http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1359

www.fromoldbooks.org

It is called A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales by Jonathan Nield, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.  Wow!  It makes me want to clear my schedule and just read for the next three years.  Mr. Nield has even included a special section at the end covering recommended literature for youth.  The only problem is he stopped the list at the 19th Century and I was trying to find books about the early 20th Century.

Never mind that - it's still a great resource!

To begin with, it's wonderful snuggling up on the couch or outside on a blanket, reading piles of delightful children's books.  Every day - not just before bed - read to your kids and enjoy the expressions on their faces and the comments they make.  Don't make them hold still.  They can roll on the floor, play with blocks, draw or do whatever quiet thing they like and still enjoy the stories - but they will usually want a front-row seat to see the illustrations.

Eventually your child will want to know what you are doing when you read.  They may ask questions about letters or words - then you know they are ready to start learning.  Not all kids are ready at the same time and it has nothing to do with intelligence so don't worry about it.  In fact, I am fairly convinced that many of the so-called reading disabilities (apart from genuine dyslexia) are caused by forcing kids to read before they are ready.  For more info on this, read Raymond and Dorothy Moore's excellent book, Better Late Than Early.

When your child is genuinely ready - chomping at the bit to learn how to read - you don't need a complicated series of phonics workbooks and flashcards.  Just start with something simple like, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. You could always ramp it up later if necessary.

My first son learned to read at the age of six during his brief few months at school, so I missed it.  My second son Aengus was ready to read by the age of five.  He was already puzzling out road signs and other print in his environment and had somehow learned the alphabet but I don’t remember how (maybe from his older brother).  So when I sat down with him and the 100 Easy Lessons book he was eager to learn.  The sessions were nice and short, with engaging illustrations.  Aengus learned enough in the first 50 lessons to start reading real books.  We stopped the reading lessons there because he figured out the rest all on his own.

My daughter wasn’t ready to read until the age of seven.  Before then, she lived in her own daydreamy world of play and imagination.  She loved to be read to, but had no interest in reading for herself.  Due to feelings of parental anxiety, I started using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with her when she was six.  She liked the book and didn’t mind the short sessions so she acquired some very basic phonics skills.  I also introduced her to the BOB books for beginning readers and she LOVED those.  After about Lesson 45 of the “100 Easy Lessons” she asked to drop that book and just read BOB books with me.  That’s what we did.  As her fluency improved I checked out other easy readers from the library.  She stayed in beginner/phonics mode though until she was nine.  That was when she seemed to catch the reading bug and start reading naturally instead of laboring over every word.  I honestly believe that I could have simply waited until she was nine to teach her phonics and she would have learned to read in a matter of months instead of years.  Instead, I was too busy worrying about what the neighbors would say if they knew my eight year old couldn’t read!

Even after your kids have learned the phonics involved with reading on their own, it's still important to snuggle up on the couch with Mom or Dad and a good book.  We plundered the library every other week and came home with stacks of books!  We also checked out every “Book on Tape” we could find and listened to them in the car.  This was an excellent way to introduce the kids to a new author or series they were hesitant to read on their own.  My oldest son loves fantasy stories but I couldn’t interest him in the Redwall series by Brian Jacques.  Then I found the first book of the series on tape – not just read by one narrator, but dramatized with a complete cast of voices.  After listening to that, Jesse was hooked and promptly plowed through the rest of Brian Jacque’s books. 

Books on tape (or CD nowadays) are also good for squeezing classic literature into a busy schedule.  We spent a lot of time driving – to classes, park days, choir and music practice, field trips, sports, errands, etc…  The time flew by when we were listening to “Peter Pan,” “The Railway Children,” “James and the Giant Peach” or “Anne of Green Gables.”  Many times we sat in the driveway with the engine running – not wanting to go inside until the chapter was over.

Listening to good stories builds a taste for literature and an ear for language.  It helps kids want to read more because reading is supposed to be fun - not work.  And teaching reading should be fun too.  If you find that it is too stressful, you're probably over-doing it.  If you fear that your child may have a genuine reading problem then it is perfectly OK to get outside help.  One great book to check out first is A Mind at a Time by Mel Levine, M.D.

I was reading Marden's book, Making Life a Masterpiece, originally published in 1916, and the following excerpt caught my eye:

"The real problem of education is how best to show youth its possibilities, how to arouse its latent energies, how to give the boy and girl a picture of the highest possible self, how to stimulate its growth and development.  The pumping of facts into a pupil's brain, the teaching him by reiteration and imitation, filling his mind with facts and theories and rules, is not education.  It is merely mental stuffing.  The real education is evolution, calling out what is in the mind, developing it, exercising the mental faculties until they become vigorous and strong enough to seize, to grip and to hold.

The teacher who by encouragement and inspiration leads youth to self-discovery is the greatest of all educators."

Marden goes on to give examples of mentors and powerful personalities who inspire others to discover their own latent abilities and interests.  Young lawyer Wendell Phillips was inspired to fight for civil rights after hearing William Lloyd Garrison depict the horrors of slavery.  Emerson inspired a generation of idealists.  Daniel Webster inspired future orators.  Theodore Roosevelt captured the imagination of young Americans who dreamed of bold action.

