Tara was raised on an isolated farm in Idaho. There she was homeschooled on occasion by her mother. Her dad has issues and was working on living off the grid. He supported the family by scrapping and building contracting. Her mother was a midwife and essential oil/homeopathy healer. When Tara was 16 she decided she wanted to go to school. She was able to go to BYU but there were many gaps in her education that needed to be filled. She was fortunate that in her second-year roommates she found that help. She then went on to Cambridge and Harvard.

This book was a fascinating read, like watching a train wreak--you know you should not look but it is impossible to look away. How Tara and her siblings were raised was horrific. That none died is a miracle. I am glad that Tara and some of her siblings got out and found lives in the outside world. Their dad had mental illness and their mother had a traumatic brain injury. They should not have been raising these kids. I loved when her brother Tyler spoke up in support of Tara when she would not come back into the fold and her parents spread lies about her. I am glad that Tara, Tyler, Richard, and Tony supported each other. They were the ones who got out. The others who stayed had issues and I am afraid some of the problems will continue to go down to the next generations.

I am glad I read this but it is tough as she talks about what they went through physically and mentally. I applaud them. I congratulate them on making it.

Blueprint Homeschooling: How to Plan a Y... I received a copy of this book free from a GoodReads giveaway for an honest review, thank you for the chance to win, and to read it.

An excellent resource for anyone who is considering or is involved in homeschooling. Practical advice, helpful planning ideas, and great tips, a must read for anyone wanting to get the most out of homeschooling!

I liked this book so much I passed it on to my mom who is homeschooling my brother and sister! She had nothing but praise for it!

Chaotic storyline. First the author killed the lovely dinosaur Old Lace. Then he killed the lovely leapfrog, the runaways' transportation for such a long time that it even develops the ability to talk. Finally, the author decided to add a chaotic time-travel story which betrays every previous story setups. 

 

I guess that's all it takes to end this series. 

After reading the first chapter, I was having flashbacks of Dr. Sears’s attachment parenting techniques: wrapping my kids in slings and keeping them bound to my body for 24 hours a day. I understand the sentimentality of comparing our kids to the lovely ladies in Africa and even the cuddly rats. Cute, okay, got it. I haven’t read Dobson’s other books, so I’ll reserve judgment on her theories until I’ve read them.

The preceding chapters contain the real meat of this wonderful book, as the title suggests: over 500 ideas to kick-start your children’s learning. I would like to emphasize this is an excellent book to have for both homeschooling and non-homeschooling families alike. There is no reason that some of these activities can’t be done on weekends, holidays, and nights. Life is learning, and this book will cultivate ideas to find those lessons.

Besides the cut-and-dry ideas, there are many other listed resources on learning. Everything may be online somewhere, but it would take a very long time to swim through the slush and find the gold. This book does it for you. Think of it like a recipe book that has gathered all the online 5-star recipes and bound them together. And as with recipes, there will be some that don’t appeal to you; though I am confident there will be many more that do.

As far as a rating, I find it hard to give any stars on its literary merit, because it isn’t a traditional read through cover-to-cover type of book. This rating also does not reflect Dobson’s theories on homeschooling. I do however give five stars on the sheer amount of content and the organization involved.

I saw this one mentioned on Unshelved and was immediately curious, especially when I saw a mention of a Shakespeare group in Southern California. Could it be Melissa Wiley? Spoiler alert: it was. But more than that, I liked Cummings’ memoir of her first year as a homeschooling parent a lot. It was funny, honest, and open to other ways of homeschooling even if, in the end, Cummings didn’t agree exactly with their methods. I also thought it was helpful to have someone who’s fairly mainstream articulate arguments for homeschooling.