The Constitution—Debate it. Discuss it. Understand it.

ALL Americans are encouraged to celebrate the U.S. Constitution on September 17. It was on this date in 1787 delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed the Constitution, a written charter for a new—and enduring—federal government.

The Constitution does not belong to one political party or one religious group. It belongs to all of us, so it is important that all our children understand what rights are protected under law.

Debate controversial issues with your homeschool support group friends. Discuss constitutional concepts with your children. Understand how the Constitution has shaped our democracy.

Visit The Constitution Day website for lesson plans, interactive features and games, conversation starters and information on landmark Supreme Court cases.

Here are some conversation starters about some important issues to help you get started.

For those of you wishing more formal lesson plans, or presentation materials, here are some lessons with pdf presentation materials.

Have some fun with these interactive games regarding the Constitution.

It is almost impossible to fall "behind" the public schools! Do realize that at school the kids are likely to be on task only two hours a day at most! And many are just good at playing the game, or have stopped playing altogether.

Kids do well at home because:

• They learn and sleep with the same odors in the house!
• they are in a loving situation;
• they are well fed with nutritious foods that they like, using a meal plan you feel is right for their needs;
• they don’t get sick or injured as often and when they do, they can take time to heal;
• they’ve had a full night’s rest;
• they are getting lots of sunshine, which helps retention of new lessons;
• and they are encouraged to learn about things that interest them until the topic is mastered!

More on Planning a Custom Education

Dear Readers,

Exactly a year ago, on August 13, 2009, I published a Virtual Homeschool Fraud Alert that you might remember reading. My reason for sharing this information was to hopefully minimize the amount of families who might fall victim to these companies and their deceptive tactics. Little did I know that so many of you would share this information with so many others — including your homeschool support groups, state leadership, HSLDA, etc. I had only hoped that some families who were considering one of these companies might find and read the alert and still have time to preserve their limited budgets for homeschool curriculum resources for the year.

Some Background

At the time I first shared this information, I honestly thought it was mostly common knowledge. For years there have been complaints against Mimi Rothschild’s companies. Whenever I read a forum where a newbie was asking advice about signing up for one of her “academies”, someone quickly jumped in to point them to lengthy online discussions with multiple grievous complaints — and warn them away. I honestly didn’t realize how many thousands of families had no clue that anything was amiss with Mimi Rothschild and her companies. I was only really thinking about families who were just beginning to homeschool — those who would not have been around long enough to have seen the dozens of testimonies of families who had been defrauded over the past few years.

I had also been advised not to make any negative public statements regarding Mimi Rothschild (or any of her various entities), because she had intimidated so many homeschool webmasters (who have forums hosting open discussions about her fraudulent companies) into removing the content from their websites. (If they do not comply, a lawsuit is threatened.)

I have firsthand knowledge of several websites who refuse Mimi’s requests to advertise for her cyber academies — or who simple ignore inquiries from her companies’ representatives. They value their own reputations, yes, but first and foremost they want to be able to have a clear conscience before God that they have not in any way mislead their readers or visitors. They know the readers of their newsletters and visitors to their websites are mostly single income homeschooling families — many of them new to homeschooling. They are devoted to building trust with these families. But when it comes to dealing with Mimi Rothschild and her educational enterprises, the price of maintaining their integrity has run high. Many have been harassed and degraded for refusing her money.

My website/newsletter is not even a 1/10 as large as many of these other sites and I have personally given up thousands of dollars in potential revenue by refusing to acknowledge requests to run lengthy ad campaigns for Rothschild’s interests. Over the past few years I have received several emails from Mimi herself, as well as representatives from her “academies”. In addition to refusing to contract direct advertising, dozens of homeschooling related sites (who host “Ads by Google”) routinely block any advertisements related to Mimi’s companies from appearing on their websites.

