Can you recommend a homeschooling program, where does one start ?

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A friend of mine wants to start homeschooling her highschool age daughter and has no idea where to begin, we live in Missouri. Do you know of any good program material? Are there laws, requirements, etc and how would one find these things out ?

Thanks Norah

-- Norah A Johnson (Rockinhorse@knoxy.net), August 27, 2001

Answers

Excel is the name of the program . and it can be purchesed at the local walmart

-- Lee (sgrmtndrone@yahoo.com), August 27, 2001.

HSLDA has info on the laws for each state. There is also a very good curriculum called the Robinson curriculum as well as many others. If you email me I can send you some web sites.

-- Kathleen (krob777@msn.com), August 27, 2001.

John W. Whitehead, head of HSLDA has published a book called "Home Education: Rights and Reasons." I am quoting here from the Appendix, where each state's laws are explained.

"MISSOURI: In Missouri, home schooling attendance which complies with statutory requirements satisfies the state compulsory attendance law. A "home school" is defined as one with: a primary purpose of private or religious-based instruction; student age between seven and seventeen, with no more than 4 unrelated students participating; no tuition fees charged for instruction per calendar year given in subjects "consonant with the pupil's age and abilities."

"The parent is required to keep records of activities, subjects taught, samples of the child's school work, and evaluations of the child's progress which are evidence of regular instruction. The parent has the option of reporting home school attendance."

Now, I have also read what HSLDA says about Virginia statutory law concerning homeschooling, and it mentions nothing about a very widely used loophole: religious exemption. I myself homeschool under the religious exemption law, and am not required to keep records of any kind, nor am I required to test the children. Once I notify the school board of my intent to school at home, based on my personal religious beliefs, they are required by the law to grant me approval. From that point on, it is as though my children do not exist to the local school board.

I would get a copy of the Missouri laws concerning home schooling, and see if there isnt a referrence to an earlier religious exemption which may remain on the books. If it is there, you are free to take advantage of it. (Of course, that is if you qualify.)

-- daffodyllady (daffodyllady@yahoo.com), August 27, 2001.


Thank you all for the info, I will pass it on to my friend and let her take it from there. I am soooo glad I finally discovered the forum, I have subscribed to Countryside for about 4 years and my partner and I both scramble for it each time a new issue arrives. Sometimes I win!!! I hide it !!

Norah

-- Norah A Johnson (Rockinhorse@knoxy.net), August 27, 2001.


I really would not advise using the Robinson cirriculum for high school. If college bound the kid needs four good years of science, math, and English, at least three years of history/social science. Check the general graduation requirements for Missouri and plan to meet or exceed them.

In general, Saxon is good for math, but you will need a separate geometry course if you have not been using Saxon since early middle school.

Depending on available resources, there a couple of universities offering correspondence or online high schools. The local homeschooling fair on Saturday featured Indiana University -- which is not all that far away from us.

http://scs.indiana.edu

Some community colleges may also allow high school juniors and seniors take their classes for high school or even college credit. Check around your community colleges, small colleges and branches of major universities.

Clonlara also offers a more open ended homeschool high school experience, that allows a large degree of self direction for the motivated student.

http://www.clonlara.org/

Welcome to the adventure,

Sara in In

-- Sara (urthmomma@aol.com), August 27, 2001.



Hi, I homeschooled my two children all the way through grade and high school. When they got to high school age I enrolled them with a school call Sycamore Tree. They required quarterly reports along with samples of class work and had the kids meet certain requirement. At the end of our time the kids got diplomas. They are an excellent program and very helpful. My kids wanted the diploma versus a GED. The quarterly reports were good motivation to get their work finished and the reports were analyzed and gave helpful comments for the future. I recommend them highly. You are still in control as you get to pick from a variety of courses and books to use. Their website is www.sycamoretree.com. God bless and good teaching! Nancy

-- Nancy (nannyb@huntel.net), August 28, 2001.

