Where to Look for Homeschooling Volunteer Opportunities: Volunteering with children and teens is a great way to be involved in the community. Finding service projects and getting homeschoolers involved can be fun.

Getting homeschoolers involved in the community is an important task. So often, homeschooling families are left feeling isolated when they could be at the center of the action. With flexible schedules and a lot of interests to explore, homeschooled kids have the unique opportunity to make their community and the world their classroom. Participating in community service projects gives families the opportunity to work together for the greater good. Plus, it's a natural and healthy form of socialization.

Service Projects for Children and Teens

There are many community service projects that children and teens can be involved in. As a family, it can be as simple as raking the leaves for an elderly neighbor, leaving Christmas presents at the door of a widowed parent or peeling potatoes at a soup kitchen. Everyone is capable of helping in some way. It's just a matter of finding an appropriate place for everyone to pitch in. Smaller children are good at collecting canned goods, but should not be asked to walk around with money. Both the Girl Scout Cookie sale and the Unicef Milk Carton project have changed their rules to reflect modern safety standards.

Community Service Projects for Teens

Older teens and adults can plan their own community service projects. Teens can gather in a group to discuss the organization they'd like to help and then brainstorm ideas for how best to contribute. Many teens enjoy the idea of holding a car wash, a bake sale, an auction and spaghetti dinner or even a cell-phone telethon.

Coordinating a community service event is at the heart of the Boy Scout Eagle project and the Girl Scout Silver and Gold Awards. Not only is it good to help others, but coordinating volunteers, planning the logistics of an event, communicating with everyone involved, setting goals, marketing and advertising are all real life career skills that can benefit the teens far more than a day spent in the classroom.

Opportunities to Volunteer with Kids

Independent community service projects, like community clean-up and bake sales, are usually safe places for children to volunteer. The U.S. Postal service holds an annual fundraiser called “stamp out hunger” and in many cities, children can volunteer to help unload donated food from the mail carrier's trucks. Sorting the food into donation boxes to be sent to food banks is a task many children can manage easily. Volunteering with children is a great way to be a positive role model, and instill a love of service in a child.

Finding Service Projects

Check your local newspaper for opportunities to volunteer in the community. Many church bulletin boards also have a place where they ask for volunteers. Some older kids and teens like helping in the childcare room during a MOPS meeting, or during the Sunday service. Contact the chamber of commerce to see what the major organizations are that are dedicated to helping meet the needs of the elderly, the disabled and the ill. Sometimes people need help shopping, running errands and handling home management concerns.

Every community has people and places that just need a little help sometimes. Making a habit of getting involved and helping others can be an important part of a homeschool education. When homeschoolers are visible, active and involved in the community, they are seen as more of an asset and less like unsocialized nonconformists (as if that's a bad thing).

Home Education Seminars and Unschooling Conferences in the US: Guide to popular annual homeschool conferences. Find conventions for homeschoolers and unschoolers seminars. Learn from the best homeschool speakers and veterans.

Each year, all around the United States, homeschoolers meet to share resources and listen to motivational and inspirational homeschool speakers share their wisdom. Some homeschooling conventions, like the South Florida Homeschool Convention, are hosted by the state's homeschool advocacy group. These organizations exist as a central resource for support groups and as watchdogs for state law.

Homeschool Conventions

Local support groups and independent companies also host homeschool conferences. For anywhere from one to five days, a large church, convention center or hotel are occupied by homeschooling families, going back and forth between seminars by homeschool speakers, classes and activities for children, enormous vendor halls with curriculum demonstrations, book displays and computer labs with the latest educational software.

Unschooling Conferences

As homeschooling becomes more common some of these conventions are becoming tightly focused, for specific homeschooling methods, like the annual Autodidact Symposium in South Carolina or the Rethinking Education Conference in Dallas, Texas, which held their 12th annual conference in 2008 and Life is Good North West, both of which are for unschooling families, sometimes called “life learners.” For several years, Unschoolers have descended upon Sandusky Ohio for the Annual Winter Waterpark Gathering. The Kalahari Waterpark Resort is the nation's largest indoor water theme park and resort.

Unschooling Vacations

Life learners also have the option of enjoying their seminars at sea. In October of 2009, the National group Unschooling America will be hosting the first annual Unschooling Adventure Cruise, in which families will be taking an all inclusive cruise to Bermuda for 5 nights. Unschooling families aren't particularly interested in curriculum, like Charlotte mason families, they tend to appreciate sources of information that aren't “dumbed down,” so there's usually not an overwhelming vendor hall to be concerned with, just like-minded families enjoying conversation, recreation and good food. The select vendors you might find at an unschooling conference are usually holistic, dealing with a wide range of alternative approaches to wellness, intellectually, physically and spiritually, for the entire family.

