Home School Online

Many kids need help developing their writing skills of their children. Many homeschool parents find that teaching writing requires expertise and skills that they don’t have. It doesn’t help that kids tend to like what they’ve written adn are a little difficult about feedback.  .   Want some help to teach writing?   Time4Writing provides that help.   

Time4Writing is a set of online writing courses for students in high school, middle school, and elementary school. Each course last eight weeks and costs $99.  Additional students and the second course are less expensive.  

I’d like introduce to you an amazing online spelling website. At the simplest level, you can get practice spelling for spelling tests . There are a lot of useful spelling games (HangMouse, Word Search etc). Some of these games can generate printable spelling worksheets using your spelling List. And, there is a great TeachME function. But, going beyond the most basic spelling help, you can also access other people’s vocabulary and spellinglists. Do you want to integrate spelling and vocabulary work with your studies? No sweat, you can create and save your own lists for free. Or, use the existing lists. How’s this for an amazing list of free spelling and vocabulary lists. It’s unbeatable.

I read a post which got me thinking about the overall homeschool movement from a statistical point of view.

I’ve written before about a homeschool silent majority and that, despite the shrill tone of many websites, we’re mostly pragmatic people trying to do the best thing for our kids.  I’m going to solicit ideas on this topic.

Most homeschoolers seem to start in schools and decide to homeschool as a second choice when the schools don’t workout. They homeschool not out of principle but as a pragmatic problem solving move.  I’ve talked about them as accidental homeschoolers.

When i wrote on this, I cited the last in-depth report on homeschooling statistics that I’ve found, the National Center for Education Statistics Study of 2001. I organized their categories into principled vs pragmatic  and found the pragmatic group totals  61% of those surveyed. (There were 9% who had “other reasons” and 30% who were homeschooling for religious reasons.)

I’m now really curious about these questions.
1. Did most homeschoolers start in schools and then switch?
2. Would they have stayed in school if the experience had been better?

What do you think?