Tag Archives: Homeschooling for NON-Homeschoolers

Guest speaker: Homeschooling for Non-Homeschoolers

homeschool growth with copyrightCurious about homeschooling? Want to know facts instead of stereotypes? Need a program for your community group, education organization, university classroom, business forum, political association, or parents meeting?

Homeschooling 101: Homeschooling for Non-Homeschoolers is the perfect introduction to homeschooling for people who would like to get real information about homeschooling in Virginia and the United States.

If you’d like to hear about the new face of homeschooling, let’s work it out so I can speak to your group. We can talk about who is homeschooling, why people homeschool, statistics in Virginia and the U.S., approaches to homeschooling, homeschoolers’ relationships with and attitudes toward schools, and how homeschooling is one of the ways to fully meet the legal requirements for compulsory attendance in Virginia.

We can also talk about how businesses, libraries, community organizations, educational institutions, museums, and others can and do partner with homeschoolers.

Homeschoolers in Virginia, taken together, would amount to the eighth largest school division in The Commonwealth today, according to StatChat, produced by the Demographics Research Group at UVA.

Homeschoolers also tend to be highly engaged in their communities.

That’s a group worth knowing real facts about. The demographics of who is homeschooling, what their families are like, and their main reason for homeschooling are much different than the stereotype. I have crunched the numbers both for Virginia and the U.S., using well-respected sources. I have homeschooled from kindergarten through twelfth grade for 17 years in three states in eight different communities, work as a homeschool evaluator, and speak to many homeschooling families at conferences each year.

If you’d like an orientation to today’s homeschooling — and to understand how homeschooling parents engage their kids in learning — contact me to set up a lively presentation or consultation.

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Back from the VaHomeschoolers Conference

Thanks to all the folks who came out to the VaHomechoolers conference this weekend. During my Engaged Homeschooling session, I distributed printed handouts. To make it easy for you to read the articles and ideas I talked about, much of the information is included here on the pages of Engaged Homeschooling.

I’ll post soon about the Gallup poll on the level of student engagement in schools, which I mentioned near the beginning of our time together. I just got permission from Gallup to use their graphic here at Engaged Homeschooling. That’s the one where I had the whole audience stand up and then got a percentage of you to sit down, then another percentage to sit down, and so on — reflecting the percentage of students who become disengaged through elementary school, middle school, and high school, as determined by Gallup researchers. Look for that within a day or so.

I’ll continue to update EngagedHomeschooling.com, and I’ll start with responses to some of the questions you asked me at the conference.

I also enjoyed speaking about Phys Ed, Sports, and Homeschooling the Athlete, and presented a session called Homeschooling 101: Homeschooling for NON-Homeschoolers. After the session, I enjoyed following up with many of you, including some grandparents who came out to learn more about homeschooling at the request of their adult kids.

I was touched when one grandmom got a little teary, saying she wished she’d homeschooled her son — who is now homeschooling his own kids.

Thanks to those of you who shared your personal stories with me between sessions and asked your good questions after my talks. I always learn from talking with parents and kids at conferences, which helps me think of new ways to present homeschooling ideas.

Next year’s VaHomeschoolers conference: March 20 -21, 2015!