If you are thinking about homeschooling, there are a couple of things that you should probably do.  There are a lot of people in this area who homeschool, and homeschool for a variety of different reasons.  Find them and talk to them.  Ask what they do.  Ask how they do it. 

It’s actually not very hard to find local homeschoolers.  One group, Magnolia Home Educators, meets at the Main Branch of the Lafayette Public Library (appropriately enough in the children’s department) every month.  In December,  the meeting will be on Tuesday, the 11th, at 2 pm.  The topic is “Holiday Traditions”.  There will certainly be a number of people there to meet and talk to.

But there are other groups in the Lafayette area.  Holy Family Home Educators is the Lafayette area Catholic group.  The Christian Home Educators Fellowship is also based in Lafayette, as is the Family Fun Fellowship (I think that’s the name).  But there are also groups outside of Lafayette–in New Iberia and Abbeville and Opelousas, for example.  I will post contact people and websites as I gather them.  Keep checking the “Links” on this page for updated information.

 There are newsletters that go out to homeschoolers to keep them abreast of field trips, educational opportunities and community events.  I put together one of them, an e-mail newsletter called the F.R.E.E. SPIRIT newsletter, and if you are interested in it, please send an e-mail requesting to be put on the list to delennd@hotmail.com.  I will also post the addresses and contact people for the other newsletters as I gather them.

 Luckily, there are a lot of homeschooling books out there.  I started with John Holt’s Teach Your Own, How Children Fail and How Children Learn.  I read John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down.  Nancy Wallace’s charming autobiographical Better Than School: One Family’s Declaration of Independence helped me to understand that, as a parent, I would be able to tell what my child needed as well as a stranger would.  Homeschooling For Excellence, written by David and Micki Colfax, was one of the first of the homeschooling books that dealt with the (more or less) “unschooling” approach of child-led learning.  Raymond and Dorothy Moore’s books, like Better Late Than Early and Home Grown Kids, gave me confidence when I wondered whether the schooled kids were speeding beyond my children.  There are, of course, more books out there, and I’ll continue to list them as this goes on.

So I read, and continue to read, about others’ experiences with homeschooling–even as I grow in confidence that my children have prospered in our homeschool.  We have also met many of the local homeschooling families in the Lafayette area–a group of wonderful families who homeschool for varied and diverse reasons. 

We made our decision to homeschool when our oldest child was only 4.  We actually make the decision again every year.  Sometimes homeschooling is difficult and sometimes it is unmitigated joy; it is always worthwhile and never less than interesting.

Posted: December 6th, 2007 under Resources.
Comments: none