This weekend, I perused a review copy of Suddenly Homeschooling: A Quick-Start Guide to Legally Homeschool in 2 Weeks, by Marie-Claire Moreau, Ed.D. This guide provides a 14-day plan for parents who need to prepare to homeschool very quickly–intended for a child who had to leave school unexpectedly, for example due to health, social, academic, or emotional reasons. … Read more
In How to Tutor Your Own Child, I discuss the role that the Internet plays in students’ intellectual development. Though search engines may be an effective tool, I’m concerned about how the Web makes us so quick to Google for answers. Think about the process of discovery that’s lost in Googling. Here’s a non-academic example: Can you … Read more
I posted the following question on the How to Tutor Your Own Child Facebook yesterday: If your child’s friends like poorly written but popular books (e.g., Twilight), is it better to (A) convince your child to avoid these books in favor of better literature, even if no one else he or she knows has read these books OR … Read more
Until recently, I only had a hazy understanding of the difference between homeschooling and unschooling. For clarification, I read Unschooling 101: Top 10 Questions About Learning Without School, by Sara McGrath. Here’s my current understanding: When we talk about homeschoolers, we’re talking about the broad category of students who learn outside of the full-time American school system. … Read more
Last night I paid our cable company to reinstate our access to the Oprah Winfrey Network just long enough to watch Our America with Lisa Ling, which was doing an episode about “Extreme Parenting.” Ling interviewed four families: wealthy “tiger” parents who pay $40,000/year/child for a year-round high-pressure school, unschoolers who allow their four children to learn … Read more
If you’ve read How to Tutor Your Own Child, you probably saw Chapter 6, “iDon’t Think iKnow Where My Homework Is: Helping Kids Connect and Organize for the Twenty-First Century.” In it, I address how to maximize the educational impact of 21st-century technologies. Now, I wish I could go back and augment the section about Facebook–since … Read more
School’s out for the afternoon, and it’s time for real-life learning to begin! Despite the best intentions of a classroom teacher, it’s incredibly hard to keep up with the individual needs of every student. But you as a parent have an advantage: You see your children daily and can nurture classroom learning with resources at … Read more