The Unexpected Fruit

While I was not surprised to be threatened with a lawsuit by Rothschild, I was completely taken aback to find out, by Mimi’s own admission, that (supposedly as a result of my newsletter issue last August), there were at least 4 major homeschool conferences who refused to allow one or more of her companies to be vendors at their major state conventions recently. Some of these she had been admitted to in past years; at least one had already accepted her application and payment. I have never spoken or had any correspondence personally with any of these decision makers — I can only believe that they made their decisions based on what they read independently on the Internet; heartrending stories of despair and desperation from Christian homeschooling families who realized, too late, that they had been taken.

The Lawsuit

So now, glory to God, I get to go to court! In Philadelphia, of all places!! I find it funny that I bought plane tickets for 2 trips with my family before I had any clue about a lawsuit. I had the really cool blessing of visiting the old Philadelphia City Hall while there recently — and I got to visit (and anoint and pray over) the actual courtroom and Judge’s chambers. God is on the throne and He will be glorified.

Mimi and her husband, Howard Mandel, have demanded a jury trial because the amount of money they hope to be awarded exceeds $50,000. (Mr. Mandel is also suing me for charges of “loss of marital consortium.”)

The Accusations

I am being accused of defamation and/or slander/libel. A thing is only considered defamation if the “victim” is proven to be innocent of the claims against him or her.

Here is a summary of just a few of the claims folks have made against Mimi’s companies that you can find fairly easily in any public Internet search:

1. Charging customers’ credit cards, sometimes repeatedly over long periods of time, for items that were either advertised as “free” or should have been charged only once.

2. Refusing to respond to customer concerns, often with unreasonable “hold” times of an hour or more on the phone with customer service. Most customers give up after several attempts at contact.

3. Refusing refunds for customers who are devastated that they just spent $1,000 or more for inappropriate* materials they just received.

4. Significant and/or statistically high amount of server “down time” for the online portion of the curriculum, teachers consistently unavailable and unwilling to answer parent emails, inaccurate logging of students’ online study time/days.

5. Unreasonable deadlines to complete curriculum or for parents to be able to print out transcripts, etc. needed for reporting.

6. *Materials received that were not on grade level or mixed grade levels.

7. *Materials received that appeared to be used curriculum from a garage sale, etc. — torn, outdated, overly secular with evolution (not Christ-centered, as advertised), and, in more than one case, pornographic and/or highly offensive in nature.

8. *Curriculum full of spelling and/or grammatical errors, missing pages, etc.

In addition, here is how Mimi has treated several leaders in the online homeschool community:

1. Constant intimidation and threat of lawsuits against ANYONE who dares to publicly question her activities, motives, etc. or allow negative information about her companies to exist (in any form) on their website(s).

2. Relentless harassment by phone of those who deny her the opportunity to advertise because they are uncomfortable with the reputation of her companies.

3. Buying up derivatives of domain names of those who disagree with her (for instance if someone has a website name with a .com extension, she will buy up the .org and .net of their name), then forwarding the domain to another website which is not family-friendly, degrading the reputation of the owner of the original website. (Actual examples withheld due to privacy issues.)

I’ve left out many more complaints, but you get the picture.

If you are unsure whether you are dealing with one of Mimi’s companies, you may want to check the list compiled by Helen Hegener of Home Education Magazine. There are literally hundreds of domain names registered to her. The New Jersey Homeschool Association has a list of virtual (online, cyber, distance learning) homeschooling options that are generally assumed to have good reputations, as well as a page for those generally considered to be fraudulent. Mimi’s companies alone occupy the Fraud Alert page at this time. (They also list other companies associated with Mimi Rothschild that I wasn’t aware of — Cambridge Academy and National Academy for the Gifted.)

The main (active) ones are Jubilee Academy, Learning by Grace, Grace Academy, Morningstar (Morning Star) Academy, and Southern Baptist Academy. Two more that I didn’t mention in the post of about a year ago are </www.k-12freehomeschool.com (not to be confused with William Bennett’s www.k12.com) and Narnia Academy.

Thank you for taking the time to read my “notes” for today’s issue. I would appreciate your prayer for me as I prepare to go to court. God has given me a wonderfully light spirit about the whole situation and I look forward with great anticipation to see His hand move. I feel a bit like David up against Goliath — but I also know the end of that story.

