For those who didn't know already, buying a cow heart at the grocery store is not a cheap ticket to a great biology lesson. Turns out they just give you the parts people like to eat. No aeortas, chamber walls, nothin'. Still, five-year-old vegetarian she was, Z found it fascinating, cutting through muscle and fat with kitchen scissors and pushing blood around in the veins on the heart's exterior wall. Big discussion about blood and what it's for (review), what people eat when they eat meat (mostly muscles), the different kinds of muscles in the body, etc.

This picture would have been a lot funnier with Z in it. She was wearing her painting smock, which happens to be spattered all over with red paint, and wearing latex gloves. (Do they make those in kids' sizes?) Our dog had an excellent dinner tonight.

I get a lot of questions from parents who are considering homeschooling and just beginning their journey. We're just beginning our journey too (this is the year Z would have gone to kindergarten if she was attending public school) although we have known for years that we wanted to homeschool. Since Jeremiah and I tend to do a lot of reading, both online and in print, to support whatever project we happen to be taking on, we have collected a pretty substantial list of learning resources we have found very useful as we have begun homeschooling, and I wanted to share some of them with you - our favorite homeschooling books, forums, blogs, and websites - beginning today. The great thing about good homeschooling resources is that the activity-oriented books are also good enrichment resources any family can use, regardless of the context of their child's "main" education, so there should be something useful here for anyone who wants to better engage with their child on their learning path.

Getting started

These are the best homeschooling books we have read for the determining your goals and clarifying your perspective on the potential and challenges of homeschooling as you decide if this option is right for your family.

Teach Your Own by John Holt. if you're only going to read one introductory homeschooling book, it should be this one.

Understanding Waldorf Education: Teaching from the Inside Out by Jack Petrash

The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith

The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling's Most Respected Voices by Linda Dobson

Homeschooling: The Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3- to 8-Year-Old Child by Linda Dobson

Books for homeschoolers and public school families

These books have learning ideas useful for any family, whether it is for homeschooling or to supplement education that occurs outside of the home. We have and love the first three titles, and are very interested in and have heard good things about the other three.

The Complete Home Learning Source Book: The Essential Resource Guide for Homeschoolers, Parents, and Educators Covering Every Subject from Arithmetic to Zoology by Rebecca Rupp

Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-child Relationships from Reaction and Struggle to Freedom, Power and Joy by Naomi Aldort

Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen

Family Math for Young Children by Jean Kerr Stenmark

1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up by Julia Eccleshare

The Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas: 500+ Fun and Creative Learning Activities for Kids Ages 3-12by Linda Dobson

Internet resources

Here are some great web resources - forums and traditional web publications - for homeschooling families.

• Learning at Home and Beyond forum at Mothering.com - discussion groups for all different types of homeschoolers


• EclecticHomeschool.org


• DonnaYoung.org Homeschool Printables and Resources - This site has a ton of free printables - everything from lesson planners to math worksheets


• TheHomeschoolMom.com - More lesson plans and forms
  
• Home Education magazine site

Some of our favorite homeschooling blogs

We read a wide range of homeschooling blogs, and find great ideas on so many of them. But these are a few we have found that regularly provide us with inspiration, insight, and ideas into the art and habits of child-centered learning.

• 5 Orange Potatoes


• Camp Creek Blog


• Handbook of Nature Study


• Wee Folk Activities

Are you considering homeschooling, or homeschooling your children already? Do you have any favorite resources to share? Tell us in the comments!

Z has officially begun homeschooling, as Monday would have been the first day of kindergarten if she were attending school. We get a lot of questions about what homeschooling means to us, particularly since we are adopting a hybridized approach that encompasses some aspects of Montessori and Waldorf education but relies little on established curriculum and is generally more consistent with an unschooling approach. Rather than spelling out our overarching strategy or documenting our evolving educational philosophy, which may be irrelevant to parents whose children are in traditional schools, we thought it would be fun to share some of the activities and projects we do with Z, which you can easily do with your children in your time together, even to supplement and enhance a classroom-driven education.

Our target's for Z's first year of home education are loosely guided by our state's standards for kindergarten and first grade educational outcomes. Among them is a concern with basic organization and presentation of information in the form of graphs, which may sound crazy but is actually a lot of fun.

A couple of days ago while Z was playing with her collection of small plastic toys, for example, Jenni invited her to sort them by color, which she did with gusto for half an hour or so. Later she and I tallied the number of "friends" in each group, which ranged from two (black) to 19 (pink). This led to a discussion of how we could represent that information visually rather than with printed numbers, a significant improvement for someone who is still struggling with reading numbers, especially those with multiple digits. We ended up making a bar graph, with me showing her for the first time how we could label an x axis with the color groups (using colors themselves rather than text) and a y axis with markers for 5, 10, 15 or 20 items in the group. I didn't call them the x and y axis, mind you. Then we worked together to find the correct height of each bar, and she drew them and colored them in, first freehand and then, near the end, using a ruler she received at a science camp a few weeks ago. We had a couple of color decisions to make, too - the white group ended up represented by a gray colored pencil (white didn't show up at all on our paper) and the princesses, a special group not organized on the basis of color, adopted the color gold, for obvious reasons.


Z identified several things she wanted to add to the graph, including writing the number of friends in each group below the columns, drawing an icon representing each group at the top of their column, and making a line next to each bar indicating whether she felt it fell into the category of "a lot" of toys or "a few."

I led her through each step of this process, explaining how this would help us because when we had to put away the toys, combining her carefully separated groups into one jar, the chart would be a reference for anyone wanting to know how many toys she had in each color. My thinking is that we can do this again, with her taking more assertive control of the steps involved, now that she has been walked through the process. I'm also pretty keen to introduce the concept of simple Venn diagrams (species of "friends" and their colors would do the trick).

We spent some time afterwards discussing generalized observations about her collection of small toys that we were able to make by looking at the graph, and Z seemed quite confident that the graph was valuable to have on hand. This is probably because she frequently creates things with her toys and then is disappointed to have to put them away and "undo" her work. She insisted on posting the graph on the wall of her room, yet in a location that would not easily be seen by someone who had not been pre-approved. I guess this is the five-year-old version of a classified document.