The convention has grown so large over the years that it is now limited to a few cities within MN that have enough Hotel capacity to support the convention. The three day convention was packed with classes, vendors, speakers and parents. Many of the class rooms were full before the convention started because of pre-registration, and vendors with home school material everywhere.
The good side to this growing convention is that the days of homeschooling being a small minority of isolated families living on the land are gone. Homeschooling is becoming the mainstream. Pretty soon we are going to have to redefine the word ‘mainstream’ to mean homeschooling. The very fact that the vendors from major companies are now targeting homechoolers is further proof that homeschooling has grown into a large enough group to be targeted as a market segment by these companies. Many of the vendors have, like Scholastic, have produced school materials for public schools for decades and are now marketing their products to homeschoolers.
The challenge to parents is trying to decide what curriculum to use, with so many options and so many experts, how do you decide? At a nation, over consumption has driven our economy into a tailspin, but the spirit of consumerism leads businesses to provide an endless stream of new options to appease its consumers - which is perhaps helping homeschoolers as vendors strive to provide more and more options. At a time when public school funding is under tighter and tighter scrutiny, homeschooling is becoming the only growing market for many of these vendors.
Most homeschool parents love education, so when the doors open and the parents run it, it’s like watching kids in a candy store. The vendors are busy handing out samples and talking parents into buying their products at a rate that I highly doubt they can actually use. Like everyone else, we bought a lot of material that we are now trying to decide how much if we are actually going to use with our children. But sometimes there is no other way to truly realize if you like a material or not without using it. The material we like, we will continue using next year as we discard what we don’t like. This process can cost more money than if you only used what you bought and nothing more, but that sometimes leave you teaching with material that you don’t really like or that doesn’t fit with your child’s learning style.
The best way to minimize this ‘trial and error’ process of finding the right material is to talk to your homeschooling friends about what they are using and why. Think about and compare your children to theirs to help you decide the material they use would work for your family. You can also ask them to use a sample or visit to observe how they use the material. The average homeschooled child costs about $500 per year, but I know we probably spend about twice that.
How much to you spend and what is you process of finding just what you need?