Online school for your 13-year-old? It depends

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"Lyndsey Fry has a message about kids who attend school online: 'We're not slackers.'

The 17-year-old hockey phenom from Arizona moved from online high school diploma to Harvard. Now her younger brother Wesley seeks a similar goal — to graduate from the same virtual high school.

'It will be a whole new experience,' said Wesley, 15, who forayed into virtual learning this fall. 'I'll miss my friends, my school. But I won't miss getting up early, especially to catch the 6:30 a.m. bus.'

Kidding aside, the Frys' choice of online schooling is serious stuff: The fastest-growing trend in education has more than 2 million students enrolled nationwide, said Susan Patrick, president of the International Association of K-12 Online Learning, an advocacy group in Vienna, Va. In the U.S., 32 states provide virtual learning, with 25 states offering a full-time online education, she said.

'Some people think that online learning is just a piece of software, but it's much more than that,' said Patrick. 'What we're trying to do is to make the online option available to every student. And students are interested.'

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Home-schooling parents turn to blogs, Facebook for help

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"Carolyn Morrison home-schooled her two children from 1993 to 2004 — and the tools she had available to her then seem primitive today.

'Our computer was used primarily for e-mail, word processing and games, with CD-ROM resources filling in the gaps left by the paltry online reference sites,' she said. 'We even pre-dated Google!'

And for sure, that was before the term 'social networking' was part of the vernacular.

Internet resources now available to parents who home-school their children not only include the vast amount of information that's online; parents are turning to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs geared to their home-schooling interests for help, humor and how-tos.

'What a fantastic blessing that can be to someone who lives an hour's drive from the nearest library or bookstore,' said Morrison, of Marshalltown, Iowa, who has a popular blog, Guilt-Free Homeschooling.

'Online resources have truly shrunk the world to manageable proportions: There is no longer either a time barrier or a distance barrier between people.'

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A movable feast: For some, the world is a classroom

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"Evidence suggests that home-schooling in America is a growing trend. In a weeklong web-only series, TODAYshow.com reports on the challenges and creative opportunities presented by this approach to education.

Niall Gifford, 11, attends school on a sailboat in the South Pacific. Markos McFerrin, 7, has done countless math and spelling lessons on the back of a tandem bicycle. Jen and Maddie Farmer, 12-year-old twin sisters, have completed curricula in Greece and England.

These typical American kids are having exotic educational experiences for the same reason: Their parents have chosen to home-school them so they can travel.

For such families, “travel” doesn’t mean frantic vacations to Disneyland. These moms and dads want their children to see the world, experience other cultures and learn, learn, learn.

Of course, pulling it off can entail major lifestyle upheavals. Jobs need to be left behind (or sabbaticals requested), houses need to be rented out, modes of travel need to be selected, budgets need to be carefully crafted. For many parents who home-school away from home, wrenching themselves so completely from their regular lives has not been simple.

But has it been worth it? Oh yeah.

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I lost the home-school burnout battle—and I'm OK with it

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"What does it take to be a great home-schooler? Passion, energy, creativity, high ideals and whole-hearted devotion to your kids.

What does it take to spoil home-schooling? Passion, energy, creativity, high ideals and whole-hearted devotion to your kids.

OK, not always. But many home-schooling moms find themselves burned out after a few years, exhausted by the very things that made the whole enterprise possible.

Some parents home-school for negative reasons like fear or mistrust. But others, like us, do it because it just feels natural to stay together as a family — and because we’re dying to pass down to our children the delightful world of knowledge and culture that makes our own lives rich. We started home-schooling when our oldest child was 6 years old. We now have eight children, and have home-schooled for six years. Now, we are ready to let someone else do all that wonderful sharing!

Why? Because passing down a whole world of knowledge and culture is a pretty tall order for one set of parents. It’s a huge undertaking with even one child, never mind six or eight.

And then there's curriculum envy. Someone's always blogging about the interactive origami diorama her second-grader made with homemade rag paper and saffron dye. (And all we did today was reading, writing and arithmetic!)

We want to prove that home-schoolers aren't the backward, tongue-tied ninnies they're rumored to be. Striving against stereotype, our kids can't simply be as good as public-schoolers -- they have to be better — smarter, happier, more sociable, more ambitious — more everything.

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As home-schooling moves to mainstream, stigma fades

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"Evidence suggests that home-schooling in America is a growing trend. In a weeklong web-only series, TODAYshow.com reports on the challenges and creative opportunities presented by this approach to education.

Fifteen-year-old Tess Rodrigues is a typical teenager: She spends her free time at the mall, hangs out with friends and stays connected on Facebook.

