How to Homeschool

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product (How to Homeschool) through Ascot Media Group.  Affiliate Links will be used, thank you for your support of my blog, costs you nothing to do so, and is so much appreciated.  

As a veteran homeschooler, I wanted to check out How to Homeschool to see if it would present accurate information to new homeschoolers, and if perhaps it might be thought-provoking.  Miguel Varella-Cid using examples from his own life to present ideas to homeschoolers, new and old, to encourage us in our journey.  The goal, to help our children learn and to become good, functioning adults. 

Basic Details and Press Release

Miguel Varealla-Cid has a Canadian connection! He wrote to tell me “some of my family are from Toronto, and I spent a fair chunk of my childhood in Ontario. I’m originally from the U.K., though I moved to Japan in 1998, then settled here when I met my wife Yuko, soon afterward”.  Always good to see a Canadian connection eh?   Anyways, he’s the author of How to Homeschool: A guide for progressive parents. 

Panoma, a rethink Press company, published this 262-page softcover book.  With 17 chapters, you’ll find that it covers much about homeschooling. 

From the Press Release:

Homeschooling has surged in popularity, especially during the last couple of years, and is the fast-growing choice for parents seeking an empowering alternative to traditional classroom-based or online school learning. 

But how can parents know if homeschooling is the right choice for their children?
And when they decide it is, how can they get a good understanding of what methods of learning may best suit their individual children?    …… Miguel Varella-Cid, and his wife, Yuko, have explored the options for years and applied homeschooling methods based on nurturing children’s individual passions to help them learn much more than they would at school. …..

In it, Miguel Varella-Cid answers commonly asked questions from new homeschooling parents, explores the pros and cons of free homeschooling, examines what makes children smart, shares seven steps to homeschooling success, and much more.  …. He uses many examples he and his wife used with their own children to illustrate how their techniques facilitate a child’s individual passions and abilities while helping the child attain fruitful academic progress.

Reviewed on behalf of Ascot Media Group, Inc. 

Looking deeper into How to Homeschool

One of the things I enjoyed about How to Homeschool was the author’s attention to detail.  He wants to help progressive parents to do the job well.  His goal is to help us think through various issues and decide how to approach them.   He starts by giving us information about himself and his family.  

In each chapter, you’ll find examples of how homeschooling worked in his family and how different things most impacted his family.  From there he’ll go on and explain his thinking behind different ideas.  

He’s fairly thorough in his approach, talking about pros and cons, objections, difficulties, and such.  He frequently interchanges free schooling, homeschooling and unschooling terminology, which I found a bit confusing.  

I did find him verbose and using bigger words than he needed to.   Not that I don’t know how to read or understand big words!  I love language and interesting words! But occasionally it made his ideas more complicated than they needed to be.  There’s value in keeping your language simple. 

I love that he highlighted sections so you could easily bookmark important ideas to research, return to or think more deeply upon.   His asking of questions I find encourages me to ask new questions of my own.  It’s like my own mini-brainstorming session!  

Throughout the text you’ll find statements in bold, lists, headers, etc, all making it easier to read and highlight important concepts. 

I can’t say I agreed with everything he had to say, but it was often thought-provoking. 

He does list a number of online resources for homeschoolers.   Many are ones I knew like Khan Academy, talkbox, outschool etc.  Others were new to me like Sue Patterson, funancial freedom, and thought co.  These were in a chapter called Free homeschool resources, and while some of them are free, others most definitely are not.  So I’m not sure why he didn’t separate them out to make it more clear. 

Add it to your resource shelf?

Well, I don’t know.   There was much I found worthy of browsing through, but overall I found myself feeling a bit irritated.  I’ve been trying to figure out why. After all, How to Homeschool is a good topic.

I’ve mostly boiled to his style of writing and his encouragement to adopt his lifestyle? I think.  The occasional confusion due to his language/style of writing was too frequent.  The whole “I’m a vegan, I know other vegans and their lifestyle and health is much better thing was, for me, off-putting.  

Mr. Varella-Cid presents a lot of good information.  He has a gentle, free-flowing style, and with a goal of lovingly encouraging us to think about our children’s long-term needs.  We need to figure out what our children need and then help them figure out how to learn!