Mom Is Teaching

I was curious to see what were the top 10 homeschooling books right now. I found several great sites with top 10 lists, such as this one from A-Z Homeschool and this one from Homeschool.com’s bookstore. With so many great books out there and so many differing lists I thought it would be fun to compile my own list. So with some research (i.e. Google) I’ve put together a list of 10 books that every homeschooling parent should read.

1. The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities for Kids Ages 3-12
As a homeschooling parent, you’re always looking for new and creative ways to teach your child the basics. Look no longer! Inside this innovative helper, you’ll find kid-tested and parent-approved techniques for learning math, science, writing, history, manners, and more that you can easily adapt to your family’s homeschooling needs.
2. The Homeschooling Book of Answers : The 88 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices
This how-to guide offers the collective wisdom of six dozen homeschoolers, their children, and noted writers on the subject. Written in a question-and-answer format, it leaves no stone unturned, with chapters on everything from socialization (”But what about the prom?”) to the tricky teen years (”How will my child learn the tough subjects, like algebra and chemistry, if I don’t understand them?”). There’s also practical advice on how to handle critical relatives and friends, how to succeed at the college admissions process, and how to correspond with the governmental agencies that may oversee homeschooling in your state.
3.The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child’s Classroom
Unschooling, a homeschooling method based on the belief that kids learn best when allowed to pursue their natural curiosities and interests, is practiced by 10 to 15 percent of the estimated 1.5 million homeschoolers in the United States. There is no curriculum or master plan for allowing children to decide when, what, and how they will learn, but veteran homeschooler Mary Griffith comes as close as you can get in this slim manual. Written in a conversational, salon-style manner, The Unschooling Handbook is liberally peppered with anecdotes and practical advice from unschoolers, identified by their first names and home states. The book also includes resources such as one teenager’s sample “transcript,” a typical weekly log of a third-grader’s activities, and helpful lists of magazines, online mailing lists, Web sites, and catalogs.
4. So You’re Thinking About Homeschooling: Fifteen Families Show How You Can Do It
Confused and intimidated by the complexities of homeschooling, many sincere parents never get past the “thinking about it” stage. Now Lisa Whelchel - herself a homeschooling mother of three - introduces fifteen real families and shows how they overcome the challenges of their unique homeschooling situations. This nuts-and-bolts approach deals with common questions of time management, teaching weaknesses, and outside responsibilities, as well as children’s age variations, social and sports involvement, learning disabilities, and boredom. Seeing a wide variety of successfully homeschooling families in action will give parents the confidence to make their own dream of home-based education a reality.
5. A Charlotte Mason Education

6.Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling

7.Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s “guerrilla teaching.”

8. And What About College?: How Homeschooling Leads to Admissions to the Best Colleges & Universities
“If your child is a teenager and thinking about college, this is the book to get–and the younger your teen, the better.”

9.Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense
Despite the paradox of his position as a public high school teacher in Washington State who advocates home schooling (and provides it for his three sons), Guterson mounts a strong challenge to “the doctrine of school’s necessity.” He profiles the home-school movement, which encompasses more than 300,000 families in America, and probes the wide variety of motives behind its growth. The most common, he finds, is parents’ dissatisfaction with the mass, prescribed and other-directed nature of public education. Guterson argues that properly practiced home-schooling produces academic success, lessens peer pressure and allows children to become independent. We see these benefits in his depiction of his own family’s experience, but he scants the commitment in time and resources that home schooling requires of parents. He covers legal obstacles and community resistance that await those who embark on this traditional undertaking today. While not a panacea for America’s educational malaise, home schooling as presented here should prompt educators to reflect on their own approaches.

10.Deschooling Our Lives
What is a ‘complete’ education, and how can parents foster healthy growth for children? Hern presents an argument against focussing on schools for education, presenting articles and gathering writings which show how parents can start the deschooling process and replace school emphasis with workable alternatives. Send for the free New Society Publishers catalog for a complete listing of their titles.

homeschooling, homeschool, education, children