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Book Review: Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers by Barbara Frank

By Melissa Markham on August 27, 2008 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I reviewed Barbara Frank's book, The Imperfect Homeschooler's Guide to Homeschooling. This week, I have the honor of reviewing another of her books, Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers.

The first thing I have to say about this book is that I think it needs a new title. I think it should be called Life Prep for Teenagers as I believe it is a book that would be valuable for all teenagers, those in public school, private school or home school. I wish I had had access to this book when I was in high school and I am looking forward to reading the books from the book list that Barbara provides and working through the projects with my children when they are older. Not only that, but I am going to go through the college bound section with my 16 year old next door neighbor and babysitter. We are great friends with her mom and Ashley has become like family to us.

If you have teens in your home, or you have grandchildren who are teens, or friends who are raising teens, please consider this book as a gift for them. And it is truly a gift. One of our major goal as parents should be preparing our children to live on their own. But the education system and expectations have changed so that many teenagers are graduating unable to balance a check book, write a college essay, understand credit terms, or figure out how to create a budget. These are real life skills that they need way more than they need some of the things they are being taught in highschool. These are skills that they will use every day of their adult lives.

Barbara has designed a wonderful book to involve parents and children towards the common goal of a child's successful independence.

She provides an awesome book list of books written by insightful and successful authors such as Dale Carnegie, Sue Bender, Dr. James Dobson, John Rothchild, Peter Lynch, David Chilton, and several others.

She then provides several projects to for the teens to work with:

Credit Card Projects
The Car Projects
The Health Insurance Project
The Rent Project
The Food Expense Project
The Utilities Project
The Budgeting Project
The Mortgage Project
The Tax Project
The College Application Essay Project
The Financial Freedom Project

This is just a peek into this book. She goes a step further as to make suggestions which books to read and which projects to follow depending on whether the student is college bound or work bound. Life Prep for ~~Homeschooled~~ Teenagers is a must have resource for any home with teens.

If you decide to purchase this book, I suggest you go to one of the following places:

Rainbow Resource Center Right now the book is retailing there for 17.95. Be sure you are getting the second edition (and in a moment I will tell you why).

Amazon. Right now the second edition is available for 19.75.

Now for the 'extra.' If you order the second edition from one of the two above vendors, not only are you saving 20-40% on the book, but you inside the second edition, you will find information on how to get Barbara Frank's Homeschooling Your Teenagers ebook for free(it is regularly $7.95)! Now that is an awesome deal!