Finding Headspace

This will be a bit of a musing, rambley post so bear with me!

We've now been "officially" home educating for 3 months, 1 week and 1 day..... although actually we are still in what is called the de-schooling phase where you back away from conventional learning methods to allow the children's natural curiosity for learning re-establish itself.

In practical terms that has meant lots of visiting museums, the odd drama/music class, some film and tv watching, some game playing on computer, iPad and board, plenty of reading (and visits to the library) and a great deal of walking in the woods. I haven't been able to help sneaking in the odd bit of what would be considered more conventional learning with a touch of history (we have made timeline folders), some Spanish (a brilliant Usborne pack) and a bit of science, maths and English. There has been lots of craft and some cooking.

It's been brilliant! I'm having a lovely time and so are the children. In fact we're having so much fun I keep thinking I surely can't be doing it right ;) That they clearly aren't yet learning properly.... the normal wobbles! There have been the occasional disagreements but no more than if they were at school, and far less than I thought we would have spending so much time together. As I suspected would happen the de-schooling is slowly moving into natural learning and I suspect our patterns won't actually change a great deal even when we're no longer in this phase.

It is all lovely but also exhausting. We naturally wake around 7.30am and the questions start then. By the time the children go to bed 12 hours later I'm exhausted and can't think straight. I am still managing all the other stuff in life; like cleaning, tidying, cooking meals, shopping, making dentist appointments, seeing friends etc. but it all feels a bit rushed and out of my control. What I am missing most are the moments to just sit and get my head around what needs doing. I need to find some time in the day to get my head clear and make headspace for planning life. Friday is meant to be my day for this, but by the time I've dropped the kids off, blogged, cleaned the house, sorted any ENJO orders etc. etc. it's time to pick them back up again!

I've been thinking about trying to find some time for myself during the other days. I had thought I could use the time once the children are in bed, but by then my brain is fried. I also thought about setting an alarm and waking early to do it before they wake, but Povey is a light sleeper in the mornings and would be up and wanting food if he heard me. I wondered if anyone had tried introducing "solo time" with children of this age? I know they do it at Inwoods but I'm not sure how successfully. I just felt if I could guarantee the children wouldn't demand my attention for an hour, or even half an hour, for even just a couple of days a week it would help. Or maybe I just need to organise my free Fridays better? Any advice from more experienced home ed mums? How do you find time to think?

Not back to school

Today is the day my children would be going back if they'd stayed at their school.

I can't help but feel a bit sad that it's all carrying on without us. I'm enjoying our home ed, but I loved the school and the people there and will miss them. Obviously we've stayed in touch with them (so far) but today it really does feel like they're taking steps without us. Plus today is the "no turning back" day. Until now the children have just been on Summer hols really, now they are officially, properly being home educated.

Yesterday was a full -on day; travelled on tube and train back from London, walked from station with wheelie bag in tow to Home Ed group, after home ed group got bus back home, washed clothes from trip away, cleaned kitchen, made two types of stock and tomato chutney, had tea, helped children play on Grid Club etc. so if I'm honest I'm shattered, but I decided to make today count.

I had hoped they would lay in so it really didn't feel like a school day but Papaya has a new bike and was so excited by that she was up and dressed by 7.00am! At least the boy laid in until 8.00am, and it was wonderful not to have to leave the house and face the traffic. We took a lazy morning, then did some shopping, went to the library, packed lunches and headed to Alice Holt with some friends to enjoy the sunshine and test out the bike! No photos though as my iPhone is dead and in the process of being replaced. Then they flopped with home-made cheesy chips and Horrible Histories before bed. It felt like a good use of the day to me ;)

Next Friday the children start at Inwoods and will be there for a term every Friday. That is when our home ed routine will really get into swing I think, for now it just feels like we're still on holiday for the summer. 

The Journey Really Begins!

Another timely blog post from elsewhere today, this time it is a parent in Staffordshire whose children have all reached school leaving age and she offers encouragement for those just starting home education.....

