Customer Reviews

Homeschool Open House

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Having decided to homeschool but needing a pep-talk, I chose this book because I wanted to know about the day-to-day of what homeschool life was like. This book was exactly the thing because it's like being a fly on the wall in 55 homes. The things I took away from it are: (1) homeschooling, however you do it, is as much work as you think it will be so get ready, and (2) there are infinite ways to homeschool so go ahead and craft a lifestyle that is right for your family-- your kids will learn and thrive even if you don't do it exactly like the curriculum specifies. A very inspiring, very useful, very truthful book. Buy it and recommend it to your friends!

In this sequel to "Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days," Nancy Lande has once again opened up the lives of homeschooling families so that anyone can see that homeschooling is not only doable, but being done, and being done very successfully. What is most valuable for the person who wants to know about homeschooling in general is that there are 55 families here, each using a somewhat different style of homeschooling, but each family seems to be getting along just fine. One family, in which the parents are both long-haul truck drivers, talk about their adventures "On the Road." Some of the families, such as in the "Never O'Clock" and "Teacher Didn't Shave Today" chapters (which are in the section of follow-ups from "Patchwork") are willing to talk warts and all.

There is a good balance of families that are religious, not so religious, and not religious at all. There are families that are more or less going it alone, and others that have teamed up with learning cooperatives or that take advantage of some part of a public school program. Only children; small families; big families; rural areas; big cities; working parents; single parents; the United States, Australia, Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom; extremely structured and very free and easy. It's all here!

Recommended to journalists who want an overview of homeschooling philosophy; families considering the homeschooling adventure; skeptical relatives; anyone who likes to eavesdrop on other people's lives!

This is a superb book for three groups of people: Anyone who's THINKING about homeschooling, anyone who is ALREADY homeschooling and anyone who wants to KNOW more about it. It gives a detailed look at 55 very different families who homeschool. The families have VERY different approaches. The author doesn't try to espouse one particular technique, rather, she lets the viewer see the realities of how homeschooling looks with the individual overlays of each unique home life. This is not sanitized; it's a honest view of how different families have made it work or are struggling to make it work. The author is not judgemental about the vast differences that occur among families, and she includes more than just the standard "conservative" perspective on the subject. Homeschooling is NOT for everyone and this book helps readers determine whether they're cut out for it, or gives new ways of handling challenges. The author does ask some penetrating questions in the first few chapters. The book is full of innovative ideas and specific techniques from families all over the world who share their hard-earned 'secrets' to the thorny problems that arise. I found it compelling and think this is a 'must read'.

"What's remarkable to me, besides the awesome task of envisioning, designing, organizing, interviewing, drawing, questioning, thinking, typing, and finally publishing, was that even thought the spine of the book and the research topic is about homeschooling (and does not really effect my life one way or another), I couldn't put the book down. It's so HUMAN. So BROAD. So interesting because it's about PEOPLE. Their dreams. Their 'ideas.' Their Day. But, mostly, I was in awe of the strength, resourcefulness and sheer revolutionary energy needed to go one's own way."

I'll keep it simple...if you liked Homeschooling:A Patchwork of Days, you will at least like, if not love, Homeschool Open House. Not only does it do a five year follow-up on the original homeschooling families, but it has interviews with many more homeschooling families, from Alaska to Zimbabwe, some with one child, others with seven. I was inspired by some families, while I cringed at some of the unschoolers' choices. I am certainly looking forward to the next five-year follow up!

If you're considering homeschooling, but have no idea how it might work on a daily basis, take a look at Homeschool Open House and Patchwork of Days. Even though I had a hard time relating to the families who chose homeschooling because of religious reasons (many of the featured families), I enjoyed their honest accounts of daily life. Both books give a great look into routines, philosophies, success and failures and, in Open House, how homeschooling has fared for them over the years. I especially enjoyed the accounts of non-American familes and Nancy Lande's family.

