The Kellogg family of 14 now follows kayak trails and events across the country with the use of a 35 foot RV on the road.  The video below makes me smile and brings back mom memories deciphering the chaotic levels of children’s voices and cries.

The Kellogg Show/Family documents their adventures.  There is plenty of coverage across the country too.

From the Denver Post in October:
Colorado family of 14 kayaking throughout the U.S. By Jason Blevins

“Everything we have done comes from wanting to be free,” says Susie, who started home-schooling the kids a few years ago when a rigid schedule began pinching family playtime.

They’ve been kayaking only a few years, but Grady, 16, and Brody, 15, closed the season ranked third and fourth in the junior freestyle kayaking World Cup point series, and Kenny, 12, won the cadet class in the national freestyle championship in Idaho.

From Denver’s KDVR Fox 31 in November:

Family of 14 selling Colorado home, will live on the road and pursue dreams By Jon Bowman

All of the kids buy into this ‘simpler way of life’ their parents are moving toward. All but one of the children, 18-year-old Kerry, the oldest daughter, are being home-schooled. Kerry graduated from Glenwood Springs High School last spring.

“I am so ready for this,” said Kerry. “I am over Glenwood, I just want to enjoy new adventures and see new places.”

From the UK Mail Online
Kellogg family children to be home schooled as mom and dad drive them across the United States
By James Nye

The Kelloggs claim to have set off for the same reason the pioneers did:  Freedom — from ordinary lives.By James Nye

‘This is what freedom is,’ Dan said, waving his hand at the open road. ‘You go after it.’

Last summer, the family spent two months testing the waters of the RV life, touring 22 states and competing in nearly every junior kayaking competition in the country.

Good wishes for the kayaking competitions and I am sure this family will have loads of fun getting there.

Another family is also planning a road trip this year.  Pioneer Woman‘s website asked a good question about the legalities of
Homeschooling on the Road?

I’m sure more feedback for this family would be appreciated. (Ree Drummond’s recipe for the Perfect Iced Coffee is appealing too.)

Gotta love these families following their passions.

The Ipswich Queensland Times talks about homeschooling.

More families join home-schooling boom by Geoff Egan

“We feel that as humans we’re always learning so we don’t do book work as such.

“We take our kids out and to museums to learn all the time.”

Similarly, mum Bec Draper said she chose to educate her children from home after seeing a lack of support for autistic children.

“Three of our children have high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, which means they are eligible and expected to attend mainstream school,” she said.

“Whilst the idea of ‘inclusion’ is a fantastic one, the practical implementation of this approach is just not working in our school system, at the moment.”

The comments discusses support of special needs in the schools, along with the usual problem of bullying.

A Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star article had me exasperated at first.  Starting with the title:  Home schooling: Making your house work as a classroom, too By Linda Ulrich. Our houses are not schools.  They are homes.  Some homeschooling families do have a school-like set up.  In my experience, most do not find that suitable for their family.

But, after reading about the 3 Nebraska homeschooling families’ home environment, one mom, Jennifer Geaghan, described home life well:

“I have really tried to make our home school area be free flowing and incorporated into our daily lives as much as possible,” she said. “A lot of our supplies are also what you use in the daily life of a family.”

Another mom had the practical aspects of living and learning at home figured out before my husband and  I did when we took our kids out of the school.  We bought the old school desks and chairs which sat unused, while our couches and the floor
became the prime spot for reading, drawing, playing music and writing.

Jessica Freeman, another home-schooling mom, says it’s not necessary to buy special furniture for a home school.

“We would never spend money on extra furnishings for home schooling when there are perfectly good kitchen tables and chairs, comfy couches and floors available for use. We need lots of storage in this house for our things and our collection of books, but we would need that anyway,” she said.

Jessica Freeman also noted this below.  Despite the article’s title, the houses were described as family homes lived in day in and day out.

Freeman said she feels sad when she sees “the general public having such a narrow view of home schooling, when people think that the only way to learn is to import desks and dedicate a special room so that children can sit there every day and ‘do school.’

“Life is so much more interesting than that, and home schooling is wonderful because it gives a family a chance to really experience life and learning in its own style,” she said.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked to The Atlantic‘s October article: The Homeschool Diaries.

Reynolds asks: “Is this another foreshock of the coming K-12 implosion?”

The Department of Education continues to plod along with a Race to the Top, in similar style to the George Bush/Ted Kennedy No Child Left Behind educational plan. Race to the Top is a little flashier, as the current administration’s financial draw hauls in preschool standardized testing too.  Private schools are currently exempt from these federal regulations.

Glenn Reynold’s question has been asked around by innovative educators, including homeschoolers.  Logic should prevail it does not make sense to pull home educators into public school oversight, as teachers unions and many legislators incessantly attempt.

Salman Khan of the hugely popular Khan Academy has some dreams about education.

Salman Khan’s book – The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined:

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is; into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.
When and where do people concentrate best? The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the individual. Some people are at their sharpest first thing in the morning. Some are more receptive late at night. One person requires a silent house to optimize his focus; another seems to think more clearly with music playing or against the white noise of a coffee shop. Given all these variations, why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?

A Homeschool Diaries excerpt below:

… the practical reasons for homeschooling are paramount. When you set the city’s gorgeous mosaic of intellectual and cultural offerings against its crazy quilt of formal education, you can’t help but want to supplement your children’s schooling with outings to museums, zoos, historic sites and neighborhoods, and the like. Even in a tight economy, just about every city cultural institution still has an educational division. Why “save” them for weekends or field trips?

