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Go to Page Index Available Now! Only on this website Education Uncensored by Laurie Block Spigel A Guide for the Aspiring, the Foolhardy, and the Disillusioned See more information, including an excerpt, what people are saying about the book, the Table of Contents, and details of buying the book via Paypal. $12.95 plus shipping & handling A great site for those of you with lots of books you've read: Paperbackswap.com is wonderful, especially if you or your kids go through books faster than you can store them in your apartment. To start, you enter in the ISBNs of books you've already read and want to swap away to other site members--they can be kids' books, hardcovers, paperbacks, whatever. Then you get a certain number of "credits" to "buy" books from other members. It's a truly community-oriented swap site, so when someone requests one of your books that you've posted, you need to mail it to them within a week or two. When they receive it, you get another 'credit' to pick another book from any member. Your credits are stored and can be used to "buy" kids books or adult books. Then once you've read them, relist them in the paperbackswap.com system for someone else to "swap" with. You even have the option of printing the postage right on the mailing label (you print those directly from the site) so you don't have to visit the post office. Most books cost about $2.50 to mail (media mail is what they use). See Novel Action, a cheap online book exchange website. Students 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 made 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 found what we liked. Page Index Read Judging Books by Their Covers, by noted physicist Richard P. Feynman, about the general quality of school textbooks. Buy the books listed below or other items (games, etc.) via and help support this website. On this page: Books on Homeschooling Books on Education Free libraries on the Internet Free Lesson Plans Government websites: ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information. Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) FirstGov for Kids Tip: Your proof of homeschooling (letter from the Board of Ed. or your subscription label from a NYCHEA newsletter) will get you an educators' discount card at Barnes & Noble. On this website: Book Listings by Author Book Listings by Title Favorite Books for Kids Recommended Magazines Art Resources Correspondence Curricula & Online Courses Foreign Language Resources Activities and Crafts Language Arts Resources Math Resources Music Resources Science Resources Social Studies Resources Statistics Resources 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 Back to Index / Back to top

Books on Homeschooling

• David Albert has written many 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 Source Book 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: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
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
• Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling
by John Caldwell Holt
• Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow.: 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 National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) publishes research reports, books, and videos.
• The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook
by Raymond and Dorothy Moore
• The Teenage Liberation Handbook , by Grace Llewellyn
• The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School
by Valerie Fitzenreiter
• The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom
by Mary Griffith

Books on Education

The Textbook League publishes reviews of textbooks etc.

• Teacher, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.
• Awakening Your Child's Natural Genius, by Dr Thomas Armstrong
• How Children Fail, and other books by John Holt
• Dumbing Down Our Schools and The Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and other books by Paulo Freire
• And the Skylark Sings With Me, and other titles by David H. Albert
• 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)
• The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
• Discover Your Child's Learning Style, by Mariaemma Willis and Victoria Kindle-Hodson

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 released to coincide with the above announcement and the opening of "Charlotte's Web." 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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• Google Books
• 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