Blessings,
– Heather idoni

P.S. If you or someone you know has been harmed by one of Mimi’s companies, please contact me [Heather Idoni]. I would be honored to present your story to the jury and see justice done!

Related Links:

Two Offices of the Better Business Bureau Assign “F” Ratings to Learning by Grace, Jubilee Academy, Morning Star Academy

What Educational Controversy was Mimi Rothschild Involved in Before Starting Learning by Grace?
(This first 8-page 2002 article is a MUST read. Read to the end, even though it is painful.)

A Typical Online Forum Discussion Regarding Mimi’s Companies

Entries at “Rip-Off Report”:

This transcript may be shared in its entirety via email or in any publication – website, newsletter, etc. – provided the link below is included in the publication. Use the code from the link below.

Virtual Homeschool Fraud Alert – Part II
http://homeschool-fraud-alert.educationforthesoul.com

“Because I taught at the University of Colorado Boulder for more than a decade, these questions strike home. I know in my gut what would give Lucy the best education, but I’m almost sure that my wife and I can’t do it: homeschool her.”

There are many replies now. But here is mine:

Daniel,

I wish to address your excuses.

First: “There’s a good school down the street.” Even the best public schools are having to bend to the No Child Left Behind’” teach-to-the-test mentality, and they are having to do it with far fewer tax dollars than ever before. Talk to teachers there “off the record” while you child is still young and ask them what they think. Today’s schools are not what you remember.

Second: “It’s free!” CNN reported that the average amount parents spend on sending each child to public school is now $606. While homeschooling isn’t free, and you might wind up spending that amount, you would only be spending money on educational items your family had decided were worthwhile.

Third: You are right – you will still be teaching her at home, after school, after work, when you are all tired. You will be correcting misconceptions your child is learning. (The science misconceptions were what swung my husband to the homeschool camp. The 4th grade “science specialist” didn’t know the difference between opaque and translucent!)

Fourth: What if you screw up? You will screw up. Your child will turn 18 and have missed some concept. This will happen no matter what form of education you choose. But when homeschool parents perceive a gap, they locate mentors to guide their child through difficult subject matter. Murphy’s Laws of Homeschooing: If you know a lot about something, your child will refuse to learn it. If you know nothing about a subject, your child will insist on being taught it.

Fifth: Additional responsibility. It’s your responsibility anyway. You will be spending around 5 hours each night reteaching everything your child supposedly learned in school so that homework can get done.

Sixth: Free time. We had MORE free time when homeschooling. Mostly academics got done in a few morning hours, so we had afternoons and evenings free. We could go to events like plays that lasted late because who cared when we got up in the morning?

Seventh: Sacrifice income. Only if you must. I started my homeschool site while we were homeschooling, gathering free and inexpensive resources first for our own use and then to share with others. Online educational resources are getting better and better, disrupting the traditional “factory worker” model of schools. As an educational consultant, you could become part of this movement.

Eighth: a sense of accomplishment. I, too, was getting that once working for well known Silicon Valley businesses. But I mattered little to them when they decided to downsize. Now I use the marketing skills I learned at Apple and National Semi to promote homeschooling. I help families in dire need of alternatives to the horrors their children were experiencing at public schools.

A reply to Daniel Bringham’s article in the Denver Post.
Imagine teaching your kids at home.

Ann Zeise
A to Z Home’s Cool

Hi Ann,

It was nice speaking with you this afternoon. As promised, I wanted to share some insight regarding the reasons for making the eligibility rule modification. While it is true that homeschool students will no longer be permitted to combine with other homeschool students to form a team, every homeschool participant will still be eligible to register, compete and advance to the State and National Competitions as an individual competitor, as they have for several years now.

