3 posts tagged “homeschool”

Thought I'd pass this along...

HomeschoolRecess.com is having a book/website review contest-- the winner gets a $25 amazon gift card.

For more information, go here.

Good luck!

Generally, I tend to ignore New Year's day, and do most of my "new year" type planning in September.  All those years of "back to school" haven't worn off yet, I guess.

But I have a new project in my life, and I'm excited about it.  A homeschooling friend of mine has been putting out an email newsletter for homeschoolers in our area for a while, but her son has gotten older, and she has begun working, ya know, for money, and doesn't have time to continue with it.  So she offered it to me. :)

There are about 120 families on the list right now.  I'm going to send out my first newsletter tomorrow.  The newsletter has been basically announcements about classes, field trips, book sales, etc... and a list of local support groups.   Recently, a court found that virtual public schools are illegal in our state (Wisconsin), and there is likely to be legislation introduced this month to address the situation, so I included an article about that, because homeschoolers and virtual school families tend to hang out together. 

My friend has always done a nice job with the newsletter, but I am looking forward to making it my own.  However, I did a little research, and found an interesting article about taking over a newsletter that had this advice:

Let your own personality take over gradually. But first, you need to find out what your readers already like about the newsletter. It is a huge mistake to assume you know what's best for your readers and then change everything. The only thing that can result from that is resentment and defection.

I am doing my best to follow this advice and I believe the newsletter I send out tomorrow will look and feel a lot like what my friend would have put together.  But I do have some plans for the future (we'll see how much of this I implement):

• Start publishing on a schedule (my friend would publish whenever she had enough info).
  
• Add a table of contents at the top of the email-- I think it would make the long page of text a little less daunting.
• Add a section for people who offer tutoring and private lessons to homeschoolers-- the idea is that there would be a lot of repeating content in this section, but the info would all be together every month so you wouldn't need to hunt through past issues.
• Ask around to see if there is a newsletter like this covering the neighborhoods to the West of me, and if not, expand the region I cover to include them.  The former editor lives closer to the center of the current region than I do, and frankly, there's not so much going on here that we don't have room to include a few more neighborhoods.
• Start publishing archives in a blog.  I'm not sure if anyone would rather get the newsletter through rss feed, but it's easy and may help market the newsletter by getting us listed in google.

Long term, I'm not sure where I'll go with the newsletter.  At some point I may have enough distribution to be able to sell ads and make it worth my time, but right now I think the most I could charge would be something around $100/year, and unless I sold so much that the ads took over the newsletter, it's not worth the hassle of becoming a real business.  My short term goal for the newsletter is to build the homeschooling community in my area and support activities geared to homeschoolers.

If you homeschool and you read this, what would you want in a local homeschooling e-newsletter?  What wouldn't you want?  Would having the content archived online make you more or less likely to contribute?  What if you could opt out of having your information included in the archive?

Thanks!