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

The material in the book is definitely dated for the current year. If you're on the fence about homeschooling, this book definitely give you the peptalk to go for it. If you're currently homeschooling, it's lacking. Not much here, which was a bummer.

This book was the first book I picked up on homeschooling and was an excellent place to start. It has a variety of information on the specifics of homeschooling including some applied ideas. However, it also is chock full of resources and destinations to help guide your journey. It's a great choice for someone who is trying to make the decision about homeschooling. It offers tips on how to boost your own confidence as a homeschooling parent, and even what to do in an "emergency" when you have suddenly withdrawn your child from a school setting. It's light on philosophy which I found refreshing. In other words it doesn't emphasize religious OR secular based learning. It even offers tips on convincing your parents or in-laws that homeschooling is a good choice for you. I highly recommend it!

Linda Dobson's "Homeschoolers' Success Stories" offers an exciting and encouraging picture of the possibile paths and futures of today's homeschoolers. These young people have created hand-made lives; they are carving their own niches in the world. Reading their stories reinforces the hope that homeschooling my children will feed their uniqueness and enable them to make their own, custom, satisfying paths in life. This book would make a great gift for homeschooled teens, as a preview to the places their lives can lead. It would also make a great gift for any homeschooling parent, or even those pesky critical in-laws!

As a book reviewer with Home Education Magazine, I think this is one of the most important books ever written about homeschooling. When considering homeschooling, people want to know how homeschooling will impact their kids. The homeschooling movement is coming of age, and we finally have a body of graduates to look to for answers. The answers those graduates provide in this book will surprise and enlighten even seasoned homeschoolers.In reading this book, I was surprised again and again. The surprises come with the fresh realization of how fulfilling and unique the fruit of anyone's personal passions can be when they're not being run through a mill. The theme of this particular mind banquet was diversity and individuality in full bloom. The important message these graduates deliver is that homeschooling provided them with the opportunity to follow their own dreams and find their unique fulfillment and happiness in ways that might have been completely closed off to them otherwise. This book isn't about getting into an Ivy League college and getting a professional title that denotes success--this book is about the incredible processes people can go through to find their personal satisfaction and success in any number of imaginative ways, Ivy League education among them. You can't read these stories without stretching your mind and questioning a whole lot of cultural assumptions about what "success" is. You'll find more than just success stories, however; the book includes moving and intimate personal responses to questions about how homeschooling impacted their lives.The variety of successful people and stories in this book is amazing. There isn't a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker in the crowd, but there's a Broadway performer, a multi-millionaire internet entrepreneur, a firefighter--and a building contractor who sailed solo around the world in his teens, went to Stanford on a scholarship and quit because he didn't want to waste precious time in college. After reading Homeschoolers' Success Stories, I reread Linda Dobson's Introduction. Some words that had puzzled me on first reading took on much clearer meaning the second time around: "Some of what the people featured in this book have to say about education may make you uncomfortable; it's better you know it right from the start rather than discover it halfway through the book. If you don't want to hear any more, put the book back on the shelf and don't buy it. I have no desire to deliver anything you don't want to hear. I'm sure it has something to do with humans' predisposition to kill the messenger." Powerful warning, huh? It's because Homeschoolers' Success Stories gets into some pretty unusual territory, and it will definitely make you rethink some deeply ingrained ideas. The book had a profound impact on my some of my own perceptions, or maybe I should say preconceptions--and I'm sure it will have a similar impact on other readers.Even the

This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in homeschooling their young child. In an easy - to - read and follow format, it discusses most every issue of concern to homeschooling parents. It not only discusses facts about homeschooling (such as find out the laws in your state) but then brings together the experiences of many parents who are homeschooling to demonstrate that there is no one right way to HS your child. This book is enough to give me the confidence to begin on a homeschooling journey!

Excerpts from a review I did for Home Education Magazine on this book:Linda Dobson's book, Homeschooling The Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3 to 8 Year Old, is a wonderful resource for parents of young children. It is a celebration of children's innate curiosity and eagerness to learn about their world. She has captured the essential wonder of early childhood learning.While the book is full of parents'delightful stories about how children learned one thing or another, the theme Linda deftly brings forward into the spotlight is that learning is the natural pursuit of any child - "little learning machines," she calls them.The book is unique right from the beginning - an interesting brief overview of homeschooling diversity, building up to the comforting reassurance that "It doesn't matter where you begin - just begin!" This is a fairly radical notion for may of those in the first stage of comtemplating the move. New and prospective homeschoolers often want to have it all planned and orderly before they jump in. And yet, as Linda points out, you can expect a lot of perfectly comfortable change and admustment as you learn to tailor the homeschool to the child, rather than the child to the homeschool - it's just an onging process."Because it's so easy to change any aspect of homeschooling when necessary," she reassures the read, "you can get started with a minimum of worry and preparation. Once you're on the road, you'll constantly discover new information, resources, and friends to help you fine-tune your journey into the most rewarding and fun possible."Linda provides helpful insight into the nature of young children as learners, and the way they gather information as physical, sensory beings. This leads into an inspiring discussion of the importance of play, imagination, and creativity. "With schooling so firmly established in our culture and in our personal experience as the method for learning, it's often hard to grasp and accept the idea that, for the early years, play - unadulterated by adult 'good intentions' - is a powerful learning method...If we can bend our own thinking processes far enough to give play its rightful due, we could even call creativity the play of the mind."This is where the delightful stories start to come in - stories that capture the essence of how beautifully natural learning is for children. The stories highlight the magic that happens when a child has the opportunity to learn beyond the box.One very helpful chapter, The Joy of Learning With the Early Years Child, deals with tuning in to notice how your child learns. Again we find stories from other parents about their experiences with their children. Being able to share the revelations these "aha!" moments can go a long way in leading to one's own insights. The chapter also goes into building on strengths, and sensitively shoring up weaknesses. Socialization and relationships are discussed, as