More and more Virginia parents are opting for home-schooling. According to the Virginia Department of Education, the number of home-schoolers last year jumped 9 percent statewide. If home-schoolers constituted a school district, they would be the 13th-largest in Virginia:
Learning at home growing trend
Tags: growth of homeschooling, homeschool numbers, homeschooling, homeschooling in VA
State education officials plan to change the way they report on Oregon’s high school drop out rate this coming school year…. The new measurement system will also begin to categorize students who earn GEDs instead of high school diplomas as dropouts.
Oregon to change high school dropout tracking method
Tags: dropouts, GED, high school diploma, homeschooling
This family’s decision about homeschooling is being driven by finances. The post ends:
So…what are we going to do? I really can’t tell you for sure. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to voice them in the comments section. I’m always willing to listen to others ideas!
Read all of To Homeschool or Not to Homeschool – THAT is the question!.
Found a great illustration of a Mom’s path to homeschooling. Titled Changes are a coming, the post includes failures of the institution, tension between homeschool and public school-at-home, and that bottom line focus on our kids that I have been seeing in homeschoolers for 30 years.
Interested in unschooling? Check this out.
Who Needs School? Interview with A 17-Year-Old “UnSchooler” by Lee Stranahan
In a society that often considers the act of parents teaching their children at home to be something bizarre, the idea of unschooling is about as radical a parenting strategy as one can imagine. It’s homeschooling without the artificial structure of formal education.
Additional video clips with Holly’s mom, Sandra Dodd and more info.
Tags: homeschool, homeschool teens, unschooling, unschooling teens
It is not that homeschoolers haven’t known the importance of play for decades, or that we need research to tell us what we already know, but still, this press release caught my eye.
Early Childhood Experts to Brief Congress On Disappearance of Play and Playful Learning
Defenders of child-initiated play argue that learning, creativity, and democracy itself are threatened by narrow focus on academics and testing
College Park, MD, May 22, 2009—Crisis in the Kindergarten, the new study of how play is disappearing from early education because of increasingly intense academics and testing, will be the subject of a Washington briefing for Congress members and staff on Thursday, May 28 at the Capitol Visitors Center
