Last night I had the pleasure of meeting 20-year homeschooling veteran Lori Lane, founder of Artios Academies and The End in Mind, a Christian homeschooling encouragement blog. As the guest speaker for my local homeschool support group, Lori shared her personal homeschooling journey and its connection to the foundation of…
Welcome to “Ask a NextGen Homeschooler.” It’s your turn to ask the authors of NextGen Homeschool — formerly homeschooled moms who are now homeschooling our children — to weigh in on your homeschooling questions. From the practical to the personal, all questions are welcome! This week’s question comes from a…
This year our family is planning to attend the Teach Them Diligently Convention in Washington D.C., taking place May 15-17. As residents of Oklahoma, this is a huge thing for our family. My husband and children have never been to the East Coast, and I was only 16 years old…
Recently a good friend of mine surprised me by asking if we could get together to talk about homeschooling. I wasn’t surprised that she might consider it, but I was surprised by the timing and eagerness to get it all figured out right now — months before the school year’s…
Last week we kicked off our fourth semester of girls book club with ten other homeschooling moms & their daughters. The girls book club is a homeschool “co-op” (cooperative education group) that I started two years ago and have continued to coordinate since then, chronicling our journey here at NextGen…
Our family decided to attend this year’s Oklahoma Homeschool Capitol Day. I took our two daughters to this event seven years ago, when our son Joel was only a year old. Hannah had made homemade apple pies for our Representative and Senator. We hadn’t attended since then because the girls…
Today we’re finally celebrating my eldest daughter’s thirteenth birthday with her friends (two weeks late!), and as we prepare to welcome her guests, I’m reminded about how blessed we are to have made such wonderful friendships with other families of “tweens” in our local homeschool support group. This year we…
You may have noticed a little lull in new posts on NextGen Homeschool this past week. I’ll be honest: We’re a bit worn out. Not simply busy or overwhelmed with our families, our homeschooling, our work, and our schedules, but a little worn down by the war of words that…
Last year I wrote about expanding our backyard garden and involving the girls in every step of the process, from choosing what to grow and starting seeds in the house, to transplanting and harvesting. What I left out of the story is the fact that we’d also decided to try…
I shared last week about my experience being interviewed by a national TV news program regarding homeschooling freedom in Oklahoma and whether there should be more regulation. The focus of the story, which appeared last night and is summarized online, was whether homeschooling regulations are necessary to “guarantee” that education…
Our story at NextGen Homeschool began in 1984, when Dean & Karen Gotcher began homeschooling their three children (authors Rosanna & Elizabeth, and my husband Kenny) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Back then, homeschooling was almost unheard of unless you were in very rural areas. Although homeschooling was legal, most people didn’t…
Welcome to NextGen Homeschool’s Top Homeschooling Posts of 2013 Series! This week we’ll be sharing the top homeschooling topics — and most viewed posts — of last year based on the number of reader views and pins at NextGen Homeschool. Pin this page so you can refer back to each…