Books featuring homeschoolers

Like other kids, homeschoolers can be inspired by seeing themselves in fiction. The problem is that many of the depictions of homeschoolers in mainstream fiction depend on misinformation and depict homeschoolers as two-dimensional. The books on this list all show more well-rounded depictions of homeschool life.

Some of them are older books from before the time when homeschoolers were considered unusual. Many are more recent, positive depictions of kids living modern homeschooling lives. Please leave other suggestions in the comments below. (I haven’t read all of these, so let me know if any don’t belong on this list.)

Hanna
My book, Hanna, Homeschooler, follows seven-year-old Hanna as she moves to a new town and makes new friends.

Young Readers (picture and chapter books):

Books about homeschoolers
“Please excuse my child from school. I’m a vampire, and she might be one, too.”

Middle Grade (8-13 years):

  • Almond, David: Skellig
  • Atkinson, Elizabeth: I, Emma Freke
  • Baranoski, Sheila: Cellular Spirits
    Eric Achak is a twelve-year-old unschooler who can see ghosts. He thinks he’s the only one who has this problem until he meets Mr. Francis, who not only can see them but has developed a ghost-catching app that sucks ghosts into cell phones.
  • Barnhill, Kelly: The Girl Who Drank the Moon
  • Bodett, Tom: Williwaw!
  • Burnett, Frances Hodgson: The Secret Garden
    Not really a book about homeschooling, but children in Victorian Britain didn’t always go to school, and it never seemed to be such a huge issue, as long as they were learning and thriving.
  • Cook, Kacy: Nuts
  • Cottrell-Bentley, Lisa: Wright on Time series (click here for all books published by Lisa’s company, Do Life Right, which focuses on books about homeschoolers)
  • Forester, Victoria: The Girl who could Fly
  • Frank, Lucy: The Homeschool Liberation League
  • French, S. Terrell: Operation Redwood
    The homeschool family in this book is just a tad stereotypical (back to the land hippies), but they are lovely characters and as role models, impeccable.
  • Hannigan, Katherine: Ida B… and her plans to maximize fun, avoid disaster, and (possibly) save the world
  • Hatke, Ben: Mighty Jack
  • Hawes, Louise: Big Rig
    This is the very best depiction of roadschooling I’ve ever read in a kids’ book, hands down. On the homeschooling front, I absolutely can’t fault this book—4 stars, 2 thumbs up. However, I only recommend this book with reservations. I have serious concerns about letting kids think that a teen girl hitchhiking alone at a truck stop would end up OK. And a book about trucking that doesn’t point out its contribution to the climate crisis at this point seems really dated. So… lots of great conversation for homeschoolers here! But I wouldn’t recommend it as solo reading lest your kid think that girls who frequent truck stops and try to sweet talk truckers are not making a (dangerous, illegal) business of it.
  • Key, Watt: Alabama Moon
  • Kilbride, Susan: Our America series
  • Kleinman, Liza: Azalea, Unschooled
  • Korman, Gordon: Schooled
  • LaFevers, R.L.: Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos
  • Law, Ingrid: Savvy
  • Leali, Michael: The Civil War of Amos Abernathy
    Two boys—one homeschooled the other in school, one in a conservative church and one in a liberal church—are gay. When they meet up in a historical reenactment park, their friendship helps them learn more about history and about themselves.
  • Mass, Wendy: Every Soul a Star
  • Morpurgo, Michael: Kensuke’s Kingdom
  • Palacio, R.J.: Wonder
    I love this book but recommend it with reservations: Homeschooling has clearly not harmed the main character, who is smart, well-educated, and socialized (as well as a boy with a scarily deformed face can be socialized). But the references to homeschooling are somewhat negative in that they imply that because his mother is “not good at fractions,” she can’t homeschool him anymore. Heck, you don’t have to be good at fractions to homeschool kids anymore, especially if you have enough money to send them to private school! I say read it with your kids and ask them whether they think homeschooling was depicted fairly.
  • Patterson, James: Treasure Hunters
  • Peterson, Stephanie Wilson: Nellie Nova Takes Flight
  • Riordan, Rick: The Kane Chronicles (starts with The Red Pyramid)
  • Selden, George: The Genie of Sutton Place
  • Selznick, Brian: Wonderstruck
  • Stead, Rebecca: Liar & Spy
  • Tolan, Stephanie: Surviving the Applewhites and Applewhites at Wit’s End
  • Wheeler, Patti: Travels of Gannon and Wyatt
Like many gentlemen of his era, young Victor Frankenstein was homeschooled.

