Resources
This is a round-up of some of our favorite educational resources and tools for homeschool families.
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Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom
John Holt books (we suggest reading in the order he wrote them)
Other books by John Holt: Learning All the Time and What Do I Do Monday?
Dr. Peter Gray, Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
Denise Clark Pope, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students (technically this book is an attempt to bring about school reform, but instead it makes an ironclad case for unschooling)
Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (we’re told a new, updated edition will be published this year)
Tammy Takahashi, Deschooling Gently
Seen, Heard & Understood: Parenting & Partnering with Teens for Greater Mental Health, by Lainie Liberti
Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, by Drs. Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté
Parent/Teen Breakthrough, by Charles Foster and Mira Kirshenbaum
How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.), by Dr. Thomas Gordon
Playful Parenting: An Exciting New Approach to Raising Children That Will Help You Nurture Close Connections, Solve Behavior Problems, and Encourage Confidence, by Lawrence J. Cohen
We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions — if they have any — and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.
— John Holt