Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Secular Homeschooling

I believe that despite what you see at the homeschool conventions, there is about half of the homeschool community who would like their education delivered separately from their spiritual training.  Called secular or non-religious homeschoolers, they have less community, curriculum and websites to call their own.

One popular secular homeschool curriculum is time4learning.com.  Very standards based and thorough, I'd recommend them.  And I quote:  Time4Learning offers a quality secular curriculum without the religious undertones that homeschoolers won't need to settle for. It combines 1000+ multimedia lessons, printable worksheets and graded activities to teach math and language arts lessons correlated to state standards. Science, social studies and art are also provided as a bonus for most grades.

There is now a very vibrant community of non-religious homeschoolers online called SecularHomeschool.com.  And again I quote:
SecularHomeschool.com has added a new forum section to our main forum page. This section is geared toward those who are homeschooling (or thinking about homeschooling) children in the middle school and/or high school grade levels.

Approaches to homeschooling lower and upper grade levels can vary quite widely, so it will be helpful for parents of older students to have a dedicated place to discuss the ins and outs of curriculum, college prep, record-keeping, and just generally parenting an adolescent.

As with all the forums, having a dedicated forum doesn't mean that every thread about homeschooling middle/high school HAS to be posted in the new section, but the hope is that members will be able to find grade-specific threads more easily and with less searching. I hope this will be a helpful and well-used addition to the site!


An interesting terminology question is what homeschoolers should say when, if they took summer vacation, when they go back to studying.  It it time for homeschoolers to go back to school?  Sounds wrong since they aren't going to school but back to homeschooling.

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