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Strollerderby
Over 2 million children in the U.S. are unschooled.
I always thought that if I am ever someday forced to take my kids out of school due to our refusal to vaccinate, I would rather unschool than homeschool.
The TODAY Show reported this morning that over 2 million children in the U.S. are legally unschooled. Continue reading »
Believe it or not, this is the car the family of six lives and travels in. Awesome.
In 2000, childhood sweethearts Herman and Candelaria Zapp set out on a pre-baby road trip. Once they had kids, they had been repeatedly told, they wouldn’t be able to travel and see the world. So they bought a 1928 Detroit-made Graham Paige (Model 610) and started driving from their home in Buenos Aires all the way up to Alaska.
That was 11 years and more than 100,000 miles ago. Because once they arrived in Alaska? They knew that they wanted to keep going. Continue reading »
Makayla Joy Sitton's author photo.
On Thanksgiving of 2009, Jim and Muriel Sitton had family over to their home in Jupiter, Florida. In all, 16 people gathered at the Sitton’s house, including a last minute guest who was uninvited, Muriel’s cousin, Paul Merhige. After Thanksgiving dinner, Merhige left the house only to return with a gun. With it, he killed his twin sisters, one of whom was pregnant, his aunt (Muriel’s mother), and the Sitton’s 6-year-old daughter, Makayla Joy.
Over a year later, the wound has not even come close to healing. The Sittons know that it never will. As such, they’re stuck in the purgatory which sits directly in between moving on and never forgetting. And now they are using their little girl’s actualized dream to help bridge the gap.
Homeschooling in Action
Do you have an outdated notion of homeschoolers as socially awkward religious zealots?
This week, as part of their web-only series, TODAYshow.com reports that home-schooling is becoming more mainstream. Continue reading »
I was a stay-at-home mom for years. I planned to homeschool my two little girls, and even went so far as to run a preschool out of my house for my preschool-age kids and some other homeschool-inclined families in our neighborhood.
Then one day my five-year-old daughter announced that she didn’t need to learn any more math from me, because she’d be going to kindergarten in the fall. After some soul-searching and school-researching, we decided to let her.
My whole world changed. Which is why this afternoon I had a good-natured laugh at the homeschooling article in Motherlode. In it, Chandra Hoffman talks about her plan to begin homeschooling her son, and her rosy vision of the close connection they’ll share as they learn together at home.
She acknowledges that they’ll probably have their share of irritations and issues. Her vision isn’t only rosy, it’s also real and lovely. I wish her every shred of luck as she and her son embark on their homeschooling journey together.
I just had to laugh because what prompted her to become a homeschooler was the very thing I’ve most enjoyed about giving it up.
Chandra is looking forward to homeschooling because she hopes it will set her free from the tedious, distancing work of policing her son’s day. In contract, sending my daughter to school has made me a more relaxed, connected mom.
People homeschool for lots of reasons, but the biggest commonality seems to be a deep distrust of the educational system as it is.
Andrew O’Hehir has been documenting his wife’s experience homeschooling their twins, who are almost 6, for Salon. He says their reasons are not religious or a wholesale rejection of mainstream culture — but based on this article,a breathtaking sense of superiority does seem to be a pretty strong motivator. I honestly don’t know how he managed to type this lengthy article, since he must have wrenched his arm patting himself on the back with quotes like this, from Susan Engel, a psychologist who runs the teaching program at Williams College: Continue reading »
A discipline method popular among conservative Christian homeschoolers is coming under fire after the death of a 7-year-old girl from injuries sustained from beatings. Her parents stand charged with her murder, and are also facing torture and abuse charges for injuries incurred by two of their nine children.
Police said that Lydia Schatz’s beatings were so numerous and severe that her internal organs may have been no longer able to function.
Lydia’s parents were aherents to the teaching of conservative Christian writers Michael and Debi Pearl, Continue reading »
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