For three days each July, the Cobb Galleria Centre bustles with home schooled children who are visiting with friends while parents and teachers discuss the upcoming school year. The Southeast Home School Expo brings 6,800 members of the home-schooling community together.

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The Home Educators Encouragement Alliance (HEEA) hosts the expo and is in its 20th year of operation. Beginning at a smaller location, the expo steadily grew and moved to the Cobb Galleria Centre in 2002. The expo also books several hundred rooms at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel and the Sheraton Suites Galleria Atlanta.

“The Cobb Galleria Centre has provided us with opportunities to grow and has enough meeting rooms to do all the breakout sessions that we would do, which is hard to find in convention centers,” said HEEA director, Randi St. Dennis.

The opening day of the event was the Home-Schooling for Excellence 101 conference that introduced new home schooling parents to home schooling veterans in order to receive personalized help on their home schooling situation.

During the next two days, parents could attend more than 120 workshops, view and purchase educational materials and listen to more than 60 speakers on a variety of home schooling and parenting topics.

Children enjoyed fun activities in the Kid Zone and could also attend a live animal and artifact educational program by a Zoo Atlanta speaker or take a swing at the Atlanta Braves Kids Activity batting cage. Teenagers spoke with representatives at from several different colleges and universities at the college fair. For more information, visit southeasthomeschoolexpo.com.