A little bit about the Carnival of Homeschooling

With the 8th anniversary of the Carnival of Homeschooling I thought some might enjoy a little history of the carnival and maybe links to some of the resources.

A little history

My wife and I started blogging in October of 2005.

We had been following various blogs for a couple years and decided to give it a try. At the time one of the blogs I read regularly was The Education Wonks. For several years EdWonk ran the Carnival of Education. The carnival did a great job of capturing various topics about education scattered across dozens of blogs. I read the Carnival of Education almost every week.

After Janine and I blogged for a month the thought hit me that there was no Carnival of Homeschooling. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of homeschooling blogs at the time, but no one had organized a Carnival of Homeschooling. We talked it over for a couple weeks and then decided to take the plunge.

On January 2006 we published the first Carnival of Homeschooling. It was a lot of work, especially since we had never done it before, but we got lots of submissions and it came together well. 

Since then we have had a Carnival of Homeschooling every week.  We had a great group of bloggers who take turns hosting the carnival.  I am so grateful.  Currently we have about 30 hosts and I just rotate the carnival through the hosts.  Over the years we've had hosts bow out and we've others take up the load. 

A few relevant links

Most people who submit to the carnival normally end up reading the Where to send your submission for the next Carnival of Homeschooling post. At the beginning we had some differences in vision for the carnival and a list of expectations was captured in Participating in the Carnival of Homeschooling.

I keep the Carnival of Homeschooling archive fairly up to date, though one time it fell a couple months behind.  Initially I just captured the carnival edition, the date, the blog and the carnival.  After awhile one of the hosts suggested including the theme for each carnival, which I've done.

There is also Schedule for the Carnival of Homeschooling which gets updated every couple weeks.  At the start I used to try and schedule three and six months out, but I found that every so often as we got close to a carnival date something would come up and a host would need to back out, so now I generally try to schedule three to six weeks out.

The last link I'll include here is to the Guidelines for hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling.  We found it helpful to spell out exactly what we expected the hosts to do.  Whenever someone expresses an interest in hosting the carnival I have them read the guidelines and ask if they can support and follow them.

Thanks for all the support

It has been a great eight years.  At some point I'll probably pass the carnival on to someone else or shut it down.  I'm not ready to do either, but I expect that some day it will be time for me to move on.

The main reason the carnival has been so successful is all the hundreds of people who have hosted, helped promote and participated in the carnival.  With over 400 editions and a rough average of 30 posts per carnival we've had 12,000 posts submitted to the carnival  That is a ton of support and I am truly thankful.