Many people believe they can't homeschool because they are lacking some magical quality or skill successful homeschoolers have. The truth is that homeschooling can be done, and done well, by most ordinary people.Terrie Lynn Bittner's book will take you by the hand and show you how. She breaks the job down into doable chunks and carefully explains each part, giving you the confidence you need to get it done. Her explainations are clear and thorough.Down-to-earth and practical ... sensible and direct ... Designed to empower the novice toward home-schooling success, this book is friendly, reassuring and endlessly supportive ... like a very well-informed neighbor. (Publishers Weekly)In this honest and commonsensical book ... Bittner ... offers sound advice on legal issues, lesson plans, curricula, testing, teaching, values, preparing for graduation, and college ... This is an encouraging and helpful resource for parents considering homeschooling their children. (Booklist)

    With insightful commentary, she recalls her own trials as a student and teacher in our industrial, one-size-fits-all educational system. Then she encounters the needs of her young son. Finding a fit is like trying to stuff an odd-shaped child into a square hole. The love for her child propels her on a journey that sweeps her own children, and the children around her, into a learning environment driven by joy, exuberance and passion instead of heartbreak and defeat. Unable to read until ages nine and ten, they entered college at eleven and twelve, became systems administrators, chief technology officers, trained with the Berlin Opera and Hamburg Ballet, created digital images used in the film "Lord of the Rings," presented software solutions to TRW, Pac Bell, Industrial Light & Magic, NSA, Sony, and more, all before the ages of eighteen. The Call to Brilliance shows parents and educators how to redirect children's challenges into strengths, discover children's interests, fuel their interests into passions, and their passions into brilliance.

    For others, it's a boring, stressful, and frustrating waste of time. If your child is in the second category, why keep tormenting them? Instead, why not help them find an educational environment where they feel genuinely motivated, excited, and empowered?In this eye-opening book, Blake Boles makes the case for leaving conventional school and taking one of the many alternative paths through K-12 that exist today. He addresses parents' major concerns about unconventional education—Can my kids still go to college? Will they still be employable? How will they learn to work hard?—while highlighting the hidden benefits of self-directed learning, such as improved parent-child relationships, a more balanced decision-making process regarding college, and a heightened sense of autonomy and connection.Drawing upon 15 years of work as a mentor and guide for adolescents in alternative and experiential learning environments—as well as his own unconventional life path—Boles weaves together narrative, theory, and research to build a powerful argument for granting children unusual levels of freedom and responsibility.

    Homeschooling does not have to mean a crazy, busy life of too much to do, too much to buy, and too much to plan. You don't have to choose between excellence and sanity while homeschooling - you can have both! "Minimalist Homeschooling" will have you rethinking your priorities and your perspective to create a simple, focused, and meaningful homeschool based on the minimalist mindset and approach. Uniquely, "Minimalist Homeschooling" offers 15 thought-provoking worksheets so readers can purge their tasks, schedule, curriculum, and supplies with clarity and confidence. There IS a way for your children to learn MORE while doing less.

    Ivy is skint, single, and scared that she isn't a 'hot mess' any more - she's a walking disaster.But one night, Ivy switches her phone off, peels last night's drunken pizza off the sofa, and makes a list. A list that changes everything . . .The new Ivy has a proper job. She goes on fancy dates in wine bars. She's starting to think: maybe 'faking it till you make it' is easy?But then she meets Scott.Curly-haired, sarcastic Scott.Sh*t.

    The 128 lessons are self-explanatory and require almost no teacher preparation. The lesson pages were carefully designed

    Snoopy - Morgan's beagle - is indeed the only living being she has considered family these past few years. When her sister and brother-in-law die in a terrible car crash, she has no choice but to adopt their two children.The unexpected addition to her household is clearly unlikely to get her closer to her canine goals - and as if this wasn't enough, she seems to be getting it all wrong in her new role, ordering bedding her new son Elliot finds terribly childish, and forgetting to bake a cake for school on Lea's birthday. Grandma Catherine is convinced she'd do a much better job...When Snoopy sprains his leg, the kids are swept off their feet by the handsome single vet who's nursing him back to health. They're convinced he and Morgan would be a match made in heaven. Now they only need to convince Morgan...

    A Mom Just Like You is for all those moms who wonder, "Okay, so how do you do it?" Through her warm, practical style, Vickie Farris fills moms with encouragement and practical suggestions for those days when the challenge seems over-whelming.

    Shumway created a series of math routines designed to help young students strengthen and build their facility with numbers. These quick 5, 10, or 15 minute exercises are easy to implement as an add-on to any elementary math curriculum. Understanding Number Sense: Students with strong number sense understand numbers, how to subitize, relationships among numbers, and number systems. They make reasonable estimates, compute fluently, use reasoning strategies, and use visual models to solve problems. Number Sense Routines  supports the early learner by instilling the importance of daily warm-ups and explains how they benefit developing math minds for long-term learning.Real Classroom Examples: Shumway compiled her classroom observations from around the country. She includes conversations among students who practice number sense routines to illustrate them in action, how children's number sense develops with daily use, and math strategies students learn as they develop their numerical literacy through self-paced practice.Assessment Strategies:  Number Sense Routines  demonstrates the importance of listening to your students and knowing what to look for. Teachers will gain a deeper understanding of the underlying math skills and strategies students learn as they develop numerical literacy.Shumway writes, "As you read, you will step into various classrooms and listen in on students' conversations, which I hope will give you insight into the power of number sense routines and the impact they have on students' number sense development. My hope is that going into the classroom, into students' conversations, and into their thought processes, you will come away with new ideas and tools to use in your own classroom."