But unlike most 10th-graders, Tess is home-schooled by her mother, and supplements her studies in marine biology, Spanish and world history with help from a weekly home-school co-op group.

“My mom and I laugh a lot and have fun,” Tess said. “And with the work, I get to go at my own pace, unlike a regular classroom. I can speed through lessons that are easy, and take time to go over things if I don’t get them.”

Her mother, Lisa Landis Rodrigues, started home-schooling her three children when they were in second, fourth and fifth grade.

“I’m not anti-school at all — I think teachers are awesome and I think most schools are great,” said the Rhode Island mom. “But morally, I think they go way too fast. I wanted my 10-year-old to be a 10-year-old, not get caught up in how other kids dress and act, so I decided to home-school them.”

Though such students represent an estimated 3 percent of the population, evidence suggests that home-schooling is a growing trend in America. While most say faith is their primary motivation, others choose this path for a variety of reasons that include dissatisfaction with the local school system, caring for special-needs kids, safety concerns, flexibility to travel and the chance to spend more time with their children.

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Home Where They Belong — What About Socialization?

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"If you’re a homeschooler or are even just thinking about homeschooling, I’m sure you’ve heard it. It’s the perennial favorite question asked by those who do not homeschool.

But what about socialization?

Aside from the fact that the vast majority of homeschoolers spend plenty of time around people of a variety of ages, in many different settings, and have proven themselves able to function quite well in the “real world”, do we really want the world’s socialization anyway?

This article, entitled Youth Violence Linked to Unsupervised Socializing, presents a scary picture of what can happen among teens who “socialize” on their own. This trend was even noticed in so-called “good” neighborhoods with “A” students.

If violence is one of the results of “socialization“, I don’t mind at all if my family is “unsocialized“.

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Boys may benefit from aggressive play

Bring it: Boys may benefit from aggressive play - Health - Kids and parenting - msnbc.com

"In her 30 years as a kindergarten teacher in Illinois and Massachusetts, Jane Katch has watched graham crackers, a pretzel, celery, tree bark and fingers all become transformed into imaginary guns and other weapons. And she has learned to work with, rather than against, the violent boyhood fantasies that accompany these transformations.

'When you try to ignore it, it doesn't go away. And when you try to oppress it, it comes out in sneaky ways,' Katch said.

Not every teacher agrees. Schools have become battlegrounds between the adults who are repelled by the play violence they see and the children — primarily boys — who are obsessed with pretending to fight, capture, rescue and kill.

While some educators prohibit this behavior, other educators and researchers claim that banishing violent play from classrooms can be harmful to boys. It's a debate entangled in gender issues, since nearly all early-childhood educators are women, and they may be less comfortable than their male counterparts with boys' impulses.

While this behavior has been around far longer than toy guns and superhero movies — boys appear to be hard-wired for more active and aggressive pursuits than girls — many adults see this aggressive play being fueled by the violence portrayed or reported in the media.

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Homeschooling Quickly Becoming a Growing Trend

Homeschooling Quickly Becoming a Growing Trend | ThirdAge

"Homeschooling is a growing trend as more students will be “attending” school without actually having to leave their homes. The Times-Georgian reported that close to 900 students in the county alone were homeschooled last year. Across the country that number increases to 1.5 million students. According to a PR Newswire release, the growth rate is between 7 and 15 percent each year, and at least 1 million K-12 students now take all or part of their education online.

According to the Department of Education, the number of homeschoolers has more than doubled in the last decade. The benefits to homeschooling? A more flexible schedule, a closer student-teacher relationship, and less subjective to bullying. Just like public schools, homeschoolers must be in “class” 180 days a year.

For celebrities like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, homeschooling is the more ideal option. “We homeschool Suri,” said Holmes. “She has a teacher who is with her every day. We like the one-on-one education.”

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Meet The Masters: Interactive Multimedia Art Education

Meet The Masters is an Interactive Multi-Media Art Education Based on the Lives and Works of the Master Artists. Your Homeschool students learn Art by studying the greats: Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Degas, Rembrandt, and MANY, MANY MORE!



Meet The Masters uses a 3-step learning approach:

* Art History - This interactive step contains audio clips of the master artist's themselves, period music, and fun review games with Pierre (our friendly French companion), all designed to capture the attention and imagination of home schooled children.

* Art Technique - Your students will learn to implement the art principles that correspond with the artist they have just been introduced to with the downloadable Art technique packets. These are available within the program in .pdf format for you to print, as needed.

