some reading for Mom

In the past few months, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about homeschooling - online, from the library, and buying books to keep as long-term references.

I've already mentioned that I read the 1st-4th grade section of The Well-Trained Mind, and some other sections about homeschooling in general. I've only skimmed the upper level grades chapters so far - I was getting ahead of myself as it is.

I recently picked through our library's selection of homeschool books and brought home a number of them. I wasn't really impressed with anything by Vicki Caruana that I looked through. Her level of injecting her faith into her writing about homeschooling came across as really overbearing. That's great that she prayed about her decision to homeschool and she feels that this is what God wants their family to do - same thing for our family. Other details of her faith being the catalyst of her decision and method of homeschooling went on and on and on. I get it. It is unnecessary to beat me, as the reader, over the head with it.

My most recent selection is Homeschooling: The Early Years by Linda Dobson (ages 3 to 8). Even though the text states repeatedly that there are as many ways to homeschool as there are families choosing to do it, the stories shared lean heavily toward unschooling without actually using the term. "Child-directed" is the catchphrase of choice. There are a few too many anecdotes for my taste about kids not learning to read or write until they're 9 or even 12, which is totally not okay with me. I'm all for working at each kid's pace, but there are things to push harder on than others to make sure they're actually learned fairly early because they provide so much of the foundation for everything else. Reading and handwriting. Imagine that. The chapter on using computers and the internet and the lists of resources at the end of each chapter were outdated, but the book was published more than 10 years ago so that's no surprise. I did get some ideas on handling handwriting with my stubborn 5-year-old. All in all, it was a decent book to read to get some ideas on handling various situations but it's not something I'm rushing to buy so I can refer to it over and over.