Homeschoolers and Poetry

Homeschoolers, teachers, and poetry lovers will appreciate Susan Thomsen’s Poetry Foundation article, “Home Appreciation,” about how homeschoolers are using poetry in their studies. The article includes recommended titles as well as suggestions for how to develop and nurture children’s interest in poetry. It also includes a few quotes from yours truly.

A Good Start: The Less-than-$150 Homeschooling Collection

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 [...]

Updated Curriculum Kit Listing

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.

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 4: Processing and Circulating Kits

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 [...]

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 3: Resources to Help You Pull It Together

Selecting materials to create kits in subject areas you may or may not know much about can be a challenge. You can feel free to copy our kits, but I’d bet a fair number of the items we chose are already out of print. Here are some resources I’ve found helpful when designing curriculum kits.
Children’s [...]

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 2: Deciding Which Topics to Cover

Once you’ve decided to create curriculum kits, your first priority will be figuring out what topics to cover. Here are some things to consider:

What is the homeschooling community looking for? You may want to gather information through surveys or focus groups. Curriculum kits are a significant investment of time and money, so you want to [...]

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 1: What Is a Curriculum Kit?

One of the most successful and interesting things we did as part of our 2005-2007 NYS Parent and Child Services Grant was to create curriculum kits. We had homeschoolers in mind when we designed the kits–and homeschoolers are loving them–but the excellent news is that they’re also being used by teachers, tutors, and families of [...]

For the Love of Literature by Maureen Wittmann

Wittmann, Maureen. For the Love of Literature: Teaching Core Subjects with Literature. La Grange, KY: Ecce Homo Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-9797609-9-7. (Available from Ecce Homo Press and Amazon.)
I know Maureen through cyberspace. I put her on my blogroll early in the process of researching and writing Helping Homeschoolers in the Library. I interviewed her here, [...]

Subject Kits for Homeschoolers

I did a presentation on homeschooling at the New York Library Association Conference in Buffalo yesterday, and one thing that came up are the subject kits we created as part of our 2005-2007 NYS Parent and Child Services Grant. Several people were interested in a listing of the kits we created along with the contents [...]

Interview with Carol Barnier

I first became aware of homeschooling mother, author, and speaker Carol Barnier when I attended a presentation she gave on a game she developed to teach children how to read at the 2006 LEAH Convention at the NYS Fairgrounds in Syracuse. I was struck by her commonsense, easygoing, and humorous approach to speaking and educating [...]