  A Home Educating parent looks back

Today our journey begins. How fitting that it is Independence Day! I will collect the children from their school at 3.20pm and from that point we are officially home educating for however long that will be.
There is no timescale on this. I want to give it at least a year, but if it works for us we will continue, or if the children decide they would like to be at school we will find one. All options are open. I'm excited about it, but also can't quite believe that we will be saying goodbye today to the school we have known and loved for 4 years.

 I sent them off with their father today telling them to make the most of their last day and with little business cards to pass onto their friends so they can stay in touch. I'm not certain they fully understand but I have done my best to explain it all to them and answer all questions. My husband says he left Papaya surrounded by all her friends enjoying the attention! Povey was given a card from a friend "for luck" that he just slipped into his bag without even opening it.

There is nothing official planned education wise until September when they will begin their one day a week at Inwoods. I have some trips out planned and some back-up projects but other than that we plan to just enjoy the Summer holiday with them and am hoping the weather will oblige with some sun!

3 Days Left

My children have only 3 days of school left, including today; which was meant to be sports day but was cancelled because of the continuing rain!
I have put this blog on hold rather for this last term as I threw us fully into the final weeks of school, but now it's nearly time for when we will be officially home educating.
The "plans" as they stand so far are to take a definite summer break  and to also take the rest of the year as de-schooling time too. I already have learning resources around if they feel the need, but I don't plan to start putting definite structures into place until next January when I'll have a better feel for which ways of working are best for them both.
Having said that they will be attending Inwoods every Friday from September, plus ACM music club on a Saturday, plus a drama group once a week and there will also be other regular home education groups we will go to, so we won't exactly be resting on our laurels!
I'm excited, and sad........ their current school is already beginning the preparations for September and the children are both very aware they won't be part of that. I have printed them both off little business cards to hand out to friends so they can stay in touch.
I feel ready to have them at home. There was a great article at Simple Homeschool today about the pitfalls of Home Schooling that I have taken the time to absorb and store away for future reference. Many of the things mentioned, like having your children with you all the time, have already been brought up as concerns from friends and family. I think the initial few months will give us a good idea of what will work and what won't and how we need to adapt our family life to make it really work.
For now I want the children to enjoy these final few days at their lovely school. We will certainly miss the place.

Some Thoughts on Deschooling

A blog post from Mamasmu got me thinking again about something I can't seem to come to a firm conclusion on; deschooling.

For anyone who doesn't know, the term deschooling (in this sense, it is also used by some as an alternative word for "unschooling") means a period of time after the child has left formal schooling during which they don't do anything like formal school work. It is a time for the child to move away from school until they learn to learn for the joy of it. To decompress after having been at school and just relax into learning naturally. To forget any ideas of statistics and tests and "keeping up" and find their own pace.

I can see the importance in this to get us all to separate our expectations of what "school" should be and move forward in a more autonomous way. My original plan was to let them deschool over the long Summer holiday and then officially start their home education in September. I liked this plan as it fulfilled the need for deschooling and gave me a timetable to work to. I began planning my curriculum basing it on a September start.

Then I started reading a particular statistic being thrown about; that children who are to be home educated actually need a month of deschooling for every year they were at school. At the point the children leave their school Papaya will have had 4 years of schooling and Povey 2 years, so those two months of de-schooling I had planned (July and August) would be fine for Povey but not Papaya.

I started fretting.... "but I only have those two months set aside for this! I wanted our home-schooling to begin in September!" I started pondering whether we even needed to do it at all. I panicked that if I allowed Povey to only deschool for 2 months and then Papaya for 4 we would end up out of sync. Plus what would friends and family say when September comes and I'm not doing any sort of school work with them? I need to prove that I'm capable of home education........

Then I stopped.

I suddenly realised that the problem was me. In fact in my fretting I was proving how it was just as important for me to deschool as the children. Why was I putting a timescale on this? Working to timetables and terms is what schools do.... we won't need to do that any more! I need to change my way of thinking.

The children finish school on the 4th July. My calender already has July filled with festivals and camping so that's really our holiday time. After that....... I just need to leave it be. I need to leave school-work aside until the children naturally return to it themselves. I need to relax and let them take their own time, it may take months, it may only take weeks, but I need to allow it to happen naturally.

