Why Homeschool?
The first step to homeschooling is making your decision to home educate your child. It is important to become informed and knowledgeable about some of the main concerns you may have. Explore these areas of our website to learn more about the initial decision to homeschool.
Making Your Decision
The reasons people decide to educate their children at home are varied and can be unique to each family. Some look towards a better educational experience, others are concerned with moral and social issues, some are concerned with safety, and still others have special needs that they wish to address. Explore these reasons and others that have led families to homeschooling.
Advantages
Ask anyone who loves homeschooling what the advantages are, and you'll probably hear a long list of the benefits of educating children in the home. Homeschooling is a journey and an adventure, with benefits and rewards for the entire family. Come find out what these advantages are and decide if homeschooling is right for you.
Teaching Your Own
Are you qualified to teach your own children? The answer is yes! It is challenging, but rewarding, to educate your children in your home. Find out what these challenges are and how to address them.
Socialization
"But what about socialization?" So the typical question goes to anyone who homeschools. Find out what socialization means to homeschooling families and strategies to engage your children and your entire family in social activities and connections.
Research & Statistics
Learn about current research and statistics involving homeschooling families, the homeschool movement, and the educational system.
Public School Issues
Many parents are basing part of their decision to homeschool on issues with public schooling, from bullying to poor academic performance to problems with governmental control.
Community Outreach
Want to help homeschooling integrate into the community at large? Are you a homeschool group leader who talks with the media or provides information to new and curious homeschoolers? Here are tips to help you present homeschooling to the public and the media.
What's Popular
7 Tips to Help Explain Your Homeschool Decision with Confidence
Many homeschoolers are confronted with negativity. Heated debates on public education, religion and politics can be incited. Facing arguments on socialization, teacher qualifications and homework are not uncommon. There will always be naysayers. You simply cannot please everyone all the time, especially when you make important family decisions. It is best to convey your decision with confidence and let the act of homeschooling tell the rest of the tale.
Exploring Single Black Mothers' Resistance Through Homeschooling
This work looks at contemporary Black homeschooling as a form of resistance among single Black mothers, exploring each mother's experience and perspective in deciding to homeschool and developing their practice. It faces the many issues that plague the education of Black children in America, including discipline disproportionality, frequent special education referrals, low expectations in the classroom, and the marginalization of Black parents. Most importantly, this work challenges stereotypica...
Why Do People Homeschool?
A look at the academic advantages of choosing to homeschool your child. These benefits come from the opportunity for an excellent education, the inevitability of a dedicated teacher, and education tailored to a child's capabilities and personality, integrated and consistent education, and better teaching materials.
Product Reviews on Homeschool Blogs: How to Get Them
How to get bloggers interested in your products so that they will write product reviews on their homeschool blogs -- have an outstanding product first of all and give bloggers incentives. Find social media savvy homeschool bloggers on Twitter and G+ using two special hashtags.
The Rise of Home Schooling Among African-Americans
Significant growth in black families’ participation in home schooling is beginning to show up on the radar screens of researchers. The National Center for Education Statistics computed African-Americans as 9.9 percent of the 850,000 children the federal agency figured were being home-schooled nationally in 1999. Veteran home-schooling researcher Brian Ray figures blacks are currently about 5 percent of the 1.6 million to 2 million home-schooled children but he agrees that black home schooling is...
Estimate of the Number of Home School Students in Minnesota
An estimate of the number of homeschooled students in the state of Minnesota, provided by the Minnesota Department of Education.
Socializing the Homeschooled Child
This YouTube video from iHomeschool Hangout discusses the issue of socialization and homeschooling. Guests are Sade Tagbo, Sam Kelley, Jimmie Lanley, and Colleen Kessler. The hostess is Dianna Kennedy.
How Do I know If I'm Qualified to Homeschool?
Parents considering homeschooling are understandably concerned about whether they are qualified enough. Do parents need to be trained and certified like public school teachers? How in the world can you be qualified to teach them? The most important thing to realize is that as a homeschooling parent, you're job is not necessarily to teach your children. Instead, you are there to help them learn. 
Are You Qualified to Teach Your Child at Home?
Can anyone with the means and the will teach their own child academics? Can anyone can teach their own child at home? For most Americans, if you have the means and the will, you can successfully homeschool your children.
The Benefits of Homeschooling: Top Ten Reasons for Homeschooling
Homeschoolers are often asked about why they homeschool. This veteran homeschoolers has come up with her top ten reasons for homeschooling: education, freedom, family and love, morals and values, independence, socialization, health, passion, creativity and imagination, and play.
Growth in the Number of Minnesota Homeschoolers
Minnesota's homeschooling statute requires notice of intent to homeschool filed with local school districts, which in turn pass on their counts of homeschooled children to the state.
Homeschooling For Dummies
This comprehensive guide gets you off to a great start. From helpful advice on how to decide if homeschooling is right for you, to how to get started, to complying with all legal requirements, you'll find what you need at the beginning of your homeschooling. Also included are teaching tips, advice on networking, testing, curriculum, and more. 
State Laws Concerning Participation of Homeschool Students in Public School Activities
This is a list of states that have addressed issues of homeschooler participation in public school classes, sports, activities, etc.
So You Think You're Not Smart Enough to Homeschool?
How intelligent does a person have to be to homeschool successfully? You do not have to know all the answers in order to be a good teacher, you just have to know where or how to find the answers. You do not have to be able to do something yourself in order to be able to teach about it. A successful homeschool teacher is one who is able to impart the material to his or her students. 
What’s the Point of Socialization?
Socialization is a pretty hot topic for those in the homeschooling circles. Many of us are asked how we socialize our kids, how our kids will know how to interact with others, and other questions that really go to the root of how our children will be able to function well in society. Now, the big question is whether each person needs to go to a school setting in order to be socialized.
Resources
But What About Socialization? Answering the Perpetual Home Schooling Question: A Review of the Literature
This book by Dr. Susan A. McDowell  uses research, statistics, and the experiences of homeschooling families to answer questions and counter myths about homeschooling and socialization. Read through a discussion of the multiple meanings of socialization, what parents, leaders, and children have to say about the issue, and what the research shows. 
Should I Home School?: How to Decide What's Right for You & Your Child

