Channel 15, an ABC affiliate out of Phoenix, Arizona, featured a piece with reporter Allison Dugaw interviewing two homeschooling moms in Ever thought of homeschooling your kids? 2 moms share their experience:

PHOENIX – Several studies show that homeschooling kids may benefit some children later in life. But a lot of parents don’t really know where to start.

Kim Wilson, a mother of five from Gilbert, just started lessons with her 7-year-old son Kyden. She says he liked kindergarten but struggled with first grade so she decided to try out homeschooling.

Raeleen Brown is a mother of seven who homeschools all of her children. She says her decision was based on being in charge of the content of the curriculum, teaching responsibilities at home and teaching about the family’s faith.

Continue reading or view the video clip at the link above.

Homeschool Snowboarding creates high-end technical outerwear for hard-riding snowboarders, and their company mission states “We are taking snowboarding back to its roots…”

In an interview for the current issue of TransWorld Business, co-founder Danny Clancey explains the name of the company in response to the question “Why ‘Homeschool?’”: “The name homeschool really comes from the idea of doing for yourself and learning by doing. Really the only way to learn something is to jump in head first and do it. I never wanted to be a business person but I’ve taken on that role as I’ve gone through this process.”

Homeschool Snowboarding is also on Facebook.

Some of the inclusions in this listing stretch the definition of homeschooler, but it’s an interesting collection nonetheless, titled The World’s 15 Most Extraordinary Homeschoolers and including some we’ve covered in the past (Astra Taylor, Tim Tebow), some we weren’t familiar with but will definitely check out (Jedediah Purdy, Sho Yano), and some we were surprised to learn about (Condoleezza Rice, Julian Assange):

Boring, unathletic, antisocial, fashion-challenged, politically retrograde, culturally backward, religiously extreme…the list of homeschooler stereotypes is seemingly endless and almost entirely negative. Despite the growing popularity of the homeschooling movement in the United States and around the world, homeschooling and its graduates continue to be viewed with suspicion, and not a little condescension, by the mainstream. But as our list of the world’s 15 most extraordinary homeschoolers shows, the homeschooling population is extraordinarily diverse, defying every attempt to shoehorn them into a single mold. The homeschoolers on this list are geniuses and jocks, conservatives and progressives, fundamentalists and hippies, scientists and artists….

Continue reading at the link above.

Susan Ryan shares a heart-warming story at her Corn and Oil blog about a homeschooling family who purchased a local school and are sharing it with their community:

“When they heard about the sale of the school and its contents, Melanie and Gary Doyle thought they may end up purchasing school supplies for their home-schooled kids. Instead, they bought the school itself.”

At 14, when girls can be preoccupied with clothes, makeup and hanging out with friends, Mikayla Holden is busy writing a sequel to her first Western novel, which was published this summer. Read more at the link.

Check out this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling: The Tryptophan Edition at Apollos Academy:

“There are wonderful holiday-themed lesson plans, imaginative plans for common subjects, and just some wonderful families enjoying life and their homeschooling journeys by kicking up their heels and taking advantage of this sometimes chaotic time of year to try something new and different.”

In this first of three posts, titled Compelled to Attend, HEM’s Road Less Travelled columnist, Linda Dobson, is revisiting her first book, The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self, published by Home Education Press in 1995. An excerpt:

And if colleges and universities ignore the true meaning of education and accept indoctrination as their function in society, what then is the purpose of all the years of schooling that lead up to college, starting at the tender age of five or, in many cases today, even younger?

Continue reading at the link above.

Zero Tuition College (ZTC) is a blog that explains how to replace the 4-year college experience with self-directed learning. Founded by Blake Boles, who designs and leads international adventures and domestic leadership programs through his company Unschool Adventures, Zero Tuition College is designed to show self-directed learners how to skip college and get a higher education on their own terms. From the Zero Tuition College web site:

We are not anti-college or anti-structured-learning. We do believe that:

* college is incredibly expensive,
* too many people have blind faith in the power of the college degree, and
* designing your own education is more satisfying than following the conventional path.

How can the 4-year college experience be replaced? With self-directed learning. Self-directed learning is the art of figuring out what you want to learn and then doing it without the oversight of an institution. Americans were mostly self-directed learners in the 18th and 19th centuries. While everyone is capable of self-directed learning, in an age of powerful, government-supported educational institutions, it’s easy to forget how to do it.

Susan Ryan blogs about a Thanksgiving Throwdown with Master Chef Bobby Flay and Ree Drummond, also known as The Pioneer Woman:

In the introduction of The Pioneer Woman’s life, Bobby Flay pointed out that she homeschools her four kids.

And:

This particular hour of Throw Down a Thanksgiving Feast was charming and fun and half of it was about a homeschooling mom’s life.

Check it out via Susan’s Corn & Oil blog.

Typical local homeschooling piece, Homeschooling in Huntsville, for WAAY-TV, asks the usual questions, provides the usual answers: “HUNTSVILLE, AL—From the first day of kindergarten to graduation, a student’s progress through school is marked with regular rites of passage. Lockers, hall passes and high school cliques are all part of life along the way. But more and more families are choosing a different path: homeschooling.”