Homeschooling: The Middle Years: Your Complete Guide to ... (ISBN 0761520929)

Amazon.com Review:
Homeschooling: The Middle Years offers resources and advice for guiding children through the later elementary years. Author Shari Henry emphasizes the importance of a well-rounded education, providing great detail on standard curriculum subjects like math, language arts, and social studies, as well as coverage of additional subject areas like theater, music, and foreign languages (sign language in particular). Each subject is accompanied by practical tips on incorporating learning into life by using interdisciplinary study techniques--learning math and communication skills through starting a business like babysitting or learning the history of the United States by writing stories, drawing maps, and interviewing senior citizens. Lists of popular books and teaching materials help narrow the focus of the huge directories found elsewhere. Parents will find encouragement as well--reminders that homeschooling is worth the extra struggle, along with a chapter devoted to the most common difficulties facing parents (financial problems, age differences in your children, or special physical or intellectual demands) and how to surmount such difficulties. --Jill Lightner

This Book is for Beginners Only:
I was a little disappointed at how basic the information is in this book. If you are completely new to homeschooling then it would be beneficial, but for those looking for a more content-rich guide with specific curriculum suggestions, this is not the best book to buy. The information is a very general guide to beginning homeschooling and the resource lists are not extensive, but they do include some good recommendations.

Homeschooling: The Middle Years:
This is a very informative book especially for first-time homeschoolers. It was well written and very well organized. The resources listed were very helpful. My only complaint was the unnecessary criticism of classroom teachers. Unless Ms. Henry was once a classroom teacher herself, I feel she is unqualified to claim that "the most average high school graduate could produce average work in this not-so-challenging college major." I was disappointed in this display of subjective writing in an otherwise well-written book.

Not for unschoolers:
I was disappointed reading this book, after enjoing "the early years" by Linda Dobson so much. This book assumes you are going to use some sort of curiculum. If you are interested in UNschooling (aka natural learning) - better get some other book.

Out dated poorly organized:
This book is basically statistics from 1 small survey. The information is presented in a less then readable manor. There are some good ideas thrown in here and there but I found it hard to sift through the commentary to pull that out. This book is outdated talking about video tapes (no mention of DVDs), audio refers to co and tapes but not mp3 players. No mention of accessing and reserving books over the internet for free from the library. She states there are 1000001 ways to home school but goes in to very little detail. The information presented in this book is antidotal and not based on any scientific studies. Although a couple of scientific studies are mentioned in passing. There is much better information on the internet for home schooling that is up to date and area specific.

Great if you are just getting started:
If you've been at it for a while this book will be only minimally helpful. However, if you are going to start homeschooling in the middle years this is the most excellent resource I have found.