Have questions about homeschooling? This book has the answers. The information in this book will help you decide if homeschooling is right for you and your child. 

Homeschool Bravely: How to Squash Doubt, Trust God, and Teach Your Child with Confidence

It's time to change your perspective to transform the way you plan, teach, and homeschool. This book helps you to see homeschooling as a calling. With this mindset, you'll be able to dismiss the stress of impossible expectations. Find strategies to help you juggle the logistics of homeschooling with different ages, be a good support for a struggling learner, set realistic goals, dismiss the guilt, and weather any criticism. You can be a hopeful homeschooler! God uses all for good and can transform all of your stress, fears, shortcomings, and successes to create the best plans for your family. 

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine. In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Dumbing Us Down and to keep this classic current, we are renewing the cover art, adding new material about John and the impact of the book, and a new Foreword.
The Exhausted School: Bending the Bars of Traditional Education
These 13 essays, presented at the 1993 National Grassroots Speakout on the Right to School Choice, illustrate how education reform actually works. Written by award-winning teachers and their students, these essays present successful teaching methods that work in both traditional and nontraditional classroom settings. “Gatto’s voice is strong and unique.” — Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul
A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
In 1991, shortly after receiving both the New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year Awards, John Gatto resigned to begin a new career as an education reform advocate. In this collection of 16 essays, Gatto analyzes the problems of American education and suggests solutions for revitalizing the system — prescriptions that run counter to current trends.
The Homeschooling Revolution
A readable, scholarly overview of the modern day homeschooling movement. Includes vignettes from homeschooling families, war stories, research information, media reaction, footnotes, and statistics.
Kingdom of Children : Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

More than one million American children are schooled by their parents. As their ranks grow, home schoolers are making headlines by winning national spelling bees and excelling at elite universities. The few studies conducted suggest that homeschooled children are academically successful and remarkably well socialized. Yet we still know little about this alternative to one of society's most fundamental institutions. Beyond a vague notion of children reading around the kitchen table, we don't know what home schooling looks like from the inside.

Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education--one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society.

Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so.

Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s.Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.

Why We Homeschool

It is a common misconception that most parents homeschool due to bullies, school shootings, or bad teaching content. While these things are important, there is a higher purpose for choosing to home education your children. Even if all those things were corrected, there are stronger reasons to stay committed to the homeschool model. So why do you homeschool? This book looks at the meaning and significance of a true Christian education. 

They're Your Kids: An Inspirational Journey from Self-Doubter to Home School Advocate

For many people, their schooling was uncomfortable, tedious, and sometimes a waste of time and energy. This book offers the idea that the public school system is tragically flawed and that we are able to do better for our own children. Sam Sorbo, mom of three and wife of actor Kevin Sorbo, took the leap into homeschooling and found the joy and success she was seeking. Included are strategies for working parents, those who are scared to take the leap, and anyone who wants the best for their children. 

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Featured Resources

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Free to Learn: Introducing Steiner Waldorf Earkt Childhood Education
Free to Learn is a unique guide to the principles and methods of Steiner Waldorf Early Childhood education. The author draws on kindergarten experience from around the world, with stories, helpful insights, lively observations and pictures. This insp...
Please Don't Drink the Holy Water
Susie Lloyd faces the trials and joy of raising a happy, active Catholic family.
Homeschooling: The Teen Years : Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 13- to 18- Year-Old (Prima Home Learning Library)
The teen years are when many homeschooling parents start to question or abandon their efforts. It's a precarious time, with challenging academics, pressing social issues, and the prospect of college looming. Parents can now breathe easy: this guide c...
Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School
Grace Llewellyn, author of the The Teenage Liberation Handbook, offers the stories of 11 teens who made the decision to reject traditional schooling methodologies and take their education into their own hands. The essays highlight offer a day-in-the-...
Considering God's Creation
Life science truly comes alive with this 270-page lap-book style notebook for 2nd-7th graders. A Charlotte Mason type discovery approach is easily implemented with creative activities, music and topical Bible studies, making this program a perfect ch...