Marden recommends:

"The degree of our achievement depends, to a certain extent, upon the accident of coming across the right stimulus, which arouses our ambition or awakens dormant faculties.  I have ofen heard successful men say that if it had not been for a certain thing which happened in their career they would probably never have been anything like as successful as they were.

If possible, get into an ambition arousing, stimulating environment.  You will be surprised to find how such an environment will stir you to redouble your efforts, will awaken your slumbering powers and spur you on to renewed endeavor.

People who seclude themselves from their kind, who do not care to meet others, who do not wish to move out of the familiar routine, people who get in a rut, make a great mistake."

He advocates travel, meeting new people, conversation, reading good books.  I love this!  Sounds like a New Year's plan to me.

There were also various forms and letters of recommendation to request from my son's other teachers/mentors, and LOTS of essays to write (all of the schools had different essay prompts).  I will definitely be starting this process earlier in the year with my next two kids.  In fact, I'm starting now.

One of the benefits of this experience has been learning how to use my "HomeSchool Tracker" software better.  I've been using it for about four years, and each year I seem to get a little better with organizing its myriad features.  But when it came time to print a transcript report, I couldn't get it to include everything it was supposed to include, and finally figured out why.

For the benefit of readers who may also use HS Tracker - take the time to read the "help" files thoroughly and set the database up properly at the beginning of each year.  It takes a lot of time at first, but will pay off in the end!  I originally learned to use the "Resources" list, "Lesson Plans," and "Assignments."  But I realized too late that I should have been creating "Courses," within subject areas.  I never really understood the need for "Courses" when I was getting along fine with "Subject" and "Lesson Plan."  Now I get it - and it would have made transcript time much simpler.  Also, you have to use the "Assignment" feature and check off when things are accomplished or else none of your student's work will show up in your end-of-year reports.

Another word of advice:  include your student when you make lesson plans, schedules, course descriptions, etc... on HS Tracker (or any planning method).  This gives them ownership of their education and lets them see their work recorded for posterity.  Show them how to fill in their reading lists and journal entries.  And if your student has a self-designed course, ask them to create a Lesson Plan for the semester, which will be the basis for their assignments (to themselves).

I never used to read biographies, unless required by school.  I remember an assignment in High School where I was supposed to write a report about any person of my choice.  Scanning the biography shelves of of my school library, it seemed like I didn't know any of the names except for founding fathers or movie stars, so I decided to pick a book at random.  It was about Aristotle Onassis.  Whew!  What a life - and what an eye opener for a small prairie-town girl to read about a worldly, multi-millionaire business mogul.  It made an impression on me far beyond any history textbook or lecture I heard in the classroom.

For some reason, I didn't read biographies again until many years later when I picked up my education again after college.  Since then, I've learned so much!  Never mind the occasional factual errors or image distortions, there is so much context surrounding a single person's life, that we can learn a lot about their place and time.  I've learned about Tin Pan Alley, the Gilded Age, New England mill towns, the Chicago World Fair, houseboating on the Nile, ranch life in New Mexico, British boarding schools, the Boxer Rebellion in China along with hundreds of other things.

I've also learned about the politics, people, technology, customs and concerns of the times these people lived, especially when one life overlaps with another biography I've read.  It's a terrific way to learn history.  But I have found that one biographer's interpretation of events does not necessarily match another author's version.  For very controversial figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt, it's quite interesting to read and compare conservative vs. liberal leaning biographies, or old vs. new biographies (newer biographies of political leaders have access to newly unclassified documents).  I also like to scan the sources they used.

This year, my sons and I were trying to decide what to do for history since we've already done a cursory overview of most time periods.  I left it up to them what they want to dig into next and they decided to skip around, reading biographies of different people in different times.  My oldest son is in love with Shakespeare and theatre in general so he's captivated with stories about playwrights.  My second son is interested in science, business and technology so he's reading about inventors and entrepreneurs such as Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, the Google founders and Warren Buffett.

I think most people avoid biographies because they've only been exposed to those boring commissioned-for-school-libraries type books.  Instead, look for well-written labors of love.  If the children's section of your local library is light on biographies, try finding what you want online first then requesting it from your librarian.  Teens can often find good books in the adult section, but be aware that means they'll usually learn all about the love lives of their subject too.  Just wait till your 16 year old finds out Ben Franklin's thoughts on choosing a young vs. an older mistress!  It's probably no worse than what they see in the movies.

Fortunately, I've already been through 7th grade with my two older sons so I had a pretty good idea what would work with her.  My daughter and I first had a brainstorming session to see what she wanted to learn/do.  Her requests were:  more art, more history, no reading comprehension questions, "how things work," and creative book reports with posters, dioramas, etc... 

The site is owned by a homeschooling mother and librarian named Teri Ann Berg Olsen.  It appears that she was the original author of the list of famous homeschoolers that is now floating around the internet (without giving credit to her unfortunately).  She has been continually updating the list since 2000, so there are a LOT of names!

For a great list of famous self-educated people, see this site:  http://autodidactic.com/profiles/profiles.htm 

If you see anyone interesting on these lists, I highly recommend reading their biography.  It is so comforting to know that even great people are perfectly ordinary, with ordinary problems just like you.  It will give you courage - especially if you're questioning your decision to home school!