Class Dismissed is a new movie in production which is questioning whether schools, public or private, are really the best education option for many families, and it will be the first feature-length documentary to focus on homeschooling. From the website:

“From home study and kitchen table math, to perpetual recess and park days, Class Dismissed follows the story of an ordinary American family in their quest to educate their children outside the school system.

“As they struggle to discover what path is best for them, the social ramifications of their choices come to light, family dynamics are revealed and they come to realize that homeschooling is not just an educational choice, but also a lifestyle choice that affects the very heart of the American family.

“Truth and consequence, myth and assumption all come together in this fresh look at what it means to be educated in the 21st century.

“Class Dismissed will focus on the topic of education, specifically the validity of homeschooling as an alternative to the industrial school model. Framed within the historical context of traditional schooling, and particularly at a time when education across the nation is in a state of crisis, the film will examine the numerous approaches to home learning, exploring both its history and recent growth. There are many choices when it comes to teaching our children, and Class Dismissed will ask some big questions…”

Prime Minister of Jamaica is a homeschooler

Exciting news from Linda Dobson, an HEM columnist, author of many books on homeschooling, and founder of the website, Parent at the Helm:

“I became aware of Prime Minister – and Education Minister – Holness’ decision to homeschool last week when a friend in Jamaica contacted me. She let me know she had loaned Prime Minister Holness one of my books. She said he still hasn’t returned it yet, kindly insinuating that maybe the book (and hers!) had something to do with the minister’s announcement.

“Thrilled with the news, I wrote a letter to the minister and his wife that appears in yesterday’s Jamaica Observer.” An excerpt from Linda’s letter”

“We get only one fleeting childhood, and you can make it count for your children. Cherish each heartwarming experience as your children’s eyes light up with their “aha!” moments, and their questions fill your days with curiosity and wonder.”

Click this link to read Linda’s wonderful open letter to the prime minister and Mrs Holness.

In an blog post for the Greene County Daily World, which serves several counties in Indiana, Lisa Luper shares an article titled Why I Homeschool–Part One: (Because I was homeschooled), writing: “I wanted to take the next few blog posts to answer the classic question of why I homeschool. This is a question that I have been asked over and over when people find out that none of my children have ever been to a public school. There isn’t one, quick answer to that question. Not only that, the reasons I homeschool today aren’t necessarily the same as the reasons I started homeschooling years ago.”

Looks like some interesting reading as Lisa shares her experiences in growing up homeschooled.

Update Dec. 3: Why I Homeschool, Part Two – I Like Being With My Kids

A Nov. 11th L.A. Times article for L.A. at Home, which seems to focus on architecture and design for southern California homeowners, carried the cutsy title, “For home-school parents, classroom design is the subject du jour.” The first part of the article does, in fact, focus on parents with a severe yearning to replicate school in their homes, quoting one parent who “…demolished a galley-style kitchen in her home to create a school setting. The house had to be extended into the backyard, with a brand-new kitchen built in.”

Another parent, who the article describes as ‘striving for structure and routine,’ states, “It seems there’s a whole new group of us that I refer to as ‘contemporary home-schoolers…’” The article goes on to explain that she is “so committed to the idea of replicating a traditional school experience for her son that she has given her classroom a name: University School for Children, with uniforms, a logo and school IDs.”

This beginning part of the article almost had me passing it over for mention here, but the second part highlights an entirely different approach, and quotes a longtime friend and author: “Tammy Takahashi takes an ‘unschooling’ approach with her three children, ages 7 to 13. The classroom might be an art table at home, a recycling center or the beach. The inherent appeal of the approach is that the style of teaching can be tweaked to accommodate what works best for the student, said Takahashi, who has also written two books on home schooling.”

There are some good arguments for both structured and non-structured approaches, and lots of food for thought and discussion.

The venerable New York Times Magazine published an article on November 8, 2011 titled My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists, by Margaret Heidenry:

“Tired of the constraints of the 40-hour workweek, my father, in 1972, quit his job in publishing. My parents were in their early 30s, and they had four children under 7. ‘But we still wanted to explore the world,’ my father recalled recently. They bought six one-way tickets to Europe, leaving only a laughable $3,000 to subsist on. Young and idealistic, they thought they could easily educate us along the way. ‘Life itself would become a portable classroom.’”

Margaret explains how for the next four years they “embarked on an uncharted ‘free-form existence,’ traveling through Spain, England, a Midwestern farm, Mexico, and finally settled in St. Louis. She details how her parents stretched their budget to allow for the far-flung classrooms, and writes of the family adventure, “…my parents were consistently inconsistent. There were a few interludes of standardized education, but for the most part, as my mother would later write in this magazine, ‘during all this time, the children traveled with us and received nothing that remotely resembled formal schooling.’”

“Home Is Where the School Is,” published in the Oct. 19, 1975, issue of The New York Times Magazine, was the first article in a national publication to espouse what was then still a fringe educational choice.

Read Margaret Heidenry’s entire article at the link above.

After just a few months of college – in which he enrolled after spending his middle and high school years unschooling – Dale J. Stephens, 19, left school. Based on his conviction that college is not necessary for success and fulfillment, he founded an organization called UnCollege, which promotes ways that young people can “hack their education” by finding individualized paths to self-directed learning. A Thiel fellowship recipient, he is currently writing a book for Penguin called Hacking Your Education and traveling extensively on speaking engagements.

In a guest post for The New York Times, Mr. Stephens explains his belief that any student at any level, even those in traditional education environments, can take charge of their learning:

“Why did I make trouble? Going along with the program seems pretty sweet. I could have written papers, skipped class and partied until dawn. After four years as a college student, I would have had many friends, a good job and letters after my name. But I left college because I realized I couldn’t rely on a university to give me an education.”

Read the entire article at the link above.