Life is a Highway - it’s the journey, not the destination

Why did we decide to home educate?

Initially we were worried about the local schools that we were unfortunate to live near. It must have been before A was born and I remember just being appalled at the lack of road sense and manners of the kids on the way to and from school (oh the joy of being a new parent and thinking it is oh so simple and that we knew all the answers!!). I vowed mine would never be like that We started looking at the idea of me going to Uni, getting a degree and then a job earning a fortune and sending them to a private school. It seemed like an idea, however impractical, and I set about researching it. I remember being on the UKParents forum and browsing the education forums and of course there was the home education forum. I think I had a quick look and expected everyone to be hippies I can’t remember if that was the first impression or not though. It sounded interesting, but was something I was sure my DH would not go for.

I must have been more intrigued and looked more into it, can’t remember why but it might have been from comments on the cloth nappy forum on UKP that I frequented. These things tend to lead onto other less mainstream things I guess. Anyway I looked into it more, and mentioned it casually to DH that M didn’t have to go to nursery or school and we could teach him at home. He was surprisingly up for it and well I took that and ran with it!!

I then joined the MuddlePuddle yahoo group and started to think more about it. It seemed that most people seemed fairly normal, or at least a bit like me. The more I thought about it all the more I knew it was right and the best thing for us. I knew we could change our mind at any time and so the pressure seemed off.

As I learned about the benefits the ‘why’ changed from just being concerned about the schools to actually feeling like it was a great way to learn. I wanted my 2 to grow up knowing that there was no rush to learn to read, multiply, know historical dates, anything really. I wanted them to do it when they were ready and interested. DH had a hard time at school and was slow at reading and maths and it had created such a mark on him that even to this day affects him. If possible I really wanted to avoid that kind of thing. I didn’t want them being 30 and still thinking they were ‘thick’ due to being put in a different set, or not doing things at the right age.

There are more reasons, not sure I can be bothered to list everything though! I suppose while it’s going well that is the biggest reason. We enjoy the freedom it gives us and I can see they are learning lots and are happy. That seems a good reason.

How do we home educate?

We seem to change how we do it constantly. We’ve looked at Montessori, workbooks, autonomous ed, Charlotte Mason and probably lots more. Since we’ve home educated from the very beginning I suppose it’s normal for us to have evolved in the way things happen.

Now we use Charlotte Mason when we’re needing a bit of structure. We like to learn from literature and from nature so it suits us. We try to keep lots of time for the kids to be kids and they spend lots of time playing. They are still only 9 and (nearly) 8 and I’d like to think they have a good few years of playing left! We also follow their lead a lot, M likes history, and A likes animals and nature so lots of these things go on. We’re flexible in everything, and if something doesn’t work we change it. If there is a museum exhibition on and it takes our interest we run with it.

I try and encourage daily reading, but with M it was becoming a chore so now we ask them to try and read 2 books a month that we can record and do a rating for. They are happy to do this at the moment so we’ll continue. Now that they both can read I’d like them to increase their fluency but not at the expense of making reading horrible for them.

Maths has been a biggy for us. We’re still not in a comfortable place with it. We love the Living Math ideas and try that lots, any kind of workbooks or sheets don’t sit right at all and I see the most improvement when we do nothing at all! Both kids went through a phase of hating doing it and thinking they were rubbish at it so we calmed right down with it. That is the benefit of this I guess, even if it is hard to work through. I’m happy to be hands off at the moment anyway!

So I guess we’re a bit of a mixture in how we do things. Next year might be different though!