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Homeschooling help and encouragement from experienced homeschoolers - find out how homeschooling works and how to start, get tips & ideas for when things need adjusting, read curriculum reviews before buying, learn how online schools work, gain confidence about homeschooling high school, and more.

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Jeanne Faulconer

Parental Deschooling: Deschooling is not just for kids

Parental Deschooling: Your Reading Homework

by Jeanne Faulconer

One of the most important things you can do is to read about homeschooling, education, and de-schooling. Read books, magazines, and online articles, blog posts, and websites.

Stretch yourself and read some things you don’t think apply to you, that are outside your comfort level. You don’t have to accept the premise of each homeschooling book or article you read, but even if you don't agree or find certain ideas too radical, you’ll educate yourself about the many approaches to home education.
Continue reading »

Teaching Critical Thinking

Teaching Critical Thinking with The Fallacy Detective

by Jeanne Faulconer

One of the most accessible basic logic books on our book shelf is The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning by Nathan and Hans Bluedorn. The book helps kids (and adults) spot errors in thinking -- logical fallacies often used in an effort to persuade others. Learning about fallacious thinking is valuable for academic reasons, but it's also important to being a good consumer (recognizing how advertising works) and to being a good citizen (understanding how political communication works). Continue reading »

Electronic Circuit Board Kits (Instead of Curriculum)

Instead of Curriculum: Electronic Circuit Boards

by Jeanne Faulconer

Working with electronic circuit boards may sound ambitious or advanced, but my kids enjoyed playing with these as part of their science and technology learning when they were in their early elementary years. They learned many concepts about creating circuits from hands-on play, in particular by using a kid-friendly Snap Circuits® Kit from Elenco. Continue reading »

Stack of books with headphones and text LibriVox Free audiobooks for homeschooling

LibriVox Free Audiobooks for Homeschooling

by Jeanne Faulconer

LibriVox is a great online source for free audio books. This means you and the kids can listen to lots of well known classic fiction, nonfiction, and children's books -- at no cost -- right from your personal computer, smart phone, or tablet. The books available on LibriVox are books whose copyright has expired, meaning LibriVox volunteers can record them without violating copyright laws, and you can listen without paying a purchase price. Continue reading »

Homeschooling at Night: How Nightschooling Can Help You

Homeschooling at Night: How Nightschooling Can Work for You

by Jeanne Faulconer

Everybody knows that your kids should be up early hitting the books, right? Homeschooling goes better if Mom is organized and has lessons prepared for first thing in the morning. Homeschooling works well when kids focus on academics when they're fresh, and they get to play when they've completed their school work.

Homeschooling at any other time of day is risking disaster.

That's the conventional wisdom, anyway.

However, sometimes homeschooling at night makes more sense than the conventional wisdom. That can even include "nightschooling" - focusing all or part of your homeschooling efforts during the evening hours. Continue reading »

Will homeschooling help add/adhd?

Will Homeschooling Help ADD/ADHD?

by Jeanne Faulconer

Will your child's ADD get better if you homeschool?

I'm no educational psychologist, but I've been homeschooling for sixteen years in three states. I've met hundreds of homeschooling families at conferences and workshops I've presented, I've answered hundreds of calls at a statewide homeschool phone line, and I've been a homeschool evaluator in Virginia for quite a few years now. I've heard dozens of parents praise homeschooling for their children who were labeled with ADD/ADHD in the school setting. But it's not magic. The parents who observe such a change in their children also generally report actively shaping their homeschooling to address attention problems their child had in a school setting. Here are some of the things that have made them successful... Continue reading »

Parental Deschooling: Deschooling is not just for kids

Parental Deschooling: Finding Your Non-School Normal

by Jeanne Faulconer

Have you decided to homeschool? You probably need some parental deschooling. Most parents who are choosing to homeschool their children today attended school themselves. We have also lived for many years in a world where the public school model of education is predominant. School is the status quo. School is the default. School is the norm. As many of my school-teacher-turned-homeschooler friends have pointed out to me over the years, one of the hardest things about transitioning to homeschooling as a parent is getting out of the school mindset. Continue reading »

Plan a Library Scavenger Hunt

How to Plan a Library Scavenger Hunt

by Jeanne Faulconer

A great activity for your homechool group or co-op is a library scavenger hunt. Working with your librarian, plan a gathering for homeschoolers that includes sending the kids throughout the library to find resources, so they'll get to know the library better. If the scavenger hunt is promoted by the library, you might even find some more homeschooling friends in your community if they show up at the scavenger hunt. You can organize the kids into pairs or teams (and have the youngest kids hunt with an adult), and send them out with a list of things for each child to find or do in the library. A sample scavenger list might ... Continue reading »

What is Deschooling? From School to Homeschool

From School to Homeschool: What is Deschooling?

by Jeanne Faulconer

Deschooling is the adjustment period a child goes through when leaving school and beginning homeschooling. To really get the benefits of homeschooling, a child has to decompress and disconnect from "school" being the default and "school ways" being the standard expectation.

