This page is a subjective, selective list, alphabetical by title of the site, of Internet-based resources primarily intended to assist public librarians when serving the homeschooling community. In addition to information about homeschooling styles, laws and support groups there are a number of carefully selected sites that provide excellent Internet based learning tools or are sources for curriculum materials for free or purchase. It is hoped that homeschoolers, their educators, and educators in general, will find useful material here. This page is local in its focus, concentrating on New York State and in particular, the Central & North Country regions. Suggestions, corrections and recommendations for additional links should be sent to helpdesk@fultonpubliclibrary.info.

 

About Homeschooling
One of the "What You Need to Know About ...." sites (previously known as The Mining Company) where experts select and develop resources on each topical page. Includes articles, forums, chats, and linked resources. The Homeschooling "guide" is Beverly Hernandez, a veteran homeschooler with 17 years experience from preschool through high school levels. She was the administrator of a large independent study program while simultaneously owning and operating a home school bookstore.

Cobblestone Publishing
The Cobblestone products are almost universally mentioned as favorite teaching tools by homeschooling families. Presenting non-fiction in a way that is truly engaging, these resources include several magazines, Teaching with Primary Sources Series, Theme Packs and other types of kits, CD-ROMs, mapping, and timeline products. The site has a very impressive subject listing of Resources and a For Kids . Each magazine has its own web site with resources on its topic. For example, see the dig State-by-State Guide to Archaeology and Paleontology for New York.

Harvest of History
Developed by the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, NY this site makes the story of our agricultural heritage come alive. You can explore the Village to find out where your food comes from, how and where it grows, and compare life in 1845 with our modern world. Then produce your own movie with the Village Video maker. Use the interdisciplinary fourth-grade curriculum to learn how agriculture has been, and still is, an integral part of our lives in New York State.

Help Getting Started
Many librarians find themselves at a loss as to know how to help families who are considering whether or not homeschooling is for them. This page has terrific essays written by veteran homeschoolers on what it was like to get started, the tools needed, legal and extended family considerations, and more. This is one page in a large Web site maintained by Ann Zeise, mother whose homeschooled children have gone off to college but who continues to maintain this site which is very obviously, a labor of love: A to Z's Home's Cool Homeschooling Web Site.

Home Education Magazine
These Homeschooling Information and Resource Pages contain free online newsletters, discussion boards, a networking list, and selections from the magazine, including articles, interviews, columns, resources, reviews and a section called Questions and Answers that link by topic to the archives of previously published articles. Home Education Magazine is also the sponsor of the unschooling.com site, with many similar resources for those choosing this sytle of homeschooling, and the American Homeschool Association, a service organization created in 1995 to network homeschoolers on a national level. Current AHA services include an online news and discussion list which provides news, information, and resources for homeschoolers, media contacts, and education officials.

Home School Legal Defense Association
A tremendous resource! Choose your state and find out the most current legal information regarding homeschooling. A point and click map uses a 4-color code to signal the legislative status: action, watch, update or none. Also has links to local support groups, current headlines involving homeschoolers and home school issues, and surveys and studies. Familiarity with this site is a must for anyone interested in homeschooling. The direct link to the New York page is: http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?State=NY

Homeschool.com
This is a commercial site with many resources for purchase, including a number of online curriculums. In addition, the information available here at no charge is quite good, mostly presented in the "FAQ" style. On the Ask Your Advisors! page there are links to explanations of a variety of homeschooling methods -- very useful to those with little previous exposure to the homeschooling concept.

HomeSchool Talk and Swap
A large collection of message boards on the usual topics as well as Single Parent Homeschoolers, Encouragement, Homeschool Humor, and Controversial Issues. It is unclear whether all forum members are Vegetarians, as the host site is Vegsource.com. The site also includes a Swap section: Wanted to Buy and Items to Sell.

Homeschool World
The site of Practical Homeschooling Magazine, and like any magazine, this one has lots of advertising for the kinds of products that the target audience would find useful. There is also a very handy nationwide listing of upcoming events of interest to the homeschooling community. The magazine articles that are included are arranged alphabetically by author, with a one-sentence description. The list is not long, so scrolling through is quick, but not so helpful for those unfamiliar with the literature, this is a bit awkward. This is not a site for someone just considering homeschooling; this is for the experienced homeschooling family.

