Carnival of Homeschooling is up!

The Carnival of Homeschooling for this week is up over at Mom is Teaching. My post about High School Musicals is featured.

There were a couple of other posts that I found interesting:

• Dana over at Principled Discovery has a post entitled Structure and Learning in the Homeschooling Environment, in which she addresses the charge that homeschooling doesn't provide an adequately "structured" environment to prepare children for the "real world" (there's that term again). Incidental to her argument, she points out that different children (even within the same family!) often need entirely different amounts of structure in their days.
• The Reluctant Homeschooler has a post entitled What I Check Out of the Library. This is an interesting site; the mother started homeschooling in February, and her blog gives a blow-by-blow of why they made the decision to homeschool, what was going through her head when she started (in a word: "Panic"), what successes they had, and what mistakes they made--almost in real-time. Additionally of interest is the fact that they started homeschooling with high-school, which is definitely the road less taken. I found it particularly interesting to go through the earliest posts in their archive and see what brought them to this lifestyle choice, and how they got into it. It wasn't a smooth transition. Anyway, regarding their choice of library books: they check out some really depressing titles, dealing with the worst that Man does to Man. They want to instill in their children a sense of righteous indignation, a sense of justice, so that their children will grow up noticing these kinds of things happening around them, and be motivated to do something about them. As one who's extolled the virtues of the old children's literature (the stuff in which bad things happen to people), I find their decisions to be thought-provoking.
  
• The Thinking Mother provides this review of a book entitled Ships Without a Shore, the thesis of which is that the way we as a society raise our children--with less parental involvement than in generations past, and with more institutionalization (in everything from day-cares to high-schools)--is having a terrible effect on the up-and-coming generation.

There's a lot of good stuff there. Check it out!