There were several factors that influenced our Board’s decision to modify the eligibility rule. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for both the MATHCOUNTS national office and the several hundred volunteers who coordinate the competitions at the local and state levels to monitor whether the registered homeschools in their chapters and states did indeed meet the eligibility requirements of the national program. The frequency in which enrichment programs and tutoring centers (which are not eligible to participate) have tried to circumvent the eligibility requirements by registering as homeschool teams has increased significantly over the past few years. In addition, the homeschool requirements of the past did, unfortunately, allow some homeschool groups to take advantage of the policy and create “super teams” by drawing on students from chapters outside of their own. Unfortunately, this was an advantage that was not afforded to your typical brick-and-mortar school and created an unfair situation.

Taking these factors into consideration and recognizing that homeschools account for between 1%-2% of all registered schools in the program, it was decided that modifying the rules to only allow homeschoolers to participate as individuals was the best solution to create a fair and balanced program for all 6000 participating schools and nearly 40,000 participating students.

MATHCOUNTS values our homeschool participation and will continue to give homeschool students every opportunity to be involved in and succeed in the program. Although homeschool participants will no longer have the opportunity to participate in the team component of the competition, we hope they will still find a great deal of value and benefit from competing in the individual components, as do the 40% of registered students nationwide who compete strictly as individuals.

We appreciate your support of the program and I hope you understand the reasoning behind this decision. Please don’t hesitate to contact me should you have any further questions or concerns.

Thank you.

Chris Bright
Program Manager
MATHCOUNTS Foundation
Phone: 703-299-9006 x 104
Fax: 703-299-5009
chris@mathcounts.org

Official Explanation for MathCounts Altered Rules for Homeschool Teams

Homeschool Mathcounts Discussion Group

Everyone on the AP site where she shared her story was indignant, calling for nurse-ins and boycotts, but it occurred to us after some discussion that the problem was not that she was nursing in public at the event, it was that she’d set up an ‘unauthorized booth.’ So the answer, then, must be an authorized booth. She and I started talking, and developed the idea that it should not be a ‘breastfeeding’ tent, but an infant care station, where all parents were welcome to come change their babies diapers, and where moms could sit in the shade, away from the distractions of the event, and feed her baby. After a month or so of discussions, I got a business license for Mom’s Breastaurant and got the ball rolling.

Our first event was in December of 2006, and we’ve done more than 50 events since then. About half of the events are within a day’s drive of the CA Bay Area, where the home chapter is located, but we have also set up and provided our services at events in AZ, NV, OR, CO, WY and LA. We welcome all mothers into the booth, regardless of how or what they are feeding their babies, and we offer them a small snack and a drink. Parenting is hard work, and if mom is nursing, it’s also very calorie intensive. Our diaper table is fully stocked, just in case they didn’t pack enough diapers, or forgot their diaper creams, or ran out of wipes. Our service is provided to parents and to the event at no cost – if we are given space to set up, we’re there. We are a 501(c)3, and do accept donations, and offer receipts for tax deductions. Donors of larger amounts may be offered a thank-you gift.

Mom’s Breastaurant is currently in the thick of things in the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Despite getting off to a late start, we’ve managed to advance in the rankings to now be in 367th place. To earn a share of the prize, though, we need to be in the top 200, and the contest ends in 4 days, on July 12th. If you are on Facebook and would like to vote for MB, please visit The Chase Community Giving Contest. Please share the link with your friends and encourage them to vote! With the prize money MB will be able to expand and offer parents our service at outdoor events across the country!

Note from Ann Zeise: Mom’s Breastaurant is a non-profit located here in my city of Milpitas by a couple of moms. While most of their service booths are at fairs here in the San Francisco Bay Area, they are hoping to establish chapters in other states. I told them that I thought that homeschool moms might think this was a really good idea whose time had come!

We keep the following in mind when organizing this conference:

There are options, and here’s some we’ve checked out.

For years on my site I’ve had an affiliate relationship with The Circle of Friends Penpal Club. This is for girls 7-17 years old only. This is a web-based system with “bad word” and “personal information” filters. There is a small entrance fee, but this is just enough to discourage those who aren’t serious about participating: $12 a year. Click on the JOIN button to sign up.