Homeschooling and the Public Library
This website was created and developed by the four graduate students in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in November, 2001. They have done an excellent job of pulling together a number of useful links, and their own thought-provoking insights. In the introduction to the section Challenges of Serving Homeschoolers they write: "Welcoming homeschoolers to the community of library patrons can be a rewarding challenge. Explore issues of concern to librarians in serving this unique population. . . . The main issue to keep in mind is that homeschoolers deserve a fair share of the library's resources -- not more, but not less." The section on Research and Statistics provides some interesting information but as it has not been updated in 5 years, is now somewhat dated.

Homeschooling Students with Special Needs
A cleanly designed site with many annotated links. Online since 1996, it is nicely kept up to date. The scope of the site is impressive without being overwhelming. Many other sites in this list have a Special Needs category of links, but their complex Web page designs may make them difficult for the intended audience to access.

Jon's Homeshool Resource Page
This is the "granddaddy" of homeschooling sites on the Web, first posted in 1994. If you do not know where to start, come here! A great feature is the state-by-state guide to Support Groups and Mailing Lists. The URL for the New York page is: http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/NewYork.html. This is also an example of Web site design at its very best: easy to navigate and read, with excellent use of imbedded links and a strong internal searching engine so you can locate specialized topics within the site. Every page has a creation date and update notation and an e-mail link to the site's author, Jon Shemitz.

Learn in Freedom
Karl M. Bunday has written over 40 thought-provoking pages with thousands of links to help those interested in "taking responsibility for your own learning. . . . [on] how to use your own initiative in learning, so you can use schools and teachers just when they are helpful to you, and voluntarily chosen by you." This Web site is famous for its list of colleges that accept homeschoolers, and there is a page on this site to show you how to get started "Learning in Freedom." It includes bibliographies as well as Web links, and has a good site map.

Lesson Plans Page
Over 2,500 lesson plans available at no cost for pre K - Grade 12 in all commonly taught subjects. Includes seasonal ideas, weekly science experiments, math worksheets and a link to most the recently added lessons, so that one need not search the entire site on repeat visits.

Loving Education at Home
Loving Education At Home, Inc. is an organization of Christian home educators, which began in 1983 with five families seeking support and fellowship. It has grown into a statewide [NY] not-for-profit ministry providing support through a network of local chapters and an annual conference. In Central New York there are a number of LEAH support groups that can be contacted through the sites contact form at: http://www.leah.org/region.php?region=5.
The Syracuse and Skaneateles groups also maintain their own Web sites at: http://www.syracuseleah.org and http://www.freewebs.com/roseofsharonleah/.
An easily navigated copy of the New York State Regulations on Home Instruction can be found at: http://www.leah.org/nysregs.html.

The Math Forum at Drexel University
If you want to add, subtract, multiply. . . study probability and statistics, algebra or differential equations . . . . There is just about everything you ever could want mathematical on this site, with its resources for pre K - 12, college and advanced learners, an Internet Mathematics Library, discussion forums, and Ask Dr. Math! This site can be very helpful for the parent who finds math intimidating.

Montessori Homeschooling
Montessori education was founded in 1907 by Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy's first woman physician. She based her educational methods on scientific observation of children's learning processes. Guided by her discovery that children teach themselves, Dr. Montessori designed a "prepared environment" filled with cultural, artistic, and scientific activities. The child freely chooses from a number of developmentally appropriate activities and is never forced to attend a lesson or do a piece of work. The instructor observes and gives careful, individual lessons while refraining from interrupting when the child is concentrating on an activity. On this site, and others linked from it, the advice given those deciding to use Montessori principles for homeschooling suggests parents "focus more on the theory and practical suggestions" and less on purchasing the traditional Montessori materials. Support groups for this style of homeschooling are still limited, but listings for them can be found at: http://www.montessori.edu/homeschoolgroups.html.

National Home Education Network
NHEN "exists to encourage and facilitate the vital grassroots work of state and local homeschooling groups and individuals by providing information, fostering networking and promoting public relations on a national level. Because we believe there is strength in a diverse network of homeschoolers, we support the freedom of all individual families to choose home education and to direct such education." In the area of promoting public relations is a selection of resources for librarians, including some Questions and Answers under the topics of: What Librarians Want to Know about Homeschooling and What Homeschoolers Want From Libraries. There is also a section entitled: "For Dads by Dads", an aspect of homeschooling that does not seem much addressed, elsewhere.

