Slashdot Mirror
Home-Schooling and "Open Source" Materials?
Deagol asks: "After we registered our daughter for second grade yesterday at public school, I began to ponder (yet again) the question of homeschooling. There's certainly not a lack of sites out there about the topic, but I was surprised at the lack of public domain materials out there. I would think there'd more collections of public domain 'courses' since the K-12 core knowledge base is so stable and well understood. Sure, there are tons of places that will sell you kits of course materials, and quite a few home-schoolers who made their own courses (but only offer them for a fee). I assume there's more than a few homeschoolers out there on Slashdot. Are there any good sources of free home-schooling materials (including software) out there?"
As a former special ed teacher (in elementary, but also in high school for a while), I'd first suggest you ask yourself why you want to homeschool. I've worked with a number of homeschooled students. While I find that, in many cases, they are well educated, that does not make up for the social issues I see almost all of these students develop. Homeschooled students simply do not get the myriad of opportunities to interact with peers and authority figures that they would in school. In one school the valedictorian had been homeschooled for most of his life. When he graduated, he was not emotionally ready for college, and would not have been able to handle making all the personal decisions living away from home requires. He did not know how to interact wit hthe other students who frequently laughed at his attempts to "fit in." Now that I'm in the business world, I see he is also not someone I would want to hire. While homeschooling may have helped him academically, his social skills were so poor, I could not see him interacting well with other employees or working with a team in a beneficial way. He simply did not have the experience at interacting and working with people.
While I have seen some homeschooled students do quite well, the majority I've seen (both in and out of special ed) are too much like the student I described above to be a coincidence. The parents are so thrilled Junior is thinking like them and acting the way he's been told to act, they don't see this. The few students that did well had EXTENSIVE social activities (I mean way more than non-homeschooled students had), such as playing on a soccer team AND acting in community plays AND ballet going on all at once -- which often would also lead to burnout.
On the other hand, I have another point to help. Schools go through textbook adoption in cycles. For elementary, one year they're working on Language Arts, then Math, then Science, etc. See if you can work with other parents in the area that want to homeschool. As a group go to school districts in the general area and see if you can obtain used copies of books they're discarding when they adopt new books. Do this with private schools as well.
The curriculum is not as set as the question makes it sound -- there are constant changes in elementary education (the very fact that statement was in the question leads me to ask if the person who asked the question knows enough about learning and what teachers are actually doing when they teach to be an effective teacher -- reading, for example, is not an easy subject to teach effectively). I only taught for 10 years, but the way reading and language arts was taught in that time changed enough so I would not have wanted to use textbooks available at the beginning of that time 10 years later.
In addition to helping with the various legal hurdles some states impose on home-schoolers, the HSLDA also provides a clearing house for home-schooling information.
Another group you may find interesting is k12.com, which is an internet-based classroom for homeschoolers, founded by former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.
It is true that you won't find a great deal of actual courses freely available. The information being taught in any course/curriculum is public domain; you're paying for the time and effort it took for someone to arrange that information for you.
However, do you need actual courses? The information you're seeking *is* out there for free. It is possible to pull together a fantastic curriculum with little effort.
One book you should immediately look at is "Homeschooling Your Child for Free." I forget the author, but you can find it on the shelf at any Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. I found a copy at my local library. It is filled with free educational resources on every subject. If there are free courses available, this book will list them.
Another useful book is "Home Education Year by Year" by Rebecca Rupp. This book will walk you through pulling your own curriculum together.
There are literally thousands of free lesson plans for teachers on the web.
All of the phonics and reading materials I use to teach our kids can be found at the library. So far all of my science material has come from the web or libraries. My kids learn handwriting from worksheets I print off the web. Most of our citizenship and art projects come off the web too.
I did purchase math and history programs, but I could easily teach those subjects using free resources as well.
Finally, go grab any books you can find by John Taylor Gatto and John Holt. Anyone who is considering homeschooling should read what they have to say about education.
~medcalf's wife
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
They are also planning an International Children's Digital Library which looks like it could be a very interesting resource.
My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:
Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page