Of course this doesn't mean I have to stop planning ways of studying, and ideas to help the children learn different subjects. I just need to prepare it all knowing it may well not be touched for months.... and that by the time we are ready for it I may have changed my mind on how I want to use it. It's actually very freeing. I think I've just taken my own first step in becoming deschooled :)




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Lego.... and the Universe

Well it appears the Universe wants me to home-school!

It has just been Povey's 6th birthday, and unsurprisingly there was a Lego theme to it all. He is just obsessed with it and wants to do nothing else. I've been scouring the internet looking for ways of incorporating it into our home-schooling in September.

I found lots of Lego maths activities including Lego geometry....

 and mathamatical shapes....

A couple of Lego games....

Lego anatomy!

  

I even found a way of incorporating Lego into story writing! Plus of course there is the wonderful blog Lego Quest that offers a monthly challenge and helps Lego fans to stretch their creativity and imagination.

I plan on using aspects from all of these, and as a first step I planned to get hold of a load of Duplo and draw or stick letters and numbers onto them for Povey to use in Maths and English..... which leads me to why I think the Universe wants me to homeschool.

Look what I spotted in our local charity shop....

I actually got a shiver down my spine when I saw the labels on these blue boxes. I opened them up in there to find Duplo letters for spelling and word forming, including punctuation...

..... Duplo numbers and maths symbols for forming mathematical problems....

.....and Duplo pattern blocks to help form and focus, complete with photos of patterns to make....

Each box was only £3 so as you can imagine I snapped them up! Just £9 for everything I wanted, all ready labelled and in boxes! I just can't believe my luck!

Planning Subjects

I've started looking at the loose list of the subjects I would like to be covering each day somehow with the children, so far it stands at....

English
Maths
The World - One of; Languages, Geography, History, Science, or Forest school
The Arts - One of; Drama, Music, Art, or Dance

I'd like our timetable to work that we do 3/4 hours all together of more focused work on these subjects (so every day we do, English, Maths, The World and The Arts) in the mornings and then the afternoons are left free to explore whatever they like, whether that means just Lego (likely for Povey) or finding out more about something we learnt that morning.... or maybe even just a walk, outdoor play or seeing friends. One of the things that I noticed they were losing through busy days of school and homework was seeing their friends so I plan to make more play dates.

They will both attend a Forest school on a Friday, and ACM Kids on a Saturday morning. I plan to take them both swimming once a week, and Papaya will join a drama club that runs on a Tuesday evening, which Povey can join when he turns 7. I'd love to get them both music lessons too, (Guitar for Papaya and maybe Ukulele for Povey?) although ACM should cover that if we take them up to the next level. At the moment the planned schedule looks so busy I'm starting to wonder how we ever had time for them to go to school!

This is all still conjecture though; I've heard from many other home educating families that often you start with plans and timetables and then things change very quickly to become much looser. I'm a planner though so I feel comfortable doing it this way.... my daughter is a planner too so I know that to start with it will help her to know exactly what is happening each day. Povey would be happy with no plans at all!

I'm going to take each of the subjects above and do some research and post up here when I have come to decisions about how I plan to cover them. Some of them I already know exactly what we'll be doing, others (Languages being the worst) I have no idea where to even begin thinking so would love some feedback. I'd also love some feedback if there are any blindingly obvious subjects I've totally failed to put on my list!

Different Types of Home Education

I'm still doing lots of research and have been amazed how many different types of home educating methods and philosophies there are. Here are some I've come across.....

Structured learning.
This is the one that is most like how you would imagine "school at home". The children work out of text books following a curriculum. Some even follow the National Curriculum.

Interest-led Learning, or "Unschooling"
Apparantly the term "unschooling" originally came from an educational pioneer called John Holt. Advocates of this method believe that children are by nature curious and able to learn and don't need a formal structure to do so.

Eclectic Learning
This is a mixture of the first two. Parents use a combination of structured and child-led learning in conjunction, using textbooks for some subjects and not others. They mix and match to create an education suited to the individual child.