* Art Activity - Your students will then move on to use the techniques and styles of the Masters to create their very own masterpieces using our step-by-step instructions. As they progress through the program, the children develop their own unique artist style and art portfolio! This Group Buy offers something for every artist at every age level -- ALL at Group Buy savings!

Homeschooling: German Family Gets Political Asylum in U.S.

READ Yahoo! News: "The Romeikes are not your typical asylum seekers. They did not come to the U.S. to flee war or despotism in their native land. No, these music teachers left Germany because they didn't like what their children were learning in public school - and because homeschooling is illegal there. (See pictures of a Tennessee family homeschooling its children.)

'It's our fundamental right to decide how we want to teach our children,' says Uwe Romeike, an Evangelical Christian and a concert pianist who sold his treasured Steinway to help pay for the move.

Romeike decided to uproot his family in 2008 after he and his wife had accrued about $10,000 in fines for homeschooling their three oldest children and police had turned up at their doorstep and escorted them to school. 'My kids were crying, but nobody seemed to care,' Romeike says of the incident. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

So why did he seek asylum in the U.S. rather than relocate to nearby Austria or another European country that allows homeschooling? Romeike's wife Hannelore tells TIME the family was contacted by the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which suggested they go to the U.S. and settle in Morristown, Tenn. The nonprofit organization, which defends the rights of the U.S. homeschooling community - with its estimated 2 million children, or about 4% of the total school-age population - is expanding its overseas outreach. And on Jan. 26, the HSLDA helped the Romeikes become the first people granted asylum in the U.S. because they were persecuted for homeschooling. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its past.)

The ruling is tricky politically for Washington and its allies in Europe, where several countries - including Spain and the Netherlands - allow homeschooling only under exceptional circumstances, such as when a child is extremely ill. That helps explain why in late February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement formally appealed the Romeike ruling, which was issued by an immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn. His unprecedented decision has raised concerns that the already heavily backlogged immigration courts will be flooded with asylum petitions from homeschoolers in countries typically regarded as having nonrepressive governments. (Comment on this story.)"

13 Careers for the Next Decade

13-careers-for-the-next-decade: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: "We offer a baker's dozen of professions that promise income growth, work-life balance and social impact.

Few decisions are more important than choosing a career. And especially in these uncertain and changing times, no decision may be more difficult.

U.S. companies, saddled with increasingly onerous costs of employing people, are downsizing, cutting employees' hours, hiring temps, automating jobs and sending work offshore. Meanwhile, technology is redefining existing jobs and demanding new skills from an aging workforce, and new competition for jobs looms in the form of 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants likely to get legalized in the years ahead. Perhaps most potent, the U.S. is experiencing the largest transfer of gross domestic product from the private sector to the government sector in history -- and shifting jobs along with it.

In these roiling times, what are smart career choices? Of course, the best career for one person can be the worst for another, but I believe these 13 are particularly worthy of attention. From among thousands of occupations, I selected the 13 that rank best overall based on these criteria:

• Likelihood of Sustaining at Least a Middle-Class Income. This subsumes three factors: likely job growth, income potential and being under the radar (so there's less competition for jobs).

• Socially Redeeming. There may be jobs, for example, as casino managers and tobacco executives, but such occupations were immediately excluded from consideration.

• Quality of Life. Reasonable work hours, freedom from toxic or noisy work environments, and so on.

• Status. Most Kiplinger readers will not, for example, be attracted to owning gas stations, even though some gas-station owners make a great deal of money."

Studies Reveal Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected

CLICK to read the whole article: "Kids who get bullied and snubbed by peers may be more likely to have problems in other parts of their lives, past studies have shown. And now researchers have found at least three factors in a child's behavior that can lead to social rejection.

The factors involve a child's inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.

In the United States, 10 to 13 percent of school-age kids experience some form of rejection by their peers. In addition to causing mental health problems, bullying and social isolation can increase the likelihood a child will get poor grades, drop out of school, or develop substance abuse problems, the researchers say.

'It really is an under-addressed public health issue,' said lead researcher Clark McKown of the Rush Neurobehavioral Center in Chicago.

And the social skills children gain on the playground or elsewhere could show up later in life, according to Richard Lavoie, an expert in child social behavior who was not involved with the study. Unstructured playtime - that is, when children interact without the guidance of an authority figure - is when children experiment with the relationship styles they will have as adults, he said.

Underlying all of this: 'The number one need of any human is to be liked by other humans,' Lavoie told LiveScience. 'But our kids are like strangers in their own land.' They don't understand the basic rules of operating in society and their mistakes are usually unintentional, he said."