Recommended Books and Other Resources

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See Novel Action, a cheap online book exchange website.
Student are more motivated when they are involved in choosing their own workbooks or textbooks, so go shopping together. I highly recommend: Bank Street Books (112th St. on Broadway) for grades K-8 -- go upstairs to where the teachers go, and the Barnes & Noble's text book annex (on 18th St. on the SE corner of Fifth Ave.) for grades 9-12 -- go into the back room on the ground floor, filled with endless stacks of new and used college and high school texts, but even these may be dumbed down and some might be too simple or boring for you and your child. Also, a first year Latin (or French or Spanish) text will be here just as easily as anywhere else, but probably with more choices to choose from, alongside dictionaries and grammar books and readers and maybe even a comic workbook in that language. I make an annual pilgrimage to one or both of these two stores every fall, spending hours sitting on the floor browsing through one book after another until we find what we like.

Kids: If you've read a book (or seen a movie) that you either loved or hated, please Post Your Review

Step 6 of the Ten Steps to Successful Homeschooling gives tips on how to Research this website, the library, and the Internet for teaching ideas, lesson plans, textbooks, and resources based on your and your child's interests

Books on Homeschooling

• And What About College
by Cafi Cohen. See Cafi Cohen's Homeschool Teens & College website.
• The Big Book of Home Learning
by Mary Pride
• The Complete Home Learning Sourcebook by Rebecca Rupp. Read some comments by Ms Rupp on Homeschooling Cheaply...It Can Be Done!!
• Deschooling Our Lives
by Matt Hern
• Dumbing Us Down
by John Taylor Gatto
• More on John Taylor Gatto
• John Taylor Gatto's speech to the Vermont Homeschooling Conference
• Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, by David Guterson
• Growing without Schooling
by John Holt
• Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love
by David H. Albert
• The Homeschooling Book of Answers and Homeschoolers' Success Stories, by Linda Dobson, ed.
• Homeschooling for Excellence by David Colfax and Micki Colfax
• The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook
by Raymond and Dorothy Moore
• The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
• The Unprocessed Child
by Valerie Fitzenreiter
• The Unschooling Handbook
by Mary Griffith

Books on Education

The Textbook League publishes reviews of textbooks etc.

• Awakening Your Child's Natural Genius, by Dr Thomas Armstrong
• Chris Mercogliano is co-director of The Albany Free School, a democratic school in Albany, New York.
See his website for information on him and a free selection of his essays. Author of Teaching the Restless, One School's Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed.
• Starting From Scratch, One Classroom Builds its Own Curriculum, by Steven Levy (how to make your own curriculum from scratch, out of print but available used online)
• Teacher, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.

Free libraries on the Internet:

• AwesomeStories - the subscription-based web site (with 125,000 links to primary sources at national archives, libraries, government and academic websites worldwide) and freely used in 25,000 schools and libraries - announced a holiday gift for students:

  "As our holiday gift to students, their parents and the general public, we are waiving the $9.95 annual subscription fee. There will be no 'group access' for these memberships, but students (and their parents, if they wish) can receive free individual access to the site by simply requesting it with this form. We recognize that many students, and their families, cannot afford 'extras' like on-line subscription fees. In an effort to encourage children, and others, to read - and to assist them as they use the Internet to research topics and locate primary sources - we are saying 'Happy Holidays!'"

  With their individual password, people can access the database from any computer connected to the Internet. A story about the science of spiders was recently released to coincide with the above announcement and the opening of "Charlotte's Web." It is anticipated that stories behind the films "Apocalypto" and "Eragon" will be on the site this week. A privacy policy is strictly enforced.

  Free academic-group status - for educators, schools and libraries - remains available, without restrictions, by submitting this form.

  Carole Bos, bosc@gvsu.edu
  Dean's Advisory Board, Grand Valley State University
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• International Children's Digital Library. 890 free children's books written in 34 different languages.
• Classic Reader, free classic books online
• LibriVox, free audio books to download.
• The Online Books Page, an Internet library at the U. of Penn. with over 20,000 books.
• Page by Page books. Books you can read online.
• Project Gutenberg, the oldest Internet library with over 6,000 books