Another service contacted me, and offered to send me a sample of their product, My Bear Mail. As I was a little worried because of the play on words in their name, I had them send samples to my 8 year old grandson and my sister-in-law, Sue, a second grade teacher. I asked both to write me what they thought of the product. Each got a stuffed bear, who appears to be sending letters from all over the world, giving short lessons on the geography and history of each region visited.

My grandson got the bear and the mailings over time. Want to know the best part? He thinks they are coming from me directly! He thinks I’m on some sort of world tour, I guess. Even though he’s a big boy, he still found the bear endearing, and very much enjoys getting “real mail” from time to time.

Sue got the whole package at once. She had tried in the past to get penpals for her 2nd grade students, but it never worked out. The penpals were not consistent about writing back to each student. Having all the letters at once, she told me, makes it easy for her to plan her lesson around each letter. The kids always think each just arrived. There is no worrying that letters won’t arrive or some child will not get a letter.

From time-to-time I’ll update this post with other child-safe ways for your child to get involved with a “penpal” who is about as safe as anyone could make it.

By Ann Zeise

From the 4 students with the most votes, the finalist will be chosen and will receive a $15,000 college scholarship. The 40 regional winners will have their art work displayed at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and will be attending an awards ceremony in New York City next week.

Since Hannah is a homeschool student she doesn’t have the backing of a large school like many of the other contestants. So, we hope you will be her school and vote for her and help us get the word out to your friends, family, co-workers, etc.

Voting ends on Tuesday, 25th. It takes just a minute to cast your ballot!

How to Vote

1. Go to doodle4google.com
2. click “Vote Now”
3. click “grade 10-12″
4. click “Region 7″
Hannah’s doodle is entitled “Dawn of Hope”
5. click on “Vote for this doodle”

Of course, we’d be so excited if she won! Wouldn’t it be great if a homeschooler won this national competition?

Thank you so much!
Lisa Newsom

by Joyce Michel, Teaneck, NJ

“Anyone out there have any information on homeschooling the gifted?” This question has occurred to me repeatedly, with increasing urgency, as my daughters (now age 3 and 5) have approached school age. With every book I encounter on homeschooling, I find myself turning first to the index to look up “gifted”; in the books on gifted children, I immediately search for “homeschooling.” So far, I have discovered little.

Intensive library research has proved disappointing. The homeschooling literature makes just a few references to the ability of homeschooling to meet the needs of gifted children. The gifted literature mentions homeschooling only in passing as an extreme educational option (or as J. Smutny aptly terms it, “the ultimate pullout program”) .I have found mention of a few enticing-sounding articles — from journals too obscure to obtain. Meanwhile, in the popular media, human interest stories depict profoundly gifted children who were homeschooled with positive results. But as to actual research? Nothing.

Why No Research on Homeschooling the Gifted?

So much has been written on the separate topics of homeschooling and giftedness that the lack of research where these topics converge is surprising — initially.

Research on giftedness, however, presumably follows the same constraints as its parent fields of educational and psychological research. The issues that are researched are typically those that are readily funded, easy to obtain data in, and of great concern to much of society. On all counts, researchers of giftedness are most likely to investigate public school populations. Compare the feasibility of obtaining data on gifted children in a large uniform school system versus in numerous separate homes of homeschooling families whose methods are likely to differ remarkably from one another. The homeschooled population has therefore been ignored by researchers probably because of logistics as well as ignorance.

On the other side, why so little discussion of giftedness in the home-schooling literature? Largely because giftedness is a comparative term that is less relevant when the child is educated at home, apart from age mates. What need have homeschoolers to test, sort, and label their children as the schools do? No matter what their educational philosophy, homeschoolers typically emphasize understanding their children and meeting their educational needs as individuals — an approach that does not concern itself with how the child’s abilities or disabilities would be labeled in a school environment.