Virtual On-line Home-schooling
This is where a child is enrolled at a school but participates online, either because they are unhappy in the school environment or live too far away.

Unit Studies
This is where parents take a literary text to incorporate most school subjects. For example Treasure Island can lead to study of history, geography, maths, culture, language, food etc.

Montessori
Used in many nurseries and schools as well as in homes, the Montessori education method focuses on hands-on experience, movement, choice and order.

Waldorf
Also known as Steiner Education. This method has a humanistic approach, developing the student as a whole: head, heart and hands. The ultimate aim is to help children develop into free, morally responsible and integrated adults, helping them to fulfill their own unique destiny.

Charlotte Mason
The Charlotte Mason Method uses living books, narration, habit training and dictation. There is also a strong arts focus.

Classical Education 
Classical education is described as a three part process to training the mind. The three stages (known as the "Trivium") are the Grammar Stage, the  Logic Stage and the Rhetoric Stage.


It seems to me that we are heading towards the third one; Eclectic Learning. I also like the philosophy behind Waldorf though, and I have a kind of Unit Study for Around the World in 80 Days planned..... although my focus will be primarily on Geography with some work on other subjects.

Hmmmmmmm still planning.....

Not such a big decision after all...

Okay forget what I wrote earlier!

We have now read the actual letter from the Bursar and the offer is only for them to attend the Summer term at the reduced rate and leave after that.
If we took them out now we would still have to pay, so it makes sense to keep them there and then de-school over the long Summer holiday, ready to home-school from September. This feels like a good natural flow as Papaya would have been moving to a different part of the school in September anyway. It also gives us more time to prepare and plan. I've added a ticker to the side so I know how much time we have left. Both exciting and scary!

Phew! Feels good to have a plan finally!

Big Decision

We've heard back from the school.

They've given us two options; either keep the children at the school until the end of the Summer term at a greatly reduced rate (a very generous 75% bursary) or take them out at the end of this term with no penalty charge for the early exit.

A real dilemma.

If we leave them until the end of the Summer term it would allow the children to complete the school year. It would also give me more time to prepare myself and the house for home-schooling. Plus the reduced rate is very generous and it would seem churlish to decline it. It's a real opportunity to get a term there for such a low price.

If we take them out at the end of this term however we could use that same money to enrol them one day a week at Inwoods for a whole year! Plus the children already know they will be leaving so maybe it's better to take the shorter time and "rip the plaster straight off" as it were. Taking them out earlier would mean I can get going right away on preparing for home-schooling.

My personal instinct is to just take them out at the end of this term, but we think we should involve the children in this decision and will have a serious chat with them on Friday when they're off school for Half Term. It should be their decision really.... in fact I think in the end it will come down to Papaya's decision as she loves the school the most and Povey is normally just happy to go along with any plan.

In other news Papaya has been diagnosed with Glandular Fever and hasn't actually been at school for a week anyway! She's very tired and weak; this morning she fell asleep in the car on the way to school so I just drove her back home and carried her in the house. She's very up and down energy wise so it's making life a bit unpredictable.

Pausing in Planning

We had a meeting with the bursar of the school last week and asked if it would be possible to take the children out at the end of this term. Our contract with the school states we have to give a term's notice, but if we could take them out now that would save us another term's fees. He is going to talk to the head and get back to us. It leaves me in limbo slightly as I don't know if I will be beginning to home-school in April or September. Part of me just wants to be able to start as I'm ready to begin a new way of life, but another part of me feels there is something right about them completing the full school year, plus we would then have the long Summer holiday for them to de-school. We'll just have to wait and see what the school says.

I had a little bit of "practice"  of home-schooling the last couple of days as the children are off school sick. Obviously I didn't do as much with them as I would on a normal home-school day, but it was amazing how much we all learnt even whilst ill. That is one of the appeals of home-schooling; that learning always happens even if we're tired or ill.

They each completed a couple of lessons on Reading Eggs, Papaya wrote a short story, we decorated Papaya's colour in doll as Boudica after researching how she would have looked, we baked some muffins and we made some short animations.