The longer a child has been in school, the more important it is to allow generous time to process the huge change from not being in school to learning as a homeschooler. Continue reading »

How to put the "feel good" into homeschool field trips

How To Put the "Feel Good" Into Homeschool Field Trips

by Jeanne Faulconer

Everybody knows homeschoolers go on a lot of field trips.

We start them young with trips to the fire department and the water treatment plant. We go to historic farms, art museums, animal shelters, state and national parks, corn mazes, and caverns.

In my state, Virginia, you can study practically all of American history through field trips: Native American sites, Jamestown, Williamsburg, historic grist mills, Frontier Culture Museum, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, antebellum plantations, Civil War battlefields and museums, memorials of World War I and II, Civil Rights sites, a Vietnam War museum, and more. Continue reading »

Editing writing (instead of curriculum)

Instead of Curriculum: Bring Me Bad Writing

by Jeanne Faulconer

"Bring me bad writing," I told my two homeschool co-op classes of middle school and elementary age writers. "Incorrect writing, wrong apostrophes, sentence fragments, typos, passive voice. Horrible stuff. Bring it."

The next week, they marched in with an array of bad writing they'd found on websites, on convenience store signs, on gas pumps, in a letter from a college administrator, in text books, in novels, and in their own journals.

They had snapped photos, hand copied passages, bookmarked pages, and printed screen shots. Continue reading »

LEGO® Build With Chrome

Build with Chrome: LEGO® Goes Virtual

by Jeanne Faulconer

As if homeschoolers don't have enough of the real thing hidden under couch cushions, Google has just unveiled a new virtual LEGO® building site, Build With Chrome. A tie-in with the upcoming film, The LEGO® Movie™, the site features a 3D graphics technology that lets you build and display LEGO® creations using virtual bricks. While LEGO® has offered its own free building software for years, Build With Chrome is adapted for use on touch screens, including tablets and smart phones as well as on computers (with or without touch screens). Continue reading »

When mom is also teacher

The Homeschool Parent-Teacher Conference

by Jeanne Faulconer

My first t-shirt as a homeschooling parent proclaimed, "Don't bother me. I'm having a parent-teacher conference."

This expressed well my initial thoughts about the roles of mother and teacher while homeschooling. I could see my "teacher self" talking to my "mother self," echoing the familiar adult roles in education that involves public school...

Past my first few months of homeschooling more than a decade and a half ago, I have not separated a "teacher self" from my "mom self." At the same time, I found it was important for me to set boundaries of time and space that made my family function well. Continue reading »

What I learned about homeschooling from Saxon Math

What I Learned about Homeschooling from Saxon Math

by Jeanne Faulconer

As you may have read over on my personal blog, I'm thinning my library of homeschooling books, and it's an occasion for reflection. One of the things I finally feel free to do is to pass along my copy of Saxon Math.

Saxon didn't work for us. In fact, it didn't work in dramatic ways. We had multiple reasons for beginning homeschooling, but among the academic reasons was that the math taught at school was a poor fit and created a lot of stress and little math learning. Continue reading »

The Alphabet Walk: Learning ABCs with Rocks and Trees

The Alphabet Walk: Learning ABCs with Rocks and Trees

by Jeanne Faulconer

Winter is a wonderful time to take Alphabet Walks with your children. In my part of the U.S., this means bundling up for the cold weather, but hunting for the ABCs in nature may be just the thing to get you and the kids moving on darker winter days.

The main object of an Alphabet Walk is to find letters that have been unintentionally formed in the outdoors. Perhaps crossing tree branches form an X against the blue sky, or a cat curved on your deck forms a perfect C. A front door wreath on your neighbor's house is an O. The brickwork above the windows in an old Main Street building creates a V. Continue reading »

Do homeschoolers get snow days?

Do Homeschoolers Get Snow Days?

by Jeanne Faulconer

Homeschool moms get used to questions from non-homeschoolers. Some questions arrive with the seasons, including in the fall, of course: "Have you started school yet?" and in the spring: "Have you finished school yet?" Some homeschooling families make no distinction between starting and stopping learning, so the question is odd to them. As I've written before about the homeschool year, other families do follow the school year with explicit study of academics, while their friends in the same homeschool group might make their own calendar. Continue reading »

giving back to homeschooling

What Have You Done for Homeschooling Lately?

by Jeanne Faulconer

Chances are you have benefited from homeschoolers who have gone before you. They have started homeschool organizations, lobbied to keep homeschooling free and legal, blogged thousands of the ever popular "day in the life of a homeschooler" posts, organized conferences, published homeschooling magazines, arranged park days, started geography clubs, shared curriculum ideas, and written homeschool help books. How can you pay it forward?
Continue reading »

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