I’m happy to announce that the fourth edition of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home now has a publication date (September 13, 2016) and is available for pre-order.

For those who are familiar with the earlier editions, here’s a list of the major changes:

• Completely updated book and curricula recommendations.

• Extensive additional material on teaching children with learning disabilities.

(These children make up a much higher percentage of home educated students than in previous years, since schools often are unable to provide the support they need. As home education has become more visible and additional resources have become available, many more parents are reacting to these very individual needs by choosing to remove struggling children from the classroom entirely.)

• An entirely new set of online resources, coordinated with the book, which will be located at welltrainedmind.com. These include:

• Out of the Box: additional resources for children who don’t fit the traditional K-12 progression-because they have leapt ahead, are dealing with learning challenges, or simply process information differently.

• Apps and More: a continuously updated list of popular apps, web-based learning games, and online enrichment activities, all in line with the classical principles described in the book.
• More Options: alternative curricula to our top recommendations, not included in the book because they were too complicated, expensive, specialized or quirky-but all of which have enthusiastic support among many veteran home schoolers.

• Brand-new maths and sciences chapters.

(Classical education has often been criticized as stronger in the humanities than in the maths and sciences. Working with highly qualified experts and experienced teachers, we have overhauled our approach to provide a much more rigorous and coherent maths and sciences education.)

• Shift of quickly outdated appendices online.

(The list of suppliers and publishers, the index of home education organizations, the guide to science contests and fairs, and other constantly changing resources will be moved to welltrainedmind.com, which will allow them to be updated regularly.)

• Each chapter has been separated into two sections.

(Chapters have been reorganized into how to teach a subject — methods, goals, expectations, etc.– and what resources to use —recommended texts and curricula. This makes the book even more flexible, since parents can use the principles of teaching even if they choose to use other specific texts or programs than the ones we suggest.)