I made a new friend today called Zoe who is also considering home education for her son and daughter who are just a few years older than mine and she lives in Worcester.
We made initially made contact via the Freedom in Education website last week and met up for a coffee today for a chat about taking pros and cons of home educating our little ones.
We had quite similar attitudes and reservations on the home education conundrum and so it was really lovely to meet someone who didn’t think I was really odd to be considering it.
She and I agreed on the following:
- We would welcome and support from the LEA incl. home visits to say whether or not our kids were on track
- How would we manage with having our kids with us 24/7 but not having the full backing of grandparents and therefore not feeling able to ask them to have them once a week
- A school-like routine would keep everyone sane and would allow dedicated hours for housework and other essential tasks.
Zoe had thought the following framework could work…
7am breakfast and some light housework (eg. laundry)
9-10am learning work (eg. reading,writing,maths)
10am:Outside for exercise and games whatever the weather
10.30ish:Project work or continuation of the morning session
12 Noon:Lunch time ( we thought a packed lunch would reduce the need for mum to make lunch)
1-2pm:Arts,crafts,music (less intensive education)
2pm til teatime:Playtime for kids and housework for parent
Teatime could involve the whole family as not having to rush kids to bed in preparation for school start the next day.
Weekends would have some time for planning for the following week and we liked the idea of doing work on projects.
We chatted about how my having twins would make teaching them easier than someone who had kids of differing ages but then we discussed how actually in a classroom setting there are often kids of many different ability levels and loads of them so perhaps teaching a small number isn’t so hard.
Having a local community of home educating families would be important as you could draw on other parents strengths (eg. music,art,languages,sport)
We were both of the opinion that it makes a lot of sense when we read that kids who are effectively home educated are ahead of their peers taught in schools.
We wondered what we would do when it came to GSCE time…
I told Zoe about Darren’s fear that our kids would be labelled ‘wierd’and also may not have many friends but my research leads me to believe that home educated kids are often very popular with their schooled chums and are ‘cooler’than the norm and very often the kids who do go to school are envious of their confidence and lack of involvement in school politics.
Zoe and I agreed to stay in touch and meet up perhaps with the children. We both also confessed that the opportunity to home educate becomes less appealing when thinking of the possibility of having a third child. Both of us would continue to send our kids to the local school if we became pregnant with our third!
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