Rebecca Stead’s LIAR AND SPY

This post briefly reviews Rebecca Stead, Liar & Spy (New York: Wendy Lamb Books, 2012)

Stead, author of the Newberry Award winning When You Reach Me, has recently published her third novel for children.  I’m reviewing it here because, like many other children’s books, it has some homeschooled characters.

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Quinn Cummings’ THE YEAR OF LEARNING DANGEROUSLY

This post reviews Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling (New York: Penguin, 2012).

I decided that since this book has been getting so much media attention I should review it.  Cummings is a fascinating woman–Academy Award nominated child star, prolific blogger, and author of now two entertaining memoirs.  This book, her most recent memoir, has been featured on the Diane Rehm Show, in Time Magazine, on Fox News, and all over the internet.

What, if anything, does it offer to homeschool researchers?  Well, first it offers a lot of fun. 

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A New Work of Christian Children’s Lit about Homeschooling

This post reviews Deb Esposito, World War Me: Soul Survivor(Cresco, PA: Monty Media, 2012).

In earlier reviews of children’s literature I have frequently had occasion to note that though conservative Christians make up the lion’s share of homeschoolers in this country, almost every piece of children’s lit that has homeschooling characters tends to feature the small minority who are drawn to the practice for more secular reasons ranging from hippie-type rejections of formalism and desire to live in nature to concerns for a child’s health.

Well, here is a book about Christian homeschooling. 

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R. J. Palacio’s WONDER

This post reviews R. J. Palacio’s children’s book Wonder (Knopf, 2012).

I’ve reviewed a lot of children’s books with homeschooling themes on this blog over the years.  This one may be my favorite.  August Pullman is a boy born with serious, serious face abnormalities, so much so that his parents homeschool him until the fifth grade to protect him somewhat from the constant shocked looks and whispered conversations that follow him wherever he goes.  But for the fifth grade they decide it’s time he starts learning how to live in the real world a bit, so they send him to school.

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Lisa Tucker’s THE WINTERS IN BLOOM

Lisa Tucker is a fairly well known and respected American novelist.  The Winters in Bloom is her sixth book.  In her 2007 work Once Upon a Day, Tucker had explored the themes of kidnapping and raising children in protected isolation from the rest of the world.  Here she returns to these same ideas.  Her protagonists, Kyra and David Winter, have a five-year-old son named Michael over whom they hover obsessively.  Their desire to protect Michael from bullying, not to mention dust, mass media, unhealthy food, and any number of other perils, lead them to homeschooling.

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Beth Kephart’s YOU ARE MY ONLY

This post briefly reviews Beth Kephart’s young adult novel You Are My Only.

Kephart is an award-winning author of 13 young adult titles as well as lots of poetry, essays, and reviews.  This, her latest book, is up for review here because of its use of homeschooling as a plot point.

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Memoir of Partly Homeschooled Montana Girl Mary Clearman Blew

Mary Clearman Blew is an English professor at the University of Idaho.  She has written a lot of books and stories, most of them autobiographical.  This latest collection is a series of autobiographical tales, most of whose chapters had appeared in print elsewhere as independent essays.

I review it because in addition to being eminently readable it includes a few juicy sections on life as a “home schooler” of sorts in rural Montana during the 1940s. 

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A Christian Romance Novel Featuring Homeschooling

A few months ago a reader of this blog recommended to me Meg Moseley’s When Sparrows Fall.  It’s the first Christian romance novel–the first romance novel of any kind really–that I’ve read.  I loved it.

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David Almond’s MY NAME IS MINA

David Almond is a British author of Children’s books, perhaps best known for Skellig, his first children’s novel, published in 1998.  Skellig was the first children’s book I read that included a deliberately homeschooled character.  Her name was Mina.  Well, some 12 years later Almond has returned to the world he created in Skellig and offered us a prequel titled My Name Is Mina.  Mina is written as the journal of the titular character, and it tells in great detail the story of why and how she came to be homeschooled.

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The Very Best Movies for Children and Families

Today I’m going to break from my usual content and style.  Back in 2008 I reviewed David Gilmour’s interesting memoir The Film Club, which describes an experiment he conducted with his teen-aged son where he “homeschooled” him for three years, the curriculum being nothing but movies.  I commented there that I thought there was much of value that could come from incorporating film into a child’s education, noting specifically that carefully selected films can 1. introduce children to classic literature, 2. give children insight into other cultures, and 3. expose children to the history of film-making, and, by extension, of popular culture.

In the years since then our family has seen many, many films.  In today’s post I’d like to share with you the very best of what we’ve seen in hopes that others looking for intelligent movies for children will benefit.

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