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.
Community Outreach: Talking About Homeschooling
An Open Letter to My Non-Homeschooling Friends
It can be difficult for friends to understand the changes and challenges a homeschooling family faces. This mom shares her reasons for homeschooling and why her relationship with them is different now.
How To Use Social Media As A Learning Tool For Homeschoolers
Matching, out-of-date sweatsuits. The ability to recite lines from the Iliad in response to your peers’ discussion of a television show. Parroting your parents’ values. If you’ve paid attention to mainstream depictions of homeschooled children, these images are likely familiar.
Homeschooled kids get a bad rap and are too frequently associated with social awkwardness due to a perceived lack of socialization with their peer group. However, with the dawn of social media, more homeschooled students—both those who are being schooled by more “traditional” methods and those who are students are virtual cyber charter schools—are able to better connect with their peers and other members of the homeschooling community.
Can Your Children Explain Why They Homeschool?
Every child is asked a thousand questions in his growing-up years. If that child happens to be homeschooled the tally rises to a million fairly quickly! You know how it is--you can't go through the check-out line in the grocery store without you and your children being riddled with questions. Homeschooled children are questioned by friends, by relatives, by people at church, by strangers, and occasionally by a TV reporter or a legislator. And sometimes well-meaning friends and relatives can't wait to get your children alone so they can find out what they really think and feel.
You will be doing your children and yourself a great service if you teach them how to handle questions in a graceful, confident, knowledgeable way.
Homeschooling Goes Mainstream
A transcript for an appearance by Celeste Land on the Kojo Nnamdi Show where she discussed the homeschooling movement. Celeste is VaHomeschoolers' Director of Government Affairs. The program touched on the many and varied reasons why families choose homeschooling, from concerns with the school environment to a desire for a tailored educational approach or a wish to keep the family at the center of a child’s upbringing. The show also addressed a common stereotype of homeschoolers by pointing out that while many families that choose home education consider their faith to be a very important part of their lives, homeschooling families come from diverse religious backgrounds, and religious homeschoolers do not necessarily choose homeschooling for religious reasons. A great example of how to interact with the media for a positive discussion about home education. Also available via podcast at Homeschooling Goes Mainstream.
How the Media Gets It Wrong About Homeschooling
Homeschoolers have gotten their share of bad coverage in the media and in popular culture in the last few years. The publicity on homeschooling runs from atrocious mischaracterization to humorously stereotypical.
Thirteen Ways to Help Your Library Help Homeschoolers
If you’re looking for a way to provide a service for homeschoolers in your community, consider becoming a liaison between your library and homeschoolers. Create activities and events for a homeschool audience. Help establish a homeschool resource center within the library. Coordinate with the library to have a Homeschool Day. Help the library find volunteers. Be an intermediary between the homeschool community and the library. And support your library's budget needs.
Marketing to Homeschoolers with Social Media
How homeschoolers interact with social media. Myths about using social media for marketing to the homeschool audience. Social media preferences for the homeschool market.
Homeschooling Advocacy Step by Step
Advocacy is for everyone. Any concerned parent can become an advocate for homeschooling freedoms. And so can you. This series of five articles will walk you through the steps you can take to become an effective advocate for homeschooling in your community.
Targeting a Message: Homeschoolers and Social Media
Homeschoolers are actually not the easiest marketing targets in general. You might think that we are such a specific subset of the population that we basically have a marketing bullseye on our foreheads, but the truth is that people homeschool their children for such a wide variety of reasons that figuring out where we are coming from can be a full-time job in itself. The one thing homeschoolers DO have in common is their belief that by homeschooling, they are providing a customized education for their child.
Homeschoolers and Public Libraries: A Synergistic Relationship
Homeschoolers are commonly heavy users of their local libraries. Libraries can become educational hubs for homeschoolers by providing programming, information, and events. Homeschoolers can help libraries by advocating for libraries and urging lawmakers to support these vital institutions in their communities.
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 inspiring book will interest parents, educators, and early years education students. It is up to date, comprehensive, and contains many illustrations, including a 16-page color section. Lynne Oldfield invites you to explore Steiner Waldorf kindergarten...
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 calms the teen-time jitters and even offers hope to those just turning to homeschooling now that their child is about to enter high school. With brief "how we did it" testimonies from other parents sprinkled throughout the book, author Cafi Cohen offe...
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-life look at teen homeschooling and unschooling, as the teens embraced self-education and increased in their self-confidence and motivation.
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 choice for a homeschool family or a classroom. It may be used as a stand-alone science course or as an invaluable supplemental resource for any other program.