Featured Speakers

Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D. is an award-winning author and speaker with over thirty years of teaching experience from the primary through the doctoral level, and over one million copies of his books in print on issues related to learning and human development.  He is the author of thirteen books including, The Human Odyssey:  Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life,  The Best Schools:  How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, In Their Own Way, Awakening Your Child’s Natural Genius, 7 Kinds of Smart, The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, ADD/ADHD Alternatives in the Classroom, and Awakening Genius in the Classroom. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew, Danish, and Russian

Jessica Hulcy, co-author of KONOS Character Curriculum, the first homeschool curriculum written for homeschool by home schoolers in 1984, will delight you with her sense of humor and refreshing openness about her home school experiences.  She will encourage us to enjoy our children and to educate them in a way that builds love and togetherness in our families, while teaching to the head and heart of each child. 

Jessica is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, has done post-graduate work at Texas A& M at Commerce, speaks nationally on a variety of public education and home school topics, writes curriculum for KONOS, contributes articles to several homeschool magazines, has taught for 31 years with 24 of those years spent homeschooling her four boys ages 31, 29, 25, and 20, lives with her husband Wade on 75 acres north of Dallas, TX, and has just started a new business called homeschoolmentor.com. designed to train the next generation of homeschoolers.

Patrick Farenga worked closely with the author and teacher John Holt until Holt’s death in 1985. He is the President of Holt Associates Inc. and was the Publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) from 1985 until it stopped publishing in Nov. 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about homeschooling, started by Holt in 1977.

Farenga and his wife have unschooled their three girls, now ages 21, 18, and 14. In addition to writing for GWS for twenty years, he has written many articles and book chapters for publications as diverse as Mothering magazine, Paths of Learning magazine, Home Education Magazine, The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society and The Encyclopedia of School Administration. He has also published and edited several popular books about homeschooling including his own book, The Beginner’s Guide To Homeschooling. His latest book is Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus, May 2003). Farenga also appears on local and national television and radio shows as a homeschooling expert; he has appeared on The Today Show, The Voice of America, NPR's The Merrow Report, Fox Across America, Geraldo-At-Large, and CNN's Parenting Today. Farenga has been quoted as an expert on homeschooling many times in the national media.

Laura Berquist, mother of 6 and grandmother of 2 started Mother of Divine Grace School in 1995. The distance learning program is based on her book and 23 years of personal experience with designing your own classical curriculum. Currently 3000 students are enrolled in the program and homeschool families  across North America are embracing the philosophy of a classical education.