Thus Josh Shaine of the Hollingworth Center for Highly Gifted Children (in NH), who spoke on giftedness at a homeschooling conference in Boston, describes homeschooling parents as reluctant to test their children and leery of educational labels such as “gifted.” Home-schoolers are, then, notably difficult to research on the topic of giftedness. In his opinion, incidentally, the identification of gifted homeschooled children would be beneficial, resulting in their needs being met more appropriately.

Further reluctance by home-schoolers to discuss giftedness — at least academic giftedness — may stem from an anti-academic attitude common to proponents of several homeschooling philosophies. With academics so heavily identified with formal schooling, it is not surprising that some critics of formal schooling find academics too bookish, too abstract, or too secular — and thus undervalue academic giftedness. For example, some homeschoolers believe that reading ability is commonly attained around age 8 or 10, and some of these parents proudly cite their children’s relatively late reading ages as if tribute to the parents’ immunity to social pressure and their commitment to the child’s natural development. Such parents may be defensive towards or disbelieving of a parent whose child began to read at, say, age three, doubting that such behavior was self-motivated and accusing the parent of “pushing.” Homeschoolers who highly value uninhibited spontaneity, practical life skills, or religious obedience may also undervalue gifted academic performance — particularly when manifested by children other than their own.

Finding Answers Between the Lines

Lacking research on homeschooling the gifted, I looked for what recommendations researchers make for educating gifted children in school. Over and over I found researchers suggesting that the school provide the gifted child with an educational environment that is:

• individualized,
• flexibly scheduled,
• appropriately challenging,
• actively supported by the parents,
• based on life experiences, and
• based on the child’s interests.

Suddenly it dawned on me — the researchers are (unwittingly) describing homeschooling!

In addition, researchers on giftedness repeatedly describe gifted children as able and independent learners who have little need to be “taught” in the didactic sense. They advise that many gifted children require not teachers but mentors to provide encouragement and access to resources. This is indeed reassuring to homeschooling parents who may doubt that they are “smart enough” to educate a gifted child. Indeed, supportive and helpful homeschooling parents — perhaps along with an outside tutor or mentor in the area of the child’s talent or interest — may be more appropriate for the gifted child than leaving the child’s education to professional teachers who must try to meet the diverse needs of many children at once.

I showed a list of recommendations such as the one above to a public school teacher, who declared that the recommendations sounded wonderful, but that they would be impossible to implement — at least in the overcrowded and underfunded classroom in which he taught. In contrast, not only can these recommendations be readily implemented through homeschooling, but they describe homeschooling as it is already actually practiced by many homeschoolers (of both gifted and nongifted children).

Of course every home school is unique; one cannot generalize too much, given the wide range of philosophies and methods to which homeschoolers subscribe. But certainly all the above features are more typical of homeschooling than of school, since homeschooling is usually more responsive to the child’s abilities. In fact, the recommendations above are antithetical to the classroom environment, which tends to be naturally group-oriented, rigidly scheduled, paced by age norms, and have a bureaucratically determined curriculum.

The features that researchers recommend for gifted children could arguably provide the basis of a fine education for children of any level of ability; many nongifted children would presumably benefit if their educations were more individualized, responsive, and relevant. But these recommendations are most appropriate for gifted children because gifted children (along with children with learning difficulties or unusual learning styles) are furthest from the norms upon which group education is based; in other words, gifted children have needs that are highly atypical — and therefore badly met — in the classroom.

In search of further information, I contacted Carla DeLancy, editor of HoMe Schooling (the newsletter of the homeschooling special interest group of Mensa). She responded that perhaps the prevalence in homeschooling of the features recommended for gifted education is partially responsible for the superior academic performance (as measured by standardized tests) of homeschooled children over their peers in school. This implies, intriguingly, that these characteristics of homeschooling can elicit gifted performance from a significant number of children who would not be identified as gifted in the schools.

So, although I located no research explicitly on homeschooling gifted children, I did find an answer I had sought: that indeed, homeschooling can provide an appropriate education for gifted children — in fact, homeschooling is in many ways better suited than the classroom for meeting gifted needs and fostering gifted outcomes.