Religious Homeschooling Conventions

Families wishing to find a Catholic or Christian homeschool convention are in good company. There are state wide and regional religious support groups that plan these conventions and the larger ones draw visitors from all over the country. With family entertainment, child training workshops and parenting practices that focus on biblical techniques, these conventions are ripe for commercial curriculum vendors and often have enormous vendor halls filled with boxed curricula and individual subject programs designed to help a parent teach a child whatever they've deemed important to learn that year. Sometimes veteran homeschoolers will develop a learning product to sell as their family business and offer their services as a speaker, too.

Homeschool Speakers

Depending upon the nature of the conference, speakers at a homeschool convention may be mothers with something special to share, ministers with a message for families from above, or authors of homeschooling books to share their techniques and philosophies with parents. Some homeschool convention speakers are visiting from the world of institutionalized education, and share subject-specific information to help parents teach writing, art or music. Additionally, veteran homeschoolers are popular speakers because they've “been there and done that” either as parents of adult homeschoolers, or having been homeschooled themselves. Second-generation homeschoolers tend to be popular speakers, too.

No matter what kind of homeschool support you're looking for, it might be a good idea for you to attend an annual homeschooling convention. Spending time with motivational and inspirational speakers can help parents get “on the same page” when it comes to parenting and homeschooling decisions. Meeting other families with the same philosophies and beliefs can be an affirmation, and help families feel a little less lonely as they navigate an often counter-culture lifestyle.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the report entitled “Homeschooling in the United States; Statistical Analysis Report”, published in February 2006 in the NCES Newsletter, the numbers of children receiving a home based education are increasing.

Since local school budgets are often based upon the enrollment of students, this trend can be disturbing for school administrators. Not only is their professionalism called into question when parents without a teaching certificate presume to educate their children at home, but their annual working budget is affected when enough children are removed from the system. Additionally, teachers and administrators have to deal with each child individually, should they re-enter the system, and carefully assess their needs and aptitudes, which may be sprawled out across several grade levels.

Creating an environment where families can keep their children at home, schools don't lose budget money and parents are all teaching to the same standard and curriculum are just three of the needs that are met by internet home schooling.

Home Schooling Programs

By enrolling children in a public school program that provides parents with home school resources, many districts are attempting to standardize the home school education. Some parents welcome the professional help of teachers and access to special education services, like speech therapy. Some families, however, aren't impressed with the one-size-fits all curriculum and object to these programs entirely.

Internet Home Schooling

Online education programs have been available for post secondary and K12 education for several years. Parents, independent of their State Education Department have, at their expense, enrolled their children in virtual school programs enjoying the consistent curriculum that's guaranteed to meet state standards.

In recent years, several State Departments of Education have adopted homeschool programs whereby the student enrolls in a public school, and the school gets the budget money (sometimes as high as $12,000 a year per student) and sub-contracts the child's schooling to programs like the K12 homeschool program.

Home School Resources

Advocates for clear and legal distinctions between public school and homeschooling, like the Washington Homeschool Organization, aren't happy with the marketing of these programs. In the WHO Advocacy Committee's Report on alternative education, they state that these programs "present to the public and governing bodies a more familiar, supervised, and regulated form of “homeschooling and that the eventual result could be a lobbying of the legislature by public education to amend or abolish the Washington Home-based Instruction Law and to absorb the homeschooling community into public education under the auspices of alternative education." In plain English, when a child is enrolled in a virtual school program sponsored by the public school district, a parent is no longer the child's primary teacher, and that a widespread acceptance of these programs could mean the end to a parent's right to homeschool independently of the public school system. Some parents speculate that because these programs are complicated, they could possibly be covert attempts to convince families that homeschooling is difficult, inspiring them to drop out and return to the classroom.

Another objection to these programs has been that the curriculum is very reminiscent of a classroom experience, with information presented into “subjects” whereas in real life, there are no subjects. Several homeschooling families use curriculum that looks nothing like a classroom, such as the Charlotte Mason and Waldorf methods that rely heavily on high quality literature, imaginative play and lively discussions. Still others teach solely from life experiences, making each day a rich and stimulating exploration of life. No boxed curriculum will meet the needs of these busy families.

Is Online Education for Your Family?

Be aware of the homeschooling laws in your state of residence. Your district might offer an internet home school program, and you might be allowed to opt out of the program. Knowing what your rights are, and weighing the pros and cons of each decision are usually the best approach.

Ask yourself if you really want to simulate a classroom style of teaching and learning in your home. If you're homeschooling simply to remove the children from a negative peer-saturated social environment, then a virtual school program might suit your needs. If you're looking to customize an educational plan that's individualized, then look beyond your state department of education's internet home schooling program.

Resources

Homeschooing in the United States 2003 Executive Summary

WHO Advocacy Committee's Report on Alternative Education