The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling has over 500 pages of homeschool information and resources. From determining whether or not you should homeschool to teaching teens, planning your school year, choosing curriculum and preventing homeschool burnout, The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling certainly covers a lot of material. It also includes a resource guide of over 50 pages and includes all types of curriculum, academic competitions and various state resources.
I found many aspects and chapters of The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling to be helpful and inspiring. I especially enjoyed and learned from the chapter on goal setting. Once you have set goals for your children you will find many paths to work toward those goals and many of those paths will be real life adventures. If you don’t set those goals then you won’t be looking for those opportunities and won’t recognize them when they come your way. This is something that has helped our homeschool to be more focused and efficient.
However, the goal and focus of this book is almost solely on the academic aspect of school at home and as I’ve said before, while we have high academic goals for our children that is not the ultimate goal of our family. Also the author obviously holds a very different world view from our family and so while I agreed with many of her points I completely disagreed with many of the ways that she came to her conclusions.
From my perspective as a second generation homeschooler (I was homeschooled beginning in 6th grade) and now having the experience of homeschooling our children over the last 13 years, I thought that much of what she presents as necessary or vital steps in the home education process aren’t necessary, but rather are dependent on the educational choices and goals that your family pursues. If a new homeschooler were to pick up this book and try to do everything that the author has done I think that they may be overwhelmed.
While this book contains a lot of information about homeschooling, I don’t think that it should be treated as “The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling”. It is a compilation of one persons ideas, thoughts, experiences and suggestions. Many of her perspectives and ideas are good and helpful, but each family has their own set of goals and values. That is the beauty of homeschooling, each family striving to follow God in the manner and way that He has called them.
The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling may be purchased through Apologia Press for $20.00. Apologia Press also offers many other homeschool titles in addition to their well known science curriculum.
Apologia Press sent our family a copy of The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling in return for my time and effort to read the book and write this review. All ideas and opinions are my own and I was not otherwise compensated for this review.
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