I wanted to say that one of the stories, story number two, specifically, called "On The Road", tells of homeschooling on an eighteen-wheeler. For those of you who read that one, I thought you ought to know that I'M A.J, now 12, writing this review in October of 2006. I stumbled across this story in this book when looking around a book shelf in our living room, in the summer. The story was written by my mom, Trish Dalton, and it was an interesting story, nonetheless, with a paticularly suspenseful conclusion, which ends our traveling on the truck. My mom still has back pains now or days, and whenever she has to bend down, I usually do it for her. Also, this story was NOT originally titled "On The Road". It was called "Travels with AJ", and I strongly approved of that. There WAS going to be a sequel written by my mom, called "Travels with AJ 2: A New Beginning", which was never written. I wrote some unprofessional short stories about our dogs and their traveling, but I never published them, because they stray away from the entire point of the first one, which is homeschooling on the road. The sequels were just about various adventures about the two interesting dogs, Lennie and Roadie, traveling. In 2002, we started doing a trucking company, but without eighteen-wheelers. We just used heavy-duty pickups. That ended pretty messy, too. My mom broke her neck in an Abilene, Texas accident, but she eventually healed. There were going to be sequels, yes, that COULD have been published, but you have to remember, I wrote them, and not only did they abandon the point of homeschooling on the road, but the stories eventually bent out of shape, with things like government conspiracies, and the Mafia. People wouldn't even see a link between them. Anyway, "Travels with AJ" was the original title, and the two sequels I wrote were: "Travels with Lennie", and "Travels with Roadie". I don't know if I ever thought about a prequel, going back to when my mom did truckdriving, before I was born. It could have been good, but it never happened. Maybe one of the reasons the first name was never used was because it too much resembled a different book, or TV show, I can't remember what it was, or what the title was. So, anyway, I wanted to comment on how I was the star of Homeschool Story #2 in this book, which also turns out to be a sequel, and I'm thinking there will be more sequels to this one, with many, many, many more homeschool stories, and it's always possible that "Travels with AJ" will be written as a graphic novel, by me, with those sequels.

Sign, Austin James "A.J." Dalton

As a person interested in himeschooling because of my own eprsonal experience that I have not learnt most of what I have from educational institutions, "Homeschool Open House" is a most welcome addition to a field of literature that, in relation to the number of homeschoolers active today in the United States and elsewhere, is not well represented.

Nancy Lande's first part of this series, Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days was less comprehensive but still provided some exceptioanlly touching stories of down-to-earth people who, as we see time and time again reading through the twoo books, manage to gain a great deal as a result of the flexible schedule provided by homeschooling. This flexibility is, as I see it, a critical virtue of homeschooling, along wiht the fact that it provides well-defined work for everybody within a family and values it in a way that can be described as very fair.

The families in the book are varied: some have only a single child, others five or six, but within "Homeschool Open House" there is, I should note, remarkably little of the religious motivation cited for homeschooling by people like Rod Dreher or Pat Buchanan. though many of the families do mention the Bible, it is always the routine, doctrinaire nature of public schooling that is so criticised by most families studied in both Lande's books.

There is a great many lovely little stories about exactly what these homeschooling families do during their daily routine - things like cooking and day-tours that I wish I could do more but which I can never discipline myself to do effectively. It is perhaps because of my envy of these things that I enjoy reading "Homeschool Open House" as much as I do when I am travelling in an aimless way around Melbourne on buses. Some of the work they do reminds me on a second look of the advanced Chemistry textbooks I would emorise when a young child - and then get chided by my minder for pointing out facts students in Year 9 are not supposed to know (like how the gas laws aren't really true for real gases).

All in all, I have found literature on homeschooling far too sparse for the curious and Nacy Lande has done an excellent job of showing the experience of so many families who practice this method of education.

I have read the first book, Homeschooling: A patchwork of Days, over and over every year. I was thrilled to see this follow-up with additional entries of other home schooling families.

As a homeschooling parent myself, I devour books on homeschooling. The idea of looking into a homeschooling day for many different families attracted me to this book. Some of the families are wonderful, showing the sacrifice and love that is involved in homeschooling. The children are thriving in a wonderfully rich cultural environment. Other families disturbed me, especially some of the unschooling ones. Their leave-and-let-bloom attitude looked to me as bordering on educational neglect. I saw mothers more worried about chores than about math. I saw kids more worried about their next TV show and with little structure. I saw too many hours gone by with little to account for. The parent that used the TV show WISHBONE to jot it down on her journal as having done "American Indian Legends" with her kids is blatantly disguising her children's educational experience. This book is a wonderful introduction to the homeschooling lifestyle but it can also be a powerful weapon for those in the educational establishment (myself as a teacher included) who are gearing their claws for attacking homeschooling. On the average, homeschooling children perform above their otherwise schooled counterparts but we also know that there must be exceptions. The book was interesting but it disturbed me as well.