Customer Reviews

Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days: Share a Day With 30 Homeschooling Families

5 star:		(14)
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I'm extensively researching homeschooling as have been considering educating my now 3-year-old this way when the time comes. This is by far the most exciting and inspiring thing I have read on the subject. Any doubts I had about homeschooling were taken away by this book. I loved reading about a day in the life of different homeschoolers and then there were updates from a year or so later to see how things were going and what had changed with each family. The book confirmed what I knew in my heart - that homeschooling is for us! It helped me realize that there are many ways to homeschool and the joy is in finding what works for your family and your children and growing and learning together as you go along. I'm looking forward to the next book by this author, which is coming out a few months from now!

If you're trying to decide if you want to homeschool your children, this is a great book to help you decide. I had read several HOW TO HOMESCHOOL books, but still did not know if and how homeschooling would work for us. This book let me peek in on homeschooling families, and thus I was able to take bits and pieces from each family and make it work for us. It was great fun to read about the MANY ways to homeschool and the MANY types of homeschooling families. This book is a wealth of information if you still don't quite grasp how homeschooling works on a day to day basis.

This book dedicates each chapter to a family telling how they spend their day, practically every minute of it. After reading many books and magazines about homeschooling, I still didn't quite understand how people spend the time during their day (until I read this book). This book is unique in that it explains so much of what I found missing in other books. At the time I read this book my oldest child was two years old and I planned to homeschool but still had a sense of vagueness about things such as: how much time do they actually spend teaching their child, or how much time the child works with a curriculum on their own. I wondered how many people use outside structured classes or how they actually manage to keep their house clean and how mom can serve up three meals per day?

Being a fan of the reality TV shows and biographical books, I like to see how people live and how they interact. I am curious about not only what a family chooses to do, but why, and how it is working out. I enjoyed the book because of the detail. I liked reading about why the family chose to homeschool and to what extent are they enjoying the experience. I also appreciated the comments about different teaching methods, books, and curriculum and which works for various children and why.

As I read these it seemed to me that many of the families discussed religion a lot. I went back and counted and found that is was a 50/50 split: half mention religion as being a daily part of their life and for some, the reason they homeschool, and the other half never mention it.

Most of the families' custom design their curriculum by choosing various curricula or by using non-textbook books. Some unschool and some use a school-in-a-box.

Some things I learned from reading this book was that there is no one right way to learn, no one right way to homeschool, and that flexibility is key. I also learned what I don't want to do as we homeschool (such as setting an alarm clock to wake up before my/our bodies are ready and to use a structured time schedule). I saw that some families self-imposed scheduling of formal learning really stressed them out, giving them a sense of despair if they didn't keep to their planned schedule. I also gleaned insight about how some families with four or more children actually live and homeschool: something that has always amazed me!

I think the author did a great job trying to capture a true day in the life of these families. It is clear she tried to represent religious homeschoolers, unschoolers, eclectic homeschoolers, etc. The number of children per family ranges from one to many. The role of the father is always mentioned. The location of the residences ranges from city to suburban to rural.

This was great fun to read and I did appreciate the details! The book also has a smallish font and little space in the margins: it is packed full! This book made me realize that although we may use the same books or curriculum, or may be unschooling, there is still no one way that each family moves through their day.

There is a sequel to this book that contains new families stories and a five-year follow up on some of the families featured in this book. It is called "Homeschool Open House" and is very similar to this book but is longer in page length and in the number of families represented.

As a parent who has had family and non-family members homeschool 'at our house', I found the subject of discipline came up often. <"Oh! Please! Can't I just take a 2 hours break today?"> Frankly, I didn't know how to handle this without causing an unseemly scene - now - I do. Thanks to this excellent book, I can keep Joy in our homeschool once again. Thanks, Nancy Lande, you are a life-saver for : > ) a frazzled Mom.

I'm the author of the chapter Never O'Clock. When I was asked to contribute to this project, I thought it was a good idea. When I saw the completed book, I decided it had been a GREAT idea.

Nancy Lande did a wonderful job putting the stories together. She gracefully editted the contributions, and anyone reading these thirty stories will come away with her central message: there is no one right way to do homeschooling. These thirty families are each "doing it the right way," even though they are doing it 30 different ways.

If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall--if you wonder, "What do homeschoolers DO all day?" or "Why homeschool when you can send your kids to school free and have the public school take care of it?" then read these days-in-the-life stories. They will surprise you. Some of them will leave you thinking, "I could never do it that way," but others will let you see a vision of what just might be possible for your family, too....

"Probably all homeschoolers wish they could just take a peek into other homeschooling families' days. How do they do things? How do they move through the day? How do they organize themselves? (Or, is anyone else disorganized like me sometimes?) We meet one another at homeschool support group meetings, we visit one another at our homes, and we talk and talk and it's a wonderful support. But that chance to really see what happens on a real day at someone else's home--that's something we all can only long for. Nancy Lande's wonderful collection of real days from homeschooling families of all stripes can give us that opportunity. And the title is really apt, as this spectrum of days is almost a crazy quilt of different homeschooling styles and strategies." Susan Richman Pennsylvania Homeschoolers

This is my very favorite homeschooling book out there. When she wrote this book she filled a need! Lots of homeschooling books give you generalized info but what you really want to know is what is it REALLY like? Theories etc. etc.....but come on....what do they REALLY do all day????? Am I normal? Am I doing it wrong? From the time they wake up until they go to sleep how do they do it? This book gives in almost unreal detail front to finish "a day in the life" of homeschoolers. A book similar to this is called "Homeschooler's Success Stories" and it does not give even 1/6 of the same type of examples. This book gives quadruple the amount of examples and it is not about famous people. It is about REAL people. I love this book. I never tire of it. I put it down and pick it up again. When you start to feel like you're not doing enough and you're not doing it right pick up that book! I can't say enough about it!!! This book made me realize I could homeschool my daughters.

Normally, it's not easy to get an inside view of how families handle discipline, daily routine, structure, and meeting the needs of children. This book goes into the hearts and homes of lots of families and is helpful even if you don't want to homeschool, but just need some inspiration and/or new ideas of how to handle everyday situations

As someone considering homeschooling and not knowing many who did, it was hard for me to have a "vision" for how families did it - what did they do all day?? A homeschooling friend gave me this book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It really gave me a feel not just for how different families approach homeschooling, but how I could - there's a lot of very practical ideas from very varied perspectives. I would imagine it would be beneficial also for someone currently homeschooling who is looking for some fresh ideas. I appreciated the many references to materials and comments on them. I recently got Mary Pride's books and am now going to go back to this book and see what worked for different families (looking in particular at the materials used by the familes I identified more with).

"Nancy Lande's book gathers together the experiences of so many individual ways of homeschooling that it manages to capture the essence of the unique and flexible nature of homeschooling. This is the book I would have wanted to read so many years ago to explore the possibilities of how different families go about homeschooling. I know that those reading this book will be inspired to make family the core of education." Jo-Anne Beirne, Homeschoolers Australia