Here are the slides I’ll be using for my presentation at the Mid-Hudson Library System, “Serving Homeschooling Families,” tomorrow, Thursday, May 1 from 10am-Noon:
Many librarians I speak to tell me that they don’t have much money to devote to serving homeschoolers and feel overwhelmed trying to figure out where to start. With that in mind, I offer you my Less-than-$150 Homeschooling Collection. These are books that span a wide variety of homeschooling needs and should circulate and prove useful for a good number of years. Prices are retail and links are to Amazon, although most of the books are available from several other sources.
Bailey, Guy. The Ultimate Homeschool Physical Education Game Book. Camas, WA: Educators Press, 2003. ISBN: 978-0966972740 ($19.95).
Bauer, Susan Wise, and Jessie Wise. The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. New York: WW Norton, 2004. ISBN: 978-0393059274 ($39.95).
Cohen, Cafi. Homeschoolers’ College Admissions Handbook: Preparing Your 12- to 18-Year-Old for a Smooth Transition. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000. ISBN: 978-0761527541 ($17.95).
Duffy, Cathy. 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum: Choosing the Right Curriculum and Approach for Your Child’s Learning Style. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005. ISBN: 978-0805431384 ($21.99).
Field, Christine M. Homeschooling the Challenging Child: A Practical Guide. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005. ISBN: 978-0805430783 ($14.99).
Gathercole, Rachel. The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling. Denver: Mapletree Publishing Company, 2007. ISBN: 978-1600651076 ($14.95).
Holt, John. How Children Learn. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995. ISBN: 978-0201484045 ($16.00).
Wittmann, Maureen. For the Love of Literature: Teaching Core Subjects with Literature. LaGrange, KY: Ecce Homo Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0979760907 ($12.95).
On my way back from the PLA Conference a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be able to stop in Johnsburg, Illinois to visit one of the premier library homeschooling collections, Johnsburg Public Library District’s Homeschool Resource Center (HRC). Library Director Maria Zawacki and dedicated volunteer Kathy Wentz were kind enough to take a few hours to meet with me, show me around, and answer my questions. I profiled the HRC in Helping Homeschoolers in the Library, and I mention it in all my talks about homeschooling. Johnsburg is a small community; the library only serves about 12,000 people. Several years ago, Zawacki and Wentz (a homeschooling mother and science teacher) partnered to write a Library Services and Technology Act Grant, which they won, to turn one of the library’s study rooms into a center where anyone could find a wide variety of learning materials. Here are some photos of the HRC as it exists now. Today, the collection is heavily-used, and not just by homeschoolers. It is evidence of the success libraries can have when they think creatively and work collaboratively with the homeschooling community.
Over the next few weeks, I’m hoping to do an occasional series, “Tips from the HRC” to share some of what I learned on my visit. In the meantime, you can learn more about the HRC:
* “The Public Librarian’s Role in Serving the Homeschooled Student” by Johnsburg director Maria Zawacki in CBC Magazine
* “Homeschool Resource Center in a Public Library” by Johnsburg volunteer and homeschooling mother Kathy Wentz in Home Education Magazine
* “In a Class of Their Own” by Ann Slattery in School Library Journal
Recently, one of our WPL staff members did an analysis of the circulation of our curriculum kits (we call them “subject kits” here). I thought some of you who are considering creating kits of your own might be interested in the results. Click here for the analysis in PDF format. We put our first thirty kits into the collection two years ago, and we added the rest a bit at a time over the next year. The kits circulate for three weeks and are renewable. Overall, I’m really pleased with the way these are circulating. Even the kits with the lowest circulation are moving enough to make them worth the shelf space. I hope to be able to add even more kits to our mix over the next year.
[If you're interested in making curriculum kits for your library, be sure to check out my four-part Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.]
For those of you in New York State, this year’s upstate LEAH Home Education Conference will be held May 29-31 right here in Rochester. LEAH (Loving Education at Home) is an organization that supports conservative Protestant homeschoolers in New York State through education, information, conferences, and the formation of local support groups. In the past, their annual conference has been held at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse. I attended the conference a couple years ago, and it was most informative. I learned a lot about homeschooling from a conservative Protestant perspective, and the trade show proved to be a wonderful opportunity to find new materials for our homeschooling collection. I even saw some of our library patrons there. Even if you aren’t local to Rochester, there are probably some homeschooling gatherings going on somewhere near you, and attending them can be a wonderful learning experience.
Here are a couple links to get you started:
* 2008 Homeschool Calendar of Events on A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling
We recently updated our list of curriculum kits available in the Monroe County Library System. I thought I’d post it here as a PDF in case it’s a help to any of you trying to design kits of your own.
For those of you attending the PLA Conference in Minneapolis this year, I will be leading a Talk Table discussion about homeschooling on Thursday, March 27th from 10:30-11:45 AM. I’ll be bringing some resources from my library for people to take a look at, and I’m really looking forward to seeing who comes and what kinds of things they’ve been doing and want to discuss. I’ll hope to see lots of you there!
Public Libraries, the journal of the Public Library Association, is looking for essays about homeschooling for an upcoming “Perspectives” feature. Find more information here.
Thanks to Susan from Wizards Wireless for giving me the heads-up on this.
When I talk about curriculum kits, I get a lot of questions from librarians about how to process and circulate them. The best way to handle these issues is going to vary widely from situation to situation, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. That said, I’ll tell you some things I thought were imporant as we made decisions about processing at WPL:
1. Make the loan period for the kits at least as long as the loan period for books. The temptation is to give the kits a shorter loan period, one that might be more in line with the AV materials in the kit, but the kits contain a great deal of information and will take a family time to get through. If I could, I would make the standard loan period for these six weeks.
2. Make sure the packaging is up to the job. We’re using the hanging bags from Janway that you see in the photo for our kits. They’re working out so far, but there is A LOT of weight in those bags. Sometimes I wish we had put them in clear plastic boxes, but I think the expense and amount of room they would have taken up would have been prohibitive.
3. Put a label on the kit that clearly lists each item in the kit in a large font. If you want to keep the kits complete, you should make it as easy as possible for patrons and staff to figure out what’s supposed to be in them.
4. Think of the patrons who will be searching for the kits when you create titles and catalog records. We titled all of our kits “Subject Kit–X,” so that when patrons do a title search on “Subject Kit,” they’ll wind up with an alphabetical listing of all the subject kits. We also created a couple of brochures patrons can access in print or electronically, one that lists just the titles/grade levels, and one that lists all the contents of every kit.
If that doesn’t answer all of your burning questions, feel free to post a question or two in the comments. I’ll be happy to respond.
They ran a blurb about Helping Homeschoolers in the Library today in our local newspaper. I’m not sure how long the link will stay live.
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