A really good homeschool board is

www.vegsource.com/homeschool

-- Tracey (trjlanier@cs.com), August 29, 2001.


We have used the Sonlight Curriculum. They are located in Littleton, Colorado and can be found on the web at: www.sonlightcurriculum.com. They interweave the subjects together somewhat and use a lot of reading literature. They are a Christian Homeschool company. We really enjoyed them.

-- Jim Deweese (jedeweese@juno.com), August 29, 2001.

Read 'Homeschooling for Excellence', by David and Micki Colfax. We are using the Robinson Curriculum with our 8 year old and are very pleased, we also integrate some of the principles from the above book. My husband's son grew up using Saxon Math. Later he went to public high school but commented that had he not learned with Saxon math, he would not have understood the operations as well or been as interested in the subject. He took the advanced SAT and got a perfect math score and is now doing very well in college.

-- Rebekah (daniel1@itss.net), August 29, 2001.

I would recommend the book, "The Highschool Handbook", by Mary Schofield. It covers what you need to know to homeschool the high schooler. I definitely recommend Saxon...though I beg to differ with the poster who said that you will need an additional geometry course. I cannot find my Saxon catalogue right now, but it says in it that they intersperse geometry into their Algebra II and Advanced Mathematics courses, so that after you have completed those two courses, you have also had the equivalent of 1 year of Euclidean Geometry, and you can list that on the child's transcript, too. We also use Abeka's video courses for foreign language and the high school sciences.

-- Loretta Flood (aorlflood@cs.com), August 30, 2001.


Thank you all for the useful information. I gave my friend a printout of all the responses so she can take over now. She was thrilled and had tears in her eyes as she could not believe that so many people had responded.

Thanks again, Norah

-- Norah A Johnson (Rockinhorse@knoxy.net), August 30, 2001.


University of North Dakota has an excellent program for high school.

-- Linda Al-Sangar (alsangal@brentwood-tn.org), September 02, 2001.

I had a very bad experience with Clonlara, and don't recommend them or their "curriculum".  There is no real reason to pay a "homeschool" school such as Clonlara anyway.  You can design and use your own curriculum, you don't have to pay somebody else for one.

There are several homeschooling organizations, and I subscribed for years to the excellent newsletter put out by John Holt, Growing Without Schooling.  It's at Growing Without Schooling.  Kept the subscription going even after we were no longer officially homeschooling.

Someone mentioned the HLDA.  This is a christians-only organization.  If you're christian and a stay at home mom with a husband, you probably won't have any problem with them.  If you're NOT christian, and/or you have ANY sort of life style that could be viewed as "alternative", forget them - they won't help you and they'll likely make you feel bad to boot.  As a divorced, working, non-christian woman, I got the cold shoulder from those folks major-big-time.  I was refused membership for being non-christian, working during the day and homeschooling in a non-approved fashion (eg I wasn't home all day with my son, we did our school work in the evenings and on weekends when I wasn't working), my ex was Hindu, and I was divorced.  Although there was clearly some conflict there over my ex being Hindu - it was as if they were torn between disapproving of me for being divorced, and being relieved I had dumped the pagan.  LOL!  They even went so far as to suggest to my that I had better "review my lifestyle choices".  They more or less told me they would never consider allowing an unfit parent such as myself to join their organization.  I guess I was unfit because I was divorced.  They were real insulting, but not real clear.  Wish I still had the letters I got from them.

Missouri is pretty easy about homeschooling.  Lots of folks do it.  Do a GOOGLE search on +homeschool +Missouri and you should come up with a ton of useful links.  I hs'ed in Puerto Rico, and it was almost ten years ago, so most of my HSing links are out of date.  I notice John Holts website (Growing without Schooling, newsletter link is above) no longer sells books and materials, and they were my favorite HSing resource.  Oh well.  Hopt that helps.
 
 

-- Sojourner (notime4@summer.spam), September 02, 2001.


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