About Us
Jean and Donn Reed homeschooled their four children for a period of twenty five years. Donn wrote the first ever homeschool resource book in 1981 and called it, The First Home School Catalogue. It wasn’t very big and we made copies on the photocopier at the local general store and bound the pages on our kitchen table. The book caught on and Donn wrote The Home School Source Book, to be followed by other editions. Donn died in 1995 and Jean took over and wrote The Home School Source Book, 3rd edition.
We love helping parents and students connect with creative resources. We hope you will enjoy the resources posted on the blog and we also hope that as you find resources that we haven’t seen yet that you will email us (customerservice(use the @ here)brookfarmbooks.com) and tell us about them.
Biographies
Jean and Donn Reed
Proclaimed pioneers in homeschooling by the NHEN (National Home Education Network). Donn and Jean Reed have been nominated to the Hall of Fame on the online alternative education listserve sponsored by AERO (Alternative Education Revolution Organization. aerolist@edrev.org). Jean is on the board of directors for the American Homeschool Association.
Married 33 years, the Reeds homesteaded and lived in Vermont, Mexico, and Canada. The Reeds homeschooled their four now grown and independent children over a period of twenty-four years.
Jean Reed was raised in Winnetka, Illinois. She studied music, dance, won trampoline medals, ski, sail, and play her guitar. She attended Goddard College. Since then she has been a wife and mother of four, now grown, homeschooled children. Jean ran a small art gallery for several years, returned to college for computer training and then was hired by the college to run the computer laboratory for the school for a year. She has studied Sign Language, and has been a certified ECA in emergency medicine. Jean has also been a nationally certified ski instructor and been director of the SnowSchool at Big Rock Ski Area in Maine. She is a certified EMT-B with the National Ski Patrol and serves at Big Rock Ski Area. She loves to kayak in the summer. In her spare time she is a student of classical guitar and tutors students in all subjects in the public school system. She has contributed to The Homeschooling Book of Answers, by Linda Dobson and Homeschooling: An Open House, by Nancy Lande. She has been interviewed by NHEN as a homeschooling pioneer and she has given workshops at the California Homeschooling Conference in Sacramento, California: Manchester, Connecticut; and Boxborough, Massachusetts, and her local libraries, and spoken more informally to numerous homeschooling groups around the country. Since Donn’s death in 1995 Jean has taken over the publishing and mail order business, Brook Farm Books, providing homeschoolers around the world with creative learning resources and written the third edition of The Home School Source Book, originally written by her husband, Donn.
Donn Reed, was born and raised in Brattleboro, Vermont and has had a widely varied career and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. As a young man just out of high school he served three years in jail as a conscientious objector where he received the Meritorious Service Award from the U. S. Bureau of Prisons for work with adult illiterates. While in Mexico he taught in the Laubach literacy house in Villa De Bravo. He has worked as a carpenter, radio announcer (CJCJ), truck driver, dishwasher, librarian, teacher, foundry worker, peace marcher, psychiatric aide (Brattleboro Retreat), tax assessor, sawmill edgerman, migrant field worker, house builder, and done extensive work as a writer, reporter, columnist, newspaper editor, and publisher. He was actively involved with homeschooling his four children. In 1981 he wrote and published the very first of the home-school resource guides, The First Home School Catalogue. This book went into several printings and was followed by a second edition. He also wrote and published The Home School Challenge, and Efficient Instruction Elsewhere. After several editions of The First Home School Catalogue he combined his books into one volume, The Home School Source Book, first published in 1991. Following that there was a second edition and a second revised edition in 1994. He has been listed in Who’s Who in American Education. His writing has appeared in Home Education Magazine, Harrowsmith, Nurturing, and The New Nativity, among others. His other published work includes A Short But Very Authoritative Illustrated History of Women’s Lib: by a man, with his wife’s permission, and How the Mounties Got Their Own Man, and My Head the Cup, and edited I Heard That Voice Before (selected poems of Raymond J. Reed).