New York Home Education Network
A membership organization of home schoolers with the following Mission:
"To support the freedom of families to educate their children at home; To improve and strengthen connections and communication among home educating families; To advocate for freedom from restrictions and for increased opportunities for home educating families; To increase public awareness, acceptance and support of home education; To provide an association that takes no position on religion, partisan politics, and non-homeschooling issues; and To protect from accidental or deliberate infringement by government parents' rights to teach their own children." There is alot of legislative information on the site and a number of e-mail lists that are hosted on Yahoo! as well as links to Centeral New York and North Country support groups.

OPEN-NY
Otherwise Providing Education iN New York is an ongoing effort by Paul Matte to research and promote the right of parents to direct education of their children without government interference. See also the Liberty Links section of the site if this is an approach that is of interest to you.

Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum
Growing out of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, and opened in 1999, the Nature Museum features a number of exciting online activities including Live Tuesday Webcasts with real-time chat. There are also archived Webcasts for viewing at other times. You can explore the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven, or work on a research project about the declining peregrine population at Bird Alert! This site with its wonderful learning tools is just one of many fine no-cost, Web-based interactive learning modules being created by museums around the world. However, Bird Alert! does something very special. It provides a wide range of resources and choices on how to proceed so that once the unit is worked through, an entire scientific research inquiry is completed and in the process, the research skills to do so are developed as a natural consequence of the process. On top of that, it is presented in a way that is fun!

Project Gutenberg
The Project Gutenberg philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. All 18,000 of the so far included works are Public Domain E-text editions in "Plain Vanilla ASCII." There are three main types of materials in the Project Gutenberg Library: 1) Light Literature such as: Alice in Wonderland , Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc. 2) Heavy Literature such as: the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc. and 3) References such as: Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc. Do not overlook the Top 100 Books which is updated daily.

Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704
Another interactive site developed by a museum, this time it is the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association / Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, MA. Though not a New York site per se, this contains very rich material that overlaps with our own state's history. In the era preceeding the Revolutionary War at least 5 cultures came into contact (and conflict) in the northeastern part of what would become the United States: French, English, Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), Wendat (Huron) and Wôbanaki (Abenaki, Pennacook, Sokoki, Pocumtuck and others). Find out more about all of them here while focusing on one specific historic event. Sites like this make learning history both managable and fun.

Travlang's Translating Dictionaries
Translation engines for 18 languages: German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Latin, Finnish, Norwegian, Frisian, Afrikaans, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Esperanto and Turkish.

Utah Education Network
Although specifically intended for the schools, homes, colleges and universities of Utah, this site has such rich resources that there is likely to be something of interest to any learner. Students can find distance learning classes and telecourses for high school and college credit. Educators can find lesson plans and online tools to help them enhance their skills. The site map is very well organized.

Waldorf Inspired Students at Home
Founded in Europe in 1919 by Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf education now includes schools on every continent and a rapidly growing homeschooling movement. It has grown to become the world's largest independent, non-denominational educational system covering all grades. Waldorf's pedagogy is designed to address the whole child: "head, heart and hands" by conveying knowledge experientially as well as academically. The Waldorf Method of Education strives to awaken capabilities, rather than to merely impose intellectual content on the child. There is a strong reliance on art and handicraft in Waldorf Education, and that is reflected in the many resources made available on this site. Also featured are links to many "WebRings" and discussion groups, including several on-going book discussion groups.

WCNY: Central New York's Own: Educational Services and Outreach
The companion site to public broadcasting's TV and radio stations with resources specifically designed for learners and educators.

World Book: Student Resource Center
The Student Resource Center contains World Book resources to help students with their schoolwork. It also offers educational games and activities that help make learning fun. Companion pages on this site are the Parent Resource Center, which contains World Book resources for parents to help their children with schoolwork and the Educator Resource Center, which contains topic enrichment resources, classroom activities, links to lesson plans, and professional development web links. The editors of World Book continually update these sections to help students of all ages.

Yamada Language Center
Based at the University of Oregon, this Web site is the first choice for language learning online. The richness of the externally linked sites, availability of satellite, radio and audio-visual aids, the many mailing lists and the downloadable font library all make this a truly great resource for those learning languages outside of the classroom environment. Students can also take advantage of the Foreign Language Exchange Database which allows students to contact each other, to mentor, learn, and practice foreign languages. All of the major languages of the world are featured at Yamada, as are a number of "less commonly taught" languages.