mr Gatto had his way, schooling would be voluntary and more children would be home-schooled, with curriculums tailored for individual students.
John Taylor Gatto is speaking in Australia this weekend at the National Home Education Conference.
BevK June 6th, 2007
We homeschool our children. We thought them somewhat protected from outside influences, but our son still learned of it, played the game and lost his life and we lost a son and brother.
From a letter to the editor at the Mining Gazette.
Don’t let the fact that you homeschool allow you to let down your guard. Homeschooling does protect our children from some bad outside influences, but even as homeschooler we cannot monitor our children 24/7. Attempting to do so probably isn’t healthy for us or them, even so. Homeschoolers need to be just as aware of trends among youth in their community. With the Internet, that community is even larger. The notion that I don’t need to worry about sex, drugs, and such because we homeschool and that stuff doesn’t come near my children is a akin to putting your head in the sand. Anything can happen, because sin abounds. “My children would never…” is a prideful remark and pride goeth before a fall. You can’t keep your children 100% safe from bad influences.
My prayers go out to any family who experiences a tragedy such as this family experienced with their son Matthew. You can read more about Matthew at Matthew’s story.