    In this all-new companion volume, Eldridge goes beyond those insights and shifts her focus to parents, offering them much-needed encouragement and hope.Speaking from her own experience as an adoptee and an expert in the field of adoption, Eldridge shares proven strategies and the moving narratives of nearly one hundred adoptive families, helping parents gain a deeper understanding of what is normal, both for their children and themselves. By first strengthening yourself as a parent, you’ll be able to truly listen to your child, and to connect with him on every level, by opening the channels of communication and keeping them open forever. Then you and your child can grow closer through the practical exercises at the end of every chapter. Discover how to• be confident that your role in your child’s life is vital and irreplaceable• pass on the legacy of healthy self-care by assessing and regulating your stress • communicate unconditional love to your child• talk candidly with your child about her adoption and her birth family• teach your family how to respond positively to insensitive remarks about adoption• connect with other adoptive families–and build a support network• plus learn to become a “warrior” parent…settle the “real parent” question…cope with emotional triggers–what to do when you “lose it” . . . celebrate the miracle of your family…and much moreFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

    Humans: from the beginning will appeal to anybody who reads about these discoveries, is intrigued by them, and would like to know more about prehistory. Now brought fully up to date for 2015, Humans: from the beginning is a single-volume guide to the human past. Drawing upon expert literature and the latest multi-disciplinary research, this rigorous but accessible book traces the whole of the human story from the first apes to the first cities. The end product of five years of research, it has also been planned from the ground up to take advantage of the eBook format and ease access to visual matter, references and glossary items. Humans: from the beginning is written for the non-specialist, but it is sufficiently comprehensive in scope, rigorous in content, and well-referenced to serve as an ideal ‘one-stop’ text not only for undergraduate students of relevant disciplines, but also to postgraduates, researchers and other academics seeking to broaden their knowledge. This 32-chapter work presents an even-handed coverage of topics including: • How climate change has long played a pivotal role in our affairs and those of our ancestors. • How humans evolved from apes at a time when the apes were facing extinction. • Why the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relatives) might have been more like a human than a chimpanzee. • A possible Asian rather than African origin for the earliest humans. • Why the Neanderthals were not the dimwits of popular imagination. • How language and modern human behaviour evolved: an examination of theories including those of Robin Dunbar, Steven Mithen and Derek Bickerton. • How the small group of modern humans that eventually colonised the whole of the non-African world might have started from Arabia rather than Africa. • David Lewis-Williams’ theory that the cave art of Ice Age Europe was linked to a shamanistic belief system that might be rooted in the very architecture of the human brain. • Why the Neolithic transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture was a lengthy process, with many down sides. • Colin Renfrew’s still-controversial theory that the spread of farming communities in Neolithic times was responsible for the languages now spoken in many parts of the world. • How an ‘Urban Revolution’ replaced egalitarian farming communities with socially-stratified kingdoms and city-states in just a few millennia. • How the complex, technological societies of today have much in common with not only the earliest states but much earlier primate societies.

    Understanding why these characteristics are so helpful makes it easier for parents to choose to respond in ways that support unschooling, rather than undermine it.Learning freely, living joyfully.

    We worry that our students will be "behind," that they won't score well on the SAT, get into a good college, or read enough of the Great Books. Our souls are restless, anxiously wondering if something else out there might be just a little bit better—if maybe there is another way or another curriculum that might prove to be superior to what we are doing now. God doesn't call us to this work and then turn away to tend to other, more important matters. He promises to stay with us. He assures us that if we rely on Him alone, then He will provide all that we need. What that means on a practical level is that we have to stop fretting over every little detail. We need to stop comparing. We've got to drop the self-inflated view that we are the be-all-end-all of whether the education we are offering our students is going to be as successful as we hope it is. After all, our job is not to be successful—success itself is entirely beside the point. It's faithfulness that He wants. Teaching from Rest offers inspiration, insight, and practical help for the homeschooling mom. Take a deep breath homeschooling mama; He's got this.

    Clear lessons and straightforward language reveal how to measure discipline in a classroom environment, as well as how to handle difficult situations, such as transition times, assemblies, lunchtime, and field trips. A separate chapter for school administrators explains how to support classroom teachers in creating discipline and how to evaluate those teachers.

    Supreme Court handed down a 5–4 verdict in Milliken v. Bradley, thereby blocking the state of Michigan from merging the Detroit public school system with those of the surrounding suburbs. This decision effectively walled off underprivileged students in many American cities, condemning them to a system of racial and class segregation and destroying their chances of obtaining a decent education.In Hope and Despair in the American City, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.Hope and Despair in the American City is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.