Young Adult (13+):

  • Carter, Ally: I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You
  • Hubbard, Susan: The Society of S
    I enjoyed this book, which is quite well-written. The main character is the daughter of a vampire and a human who is kept in 19th-century style seclusion due to her “condition”—she may be a vampire like her father. Her father is distant but loving and she gets a fine classical homeschool education. Although the theme of this book is lovely—finding family and love—it does contain some grisly murders and wouldn’t be appropriate for younger kids.
  • Johnson, J.J.: This Girl Is Different
  • Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
    I reread this recently and I was surprised to see that Atticus and his brother “never went to school.” Atticus is a lawyer, his brother is a doctor. When Scout first goes to school, the teacher tells her that “your daddy taught you wrong” because she could already read. Scout is mighty confused at this, as she could read for as long as she could remember. Not a book about homeschooling, but the message about the damage that school and bad teachers can do is loud and clear.
  • Mull, Brandon: Beyonders: A World Without Heroes
  • Oppel, Kenneth: This Dark Endeavor and sequels
    I have only read the first of this series. It portrays young Victor’s education as rather more lacking than the original Frankenstein (see Shelley below). It’s not anti-homeschooling, but it does point out the problem that can arise when a parent simply isn’t interested in an entire field of study and doesn’t guide his son’s studies in that area.
  • Rudnick, Paul: It’s All Your Fault
  • Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
    Similar to The Secret Garden, this book hearkens back to a time and place when schooling was not the only way to learn. Young Victor Frankenstein and his cohorts do OK, though Victor does have a bit of a problem with the question of whether it’s moral to create a new life and then abandon it. Apparently, Daddy forgot to teach that high school class on ethics.
  • Sloan, Holly Goldberg: I’ll Be There
  • Spinelli, Jerry: Stargirl

Book list for pre-teen gifted readers

Pre-teen gifted readers often run into a problem around the age of ten: as younger children they read everything in children’s literature that they could get their hands on. By the time they reach ten years old, they’re starting to run into roadblocks when looking for appropriate books. Some ten-year-olds are ready to go on to Young Adult fiction, but most aren’t. Young Adult, with its focus on teens’ changing bodies and questioning of their place in the world, is often inappropriate and sometimes very upsetting for “tweens” who have outgrown children’s books but are looking for meaty reading to satisfy their literary cravings.

The list below contains books recommended for this demographic. In general, recommended books will not contain violence described in a visceral way, though books that very sensitive readers might want to avoid are starred. If you have recommendations for this list, please leave them in the comments below.

See also:

Resources:

Reading list for your gifted young reader

There is a lot of understanding these days about finding appropriate books for emerging readers. An entire new genre has even sprung up for struggling older readers who want something more mature than Amelia Bedelia. But there’s a problem on the other side of the spectrum for kids who read early. It’s not uncommon for an early reader to reach five years old and hit a wall: a lack of books at a higher reading level that are still appropriate for a five-year-old. Even though these children may be able to read Harry Potter, they may not be ready for the Young Adult intensity of the later books in the series.

The following books have been vetted by moms with children in this age group who are voracious readers. Asterisks denote books that may have difficult content for very sensitive readers. If you have additions, please leave them in the comments below. But make sure that the additions follow these rules:

  • No direct violence
  • If deaths of parents, pets, siblings or others are mentioned, please add a note
  • Complex enough reading for a five-year-old reading at a higher level

List:

See also:

Resources:

Hear me “on the radio”

My daughter was very impressed to hear that I was going to “be on the radio” today. She asked, “Which station?”

