Don't Tell the Children: Homeschoolers' Best-Kept Secret

omeschoolers are a rather independent lot, almost cantankerously so. So to say that all homeschoolers do, well, anything, would be a mistake. However, I would venture to say that most homeschoolers love books. For most, books are the primary educational resource, although computers are running a close second these days.

But don’t tell the children.

You see, my homeschooled children and those of my homeschooling friends haven’t been let in on the secret that Books Are School. They sort of think our house is furnished with wall-to-wall books just because we like to read. In fact, they think most everybody likes to spend their free time reading. They think school is math problems and writing sentences and reading aloud maybe, but reading to oneself is pure pleasure.

I do know the occasional homeschooled kid who doesn’t read much, maybe because of reading issues such as dyslexia or as a result of an overdeveloped need to explore the great outdoors. But even those few have been exposed to lots of great children’s literature, because all the homeschoolers I know read aloud copiously and (usually) daily. A homeschooling mom can read a lot of books out loud by the time a child is “too big” for read-alouds at twelve or fourteen or, for some, even eighteen. My twenty-six-year-old friend Hannah, homeschooled all her life, was reminiscing just a few days ago about all the books her mother read to her and her twelve (yes, thirteen of them in all) brothers and sisters. Dickens, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Jane Austen were a few of the authors she remembers listening to when she was in middle school.

And studies support the claim that those young adults who were homeschooled and read aloud to continue to read for information and for enjoyment. In 2003, Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute did a study in which he surveyed over seventy-three hundred adults who had been homeschooled. Of the respondents, 98.5 percent said they had read at least one book in the past six months, and 100 percent said that they read one or more magazines regularly. Compare those numbers to the recent (November 2007) National Endowment for the Arts report that among the general population of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, 48 percent had not read a book not required for school or work in the past year.

So what are all these homeschooled youngsters and graduates reading? The youngest ones are more read to than reading. One week last January my six-year-old and I read a few picture books: Paul Galdone’s version of “Puss in Boots” and several Berenstain Bears books. Then at bedtime, joined by my eight-year-old, we also read the new edition of Pippi Longstocking illustrated by Lauren Child, a classic in a new package. Most homeschooled youngsters hear all the classic picture books, then graduate to books such as Winnie-the-Pooh and Little House in the Big Woods and Andrew Lang’s Orange Fairy Book. As they begin to read for themselves, Dr. Seuss is perennially popular. And my six-year-old’s favorite books are the Pigeon books by Mo Willems.

Some homeschoolers who are a little older develop a taste for historical fiction because they hear a lot of it read aloud for school. So my teenage girls are great fans of Ann Rinaldi’s American historicals with female protagonists. The younger set read a lot of series books: American Girls, American Diaries, Magic Tree House, and Time Warp Trio. Other favorite historical fiction authors, classic and not-so-classic, include Gloria Whelan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Barbara Willard, Carolyn Meyer, Laurence Yep, and the ever-popular Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Other homeschoolers tend to gravitate toward well-written fantasy after being exposed to lots of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. When I asked some middle school–aged homeschoolers what they were reading, many of them talked about Harry Potter or Christopher Paolini’s Eragon or Gail Carson Levine’s restructured fairy tales such as Ella Enchanted. Almost all of them had read or listened to the Chronicles of Narnia and were looking forward to the Prince Caspian movie.

Homeschoolers also learn early on to read for information. If a homeschooled student asks a question for which Mom has no answer, he or she is likely to be referred either to Dad or to a book. When my ten-year-old son wanted to design a website, he found and read half a dozen books on web design at the library (including Web Design for Dummies). My eight-year-old just checked out several books about dance and ballet because, you guessed it, she’s taking ballet classes and is interested in broadening her knowledge of the world of dance. Art books, science and engineering books, history books, Bible study guides, how-to manuals, you name it — they all find a place on our bookshelves and in our daily lives, and although we’re learning all the time, we seldom think of this kind of reading as school, either.

Then, too, homeschoolers, like any other kids, check out what’s popular: movie tie-ins such as Star Wars books; manga and other graphic novels; romances and mysteries. Some homeschooling parents are careful to monitor what their children, especially younger children, are reading, while others allow just about anything as long as they’re reading. I tend toward the latter camp, although I do like to talk with my kids about books that might be controversial and/or might contradict our family’s moral values. I recently read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series after my sixteen- and eighteen-year-old daughters read and recommended them. I thought they were fascinating, in a train-wreck kind of way, and I could see why adolescent girls get caught up in the tense romantic saga of a vampire and a lovesick girl.

I read lots of children’s and young adult books with my kids, not usually because I’m monitoring their reading but because I’m enjoying the books. My middle-school daughter and I read many of Caroline Cooney’s and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books last year after a homeschooling friend recommended those authors. And I get to read the “boy books,” too, with my sixth-grade son. Last week he and I enjoyed The Gollywhopper Games, a new book by Jody Feldman. My school-age children average at least two or three books a week, and to keep up with them, I have to average the same amount of reading or more.

As they get older, homeschoolers begin reading adult books. As I already mentioned, they feel free to read whatever informational books they need to learn what they want to learn, whether those books are shelved in the adult section of the library or bookstore or in the children’s section. Many homeschooled kids also start reading adult fiction at a relatively young age since there’s no one to tell them what grade level a certain book is meant for, or which books are adult books and which are written for children. (In fact, lots of homeschooled kids can’t tell you what grade they’re in anyway since grade levels are rather meaningless and fluid in this world of learning-as-you-go.) So, my middle school–aged daughter reads both Agatha Christie and Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, unconcerned about whether the books are intended for her age level. My older teenagers read young adult fiction and fantasy and murder mysteries and biographies and anything else they want. The eight-year-old tends to stick closer to her grade level since she’s still working on the mechanics of reading, but even she’s not afraid to pick up an enticing but thick book to try it out and see if she can manage it.

Finally, there are the graduates; I have three of them in my house, ages twenty-two, twenty, and eighteen. And they’re still reading. My oldest daughter reads incessantly: fiction, nonfiction, French, English, intellectually stimulating and mind candy alike. Lately she’s been reading Kierkegaard and Simone Weil, but she certainly doesn’t mind taking a tour through Anne of Green Gables for old times’ sake, or reading A Series of Unfortunate Events aloud to her little sister. The twenty-year-old is busy catching up on contemporary fiction such as that of Nick Hornby and Michael Chabon, although lately he’s been disturbingly interested in reading about the sixties and the drug culture: Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and Aldous Huxley. The eighteen-year-old reads mostly YA fiction: the aforementioned vampire romances by Stephenie Meyer, Sarah Dessen’s contemporary teen fiction, chick lit by various authors. She’s entering college this fall, so she’s reading all the light stuff now while she can.

And so we all keep reading, for information, for pleasure, even for school. And in our family, books have become a second language; shorthand references to favorite characters and episodes abound in our conversation. Once when I was reading Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver to my children, they kept asking me to read “just one more chapter.” Finally, I said, “I will read one more chapter. And at the end of that chapter, even if Attean is hanging off the edge of a cliff by his fingernails, I will not read any more tonight!” They agreed, and now whenever we need a finishing point to any project, we all say, “even if Attean is hanging off the edge of a cliff by his fingernails.” Homeschool is where education and home become inextricably entwined, where you really can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. Books in a homeschool are sort of like that, too. They become a part of your education but also part of your family.

Sherry Early is a former elementary school librarian and a twenty-year veteran homeschooler. She continues to homeschool the five of her eight children who have not yet graduated from high school, and she reads a lot. She also blogs at www.semicolonblog.com. Sherry and her family live in Houston, Texas.