Marsha
A freelance writer, Marsha serves as a homeschool resource for her local library and has written articles for Home Education Magazine and a column for Home Educator's Family Times. She has served on the planning committee for her local homeschool cooperative, taught creative writing, edited the newsletter, and been a member of the HUB (Homeschoolers United Building) advisory committee. Her book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Homeschooling, was published in February 2001, and she has spoken at homeschool conferences and curriculum fairs in Texas, California, and Michigan. She is presently working with HEM Books to update and republish her now out-of-print homeschooling book. She also holds down two part-time office management jobs, one outside the home and one for the family business.
Marsha Ransom, who began homeschooling in 1990, is the mother of four children, two of whom have always been homeschooled....
Children Have a Right to an Education
Children have the right to an education that fits their unique individual needs, that is full of joy and exploration and free from coercion and stress. Adults have learned that we all have different learning styles and varied strengths and weaknesses ...
Homeschooling is just one of the many things that define me. Before I ever began homeschooling, I was a reader with an inquisitive mind. I have always had to search and find answers to the many questions that fill my mind. I was a wife before I was out of my teens and a mother soon after I turned twenty-five. By the time we began homeschooling, I had been a mother for twelve years. We already had three children and were anxiously awaiting the much-delayed arrival of our daughter from Korea the year we began homeschooling. When our daughter arrived, it was in March of our first year of homeschooling....
The Homeschool Mom Writes a Book
I didn’t take a college class this semester. We are in the midst of a major remodel of our house, and as DIYers, that doesn’t mean that we are stressed by our home being invaded by contractors and construction workers, who make messes and leave them, or don’t get as much completed as they promised. When we stress about our remodel project, it’s because we keep having interruptions, of one sort or another, that prevent us from getting down and dirty and completing it ourselves. Stuff happens....
How Do Children Learn to Read?
Children learn to read in different ways, just as children are different and unique in every other way. One young man told me he learned to read by memorizing the shape or outline of words. He didn’t focus on the letters at all. Interesting! ...
What is Eclectic Homeschooling? Would it Work for YOU?
Homeschooling is one of the options that savvy parents are considering these days, when planning for the education of their children. Parents that work at home are often homeschoolers, too, as these two activities dove-tail quite nicely for entrepreneurial families. There are many ways to home educate; I feel that even a family using a pre-packaged curriculum is going to add their own touches to the program, simply because family life-style and circumstances will make it impossible for them to do otherwise. Thus, as you consider that each family is unique, so, too, will their homeschool program need to be....
Recently there was a discussion on an e-list I subscribe to about why homeschooled kids don’t always turn out “perfect”. In light of another discussion recently where a homeschool mother was requesting tips because she was going to write a book to help families figure out the perfect way to homeschool, this discussion resonated with me....
Quite often when children experience difficulties in school, it's because of a bad fit. I called it the "square peg in a round hole" syndrome. If your child has a unique learning style, or learning differences, it's easy for him or her to fall behind if left in a typical classroom setting. Even kids with some identified learning disabilities have been found to thrive in a homeschooling environment....
Homeschooling & Finances: A Personal Solution
Homeschooling is sometimes a difficult choice for families to make, especially if they have always been dependent on two incomes to make ends meet. For us, the choice to homeschool came after several years on one income, followed by two years when I worked part-time, banking my earnings to finance the adoption of our fourth child. While I have joyfully embraced being a stay-at-home mom, there have been times when I have had to find ways to earn a little extra....
Self-Directed Learners: Homeschooling Presidents
I read with great interest stories of homeschooled or self-taught people, trying to find clues that would help me guide my children in a way that would result in them becoming self-directed. Probably even more important, I unconsciously modeled a love for reading and research, reading voraciously whenever I can find a moment, sometimes when I should be doing something else! ;-) I realized later that perhaps my reading, note-taking, conversation, and the resulting free-lance articles, were as valuable in developing a love of learning in my children as anything I learned during my research....
Self Directed Learners: Ryan's Story
When I began homeschooling my fifth and second graders, I thought I'd homeschool for a couple of years to get them back on track. Before long we were no longer saying, "We are doing this a year at a time." It had become a part of who we were as a family. A few years into homeschooling my children, my focus changed from trying to develop curriculum that fit each child, to how I could develop life-long learners....
How To Answer The Socialization Question Once And For All
I am beginning to tire of the many articles, essays and responses I keep running across on what has become to be known as the "socialization question."...
I just spent some time perusing a website (1.) all about No Child Left Behind. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to this issue prior to now, because our children have all been homeschooled for the past sixteen years. Homeschoolers are exempt from NCLB. However, I do remember hearing President Bush’s inaugural speech when he became president for the first time, and I also remember shaking my head and saying out loud, “More testing is not what this country needs.”
“Why We Homeschool” has changed during the sixteen years we have been doing it. We began to homeschool with the idea that we would provide an educational environment and learning experience that would help our son, who was having difficulties in the institutional school setting. Through independent testing we were learning that he was an auditory learner with distractibility issues. Thus his learning needs were not being totally met in the public school....
Comments