In this modern world, she is straddling two eras of technology, perhaps three. Sometimes we listen to local radio stations over the real radio airwaves. Sometimes we listen to local radio stations which we are far away from, whose signal is transmitted through the Internet to our Rokio box. In the car we sometimes listen to satellite radio, which fizzes out every time we drive under trees. Also in our car we listen to podcasts, sometimes shows that were once on the real radio airwaves, but are now being transmitted by a cellphone tower into my phone and then broadcast through Bluetooth into our car’s stereo system.

Phew. In the past, it was simple. I’m guessing in the future, it will be simple. When my kids tell their kids what it was like to listen to the radio in their day, their kids will shake their heads and say, “Really? You didn’t just turn on the osmophone in your head?”

Or something like that.

So back to the “radio” show that I was on. I was honored to be interviewed tonight on the show Bright, Not Broken, to be found on the Coffee Klatsch, a modern radio station that functions solely online. It was broadcast live and then saved as a podcast, available to listeners around the world. All my sage wisdom, captured in bits.

I love the name of the show: Bright, Not Broken. Sometimes kids are different, and we treat them as if they’re a broken toy needing to be fixed. The great thing about homeschooling is that parents of these kids are finding that they can educate their kids without focusing on their disabilities—they focus on their abilities. In a culture where we have therapies and pills and any number of ways to remediate, some parents and educators are stepping back and saying, “I want to focus on what’s right with this kid.”

Check out my interview. Then listen to Temple Grandin, who said that these days, instead of coming up to her and saying “I like animals, too,” kids come up to her and say “I’m autistic, too.” That’s a tragedy, Grandin says: “We should be talking about what they’re good at.”

It’s so great that our modern “radio” system allows us to find others who share our experiences. Tune in and join the conversation!

Listen to internet radio with The Coffee Klatch on Blog Talk Radio

What can you say?

There are times when you realize that nothing you can say is exactly right. In the last couple of days I’ve read a number of pieces about “how to respond to tragedy,” but I find them all lacking. Really, it seems to me, there is nothing right to say to parents who have lost a child to random murder. Just simply nothing that can encompass all you might want to say yet avoid everything that might cause more pain, might seem to trivialize it, or might imply that can know what they’re feeling.

We live in an unusual time in human history when we are ill-acquainted with childhood death. I know two parents who lost young children to disease, but even that is rare in comparison with the past. Before the age of cancer treatment, I would probably have known a few more. Before the age of antibiotics, I would have known many. And before the age of plentiful nutrition, relatively clean and comfortable housing, and freedom from daily violence, every single adult I knew would have had childhood death in their immediate experience.

Our modern culture has no equipment to deal with this phenomenon that is largely unique to modern culture: random acts of violence aimed at groups of children. We digest the more common news of gang killings, innocent deaths during wartime, and parents lashing out at their own kids because there’s a sense of both normality and otherness: gang violence, innocent victims of war, and personal abuse have been part of Western human societies long enough that we collectively understand them even though we don’t accept them. At the same time, though, victims of all three of these types of violence are easily dismissed as “not our kids”—we may feel sympathy, but most of us don’t know anyone it’s happened to personally, so it’s OK.

But these random, “in the wrong place at the wrong time” acts of violence are not padded by cultural understanding. Why that day? Why that school? Why those children? — It could have been any place, any day, any kids who happened to be in the perpetrator’s path.

I am glad that events like this spark collective soul-searching, because I think that our culture is very happy to trip blithely along as if we are doing just fine, when we’re not. We have way too many deaths from violence in this country. We have way too many untreated mentally ill people in this country.

But for me personally, I still end up wondering, what can I say? What would be the right way to respond? And I come up blank. Nothing I think of contains the enormity of this, the sadness, and the answers to the questions we naturally want to ask.

Now available