Who, Me — An Expert?

Motivated by the thought that other parents were probably seeking similar information on homeschooling gifted children, I volunteered to present my findings at a parent discussion group at the Gifted Child Society in Hackensack, New Jersey. I invited my friend Sara Finkler to assist in the presentation to lend further credibility — she’s a certified teacher who is homeschooling older children, using selective acceleration to meet their gifted needs.

The discussion group, titled “Considering Homeschooling for Gifted Children,” was particularly well attended, with a spirited question-and-answer session. Photocopied handouts were eagerly snapped up. My only disappointment was that none of the parents attending seemed better informed than ourselves. To them, we were the experts.

The high level of interest in our topic was confirmed, unexpectedly, by a barrage of media attention on the topic. In quick succession, Sara Finkler’s family appeared on a story on homeschooling in the local TV news; both of her views and mine were featured in our newspaper’s parenting column (Bergen Record 11/10/96: “Letting the Gifted Learn at Home”); my family, among others, was spotlighted in an article on Jewish homeschoolers in the local Jewish weekly; and I was asked to write this article for HoMe Schooling. As Sara and I resurfaced, somewhat dazed, from our sudden immersion in the media vortex, we concluded that interest in the topic of homeschooling the gifted was high, but that no researchers on the topic had emerged.

Which brings me back to my question: “Anyone out there have any information on homeschooling the gifted?”

References and Resources

Colfax D., and Colfax, M. (1988). Homeschooling for Excellence. Warner Books. (Practical and reassuring book from parents who homeschooled several children to go on to Harvard.)

Emerick, L.J. (1992). Academic underachievement among the gifted: Students’ perceptions of factors that reverse the pattern. Gifted Child Quarterly, 36, 140-146.

Koopmans-Dayton J.D., & Feldhusen J.F. (1987). A Resource Guide for Parents of Gifted Preschoolers. GCT, Nov/Dec, 2-7. (See Table 3, Components of a Modified Curriculum for Gifted Children, which summarizes the recommendations of numerous researchers.)

McMillan, B.D. (1985). Home education for gifted children. GCT, Nov/Dec, 55-56. (Brief but convincing essay.)

Smutny, J.F. (1989). Your gifted child: How to recognize and develop the special talents in your child from birth to age seven. Facts On file, New York. (See pp. 106-108, “The Ultimate Pullout Program: Homeschooling.”)

Home sweet school. Time, Oct. 31, 1994, 62-63. (Emphasis on homeschooling for academic excellence.)

In a class of their own. Newsweek, Jan. 10, 1994, 58. (The benefits
of home-schooling for exceptionally gifted children depicted through the lives of three families.)

American Association for Gifted Children Newsletter, January 1996, vol. III no. 1. This special homeschooling issue includes several essays:

• Stewart, J. Homeschooling the gifted child — try it! (One family’s experience — emphasis on academic acceleration.)
• Blackwell, J. Home education: a growing trend. (A general overview.)
• McIntee, S.K. Learning our way at home: an exceptional family’s trek toward appropriate education. (Home-schooling two boys, both labeled gifted and learning disabled.)
• (The issue also includes a 4-page insert, “Books and Resource Guides for Home Schoolers,” which is available for $3. Write AAGC, 1121 W. Main St., Suite 100, Durham, NC 27701).

Note: I’m still desperately seeking further information on homeschooling the gifted. I’ve been unable to obtain:

• Kearny, K. (1984). At home in Maine: gifted children and home schooling. GCT May/June, 15-19.
• Kearny, K. (1989). Homeschooling gifted children. Understanding Our Gifted 1(3); pp. 1, 12-13, 15-16.

I’d be very grateful to any reader who could supply these or any other articles. Please write to Joyce Michel at 780 Grange Rd. Apt. 12, Teaneck, NJ 07666. Thanks!

From Ann Zeise: I need to reach Joyce Michel to get her permission to retain her article on this page. If someone could send me her email address, I would greatly appreciate it. I saved the article from her old Geocities site.