Good question! The Homeschool Hangout Zone is a place you can come for interesting, fun, and sometimes unusual (um, excuse me, but trees evolved?) news feeds! Textbooks are outdated - I know, I still use mine - but they should not be your only reference! News is interesting; it always comes in short bursts, so it never feels like you're working to get to the end of the chapter. And there's always something you can learn from a news article that makes it worthy of a time slot during school hours. ;)

I have always been an avid reader of news (and an avid reader in general, but we'll get to that later), and I've learned a lot of each of the basic subjects because of this. I just never realized until now. Indeed, there was a time when I measured my academic knowledge based on how much of a textbook I had completed - 50%, not enough; 70%, not enough; would 80% scrape by? - and then I stopped. Why am I comparing my education to that of the public school system? Homeschooling should be about freedom in designing your own education, and that means thinking outside of the textbook! I had fallen into the college prep frenzy that seems to strike around mid-high school, where a 1-credit course is equivalent to exactly 75% of a textbook, etc., and the only reason this is done is to simplify the comparison process within the school system. If you and your one sibling are your entire school system, why compare?

And so this website was born! Textbooks are good, they're easy to follow, and they do have a lot of useful information. But they are not an extra limb! Expand your education resources; that's the point of homeschooling. :)