These are all things that we do most non-school days anyway, but now I'm thinking about home-schooling I can see more clearly how educational it all is. Reading Eggs we have been using for nearly a year now and the children love it so I will keep up a subscription for that. I'm tempted to try Mathletics too but there is no free trial and we can't afford to subscribe just yet. I did try Education City, but wasn't very impressed as it just seemed to be a way of testing the children on National Curriculum modules rather than teaching them anything new. I think it probably works well as homework tasks for schools but not for home-schooling.

Generally though the last two days left me thinking "well if we can learn and do all that whilst we're ill, just imagine what we can do when we're well!".

Gathering thoughts and ideas

Now we've made the decision I'm excitedly gathering thoughts and ideas and getting a feel for how our version of home-schooling will work. I've finally joined Pinterest for this very reason and set up a board there to pin ideas, I've also subscribed to a lot of home-schooling blogs that interest me to get a feel for how it works in different families.

I've always been drawn to unschooling, but I need to bear in mind that the children may well be returning to main-stream education at some point in the future, plus I'm not sure my husband would yet be on-board with that little structure.... that can change though ;) What I'm thinking at the moment is more formal schooling in the mornings and then free unstructured learning in the afternoons.

We have a Forest school nearby called Inwoods that allows home-schooled children to attend one day a week, and I also have one day a week I meet up with my mother, so I'd like to continue that only with the children included. With my mother we could see shows, visit museums, or just shop or go to the park. The other 3 weekdays will take the formal morning, informal afternoon structure I said about earlier, with the odd class, music lesson etc. thrown in. Weekends will be one "Daddy day" to give them some focused time with their father and me a break, and a "Family Day" so we do something together as a foursome.

I've made a vague list of subjects I want to cover; English, Maths, The World (History, Geography, Science, Forest School and a language, probably French), The Arts (Drama, Art, Music, Dance) and Sport, probably swimming to start. I realise though that there will be a great deal of overlap amongst those. I'm even drawing up a vague timetable as I know it helps Papaya to see how her day will be set out.

I'm actually getting quite excited about it! we have a meeting with the school Bursar next week, but I think even if they were able to give us a big bursary we'd still go ahead with this plan. I can just see how it's going to benefit us as a family; The Comedian and my jobs are unstructured and sporadic, so we need that kind of flexibility with schooling too.

The Journey Begins.....

I guess this is the point our home-schooling journey begins.

 First a little history. Both our children currently go to a private school. It kind of happened by accident; when we first started looking for schools for a then 3 year old Papaya, we were living in an area where there are loads of brilliant state schools, but sadly where we lived meant she could only get a place in the one rubbish school.

We considered home-schooling but then we looked at private schools, discovered this one and fell in love. The things we liked (and still like) about it aren't to do with it being private, we're not concerned by league tables and grades. We like that it has lots of outside learning, no uniform,children are nurtured as relevant people and there is lots of "arts" learning, drama, art, dance, music etc. But...... we can't afford it.

We weren't naive when we chose the school, we realised what it would cost, but at the time we could afford it and the future looked bright. Now finances have gone awry and things aren't improving as fast as is needed. We've been struggling for several terms just about scraping by. We restrict spending on everything else, the house, the car, food even, to keep the children at the school and we're still not managing and fees go up every term. We already receive a bursary and we still can't find the fees this term. We need to be realistic and pull the children out.

 The plan is for me to initially home-school whilst looking at other schools, but I am prepared to home-school indefinitely depending on how well it works for us. We feel it's important to do this rather than straight into a new school as we all love their current school so very much and I think it would be unfair on them and the new school as they and we would compare it unfavourably no matter how good it is. I've always been "home-ed curious" as it were ;) so it's nice to get a chance. 

Both children will finish the school year so home-schooling will really "officially" begin this September, with plenty of time over the long summer holiday to have a practise. This blog is for me to store ideas, curriculums, books and plans as I figure out what form our home-school will take. At the moment it is a private blog with only a few readers invited, but I may well open in up to the public once we've "come out" as home-schoolers!

 I'm sad we're having to take the children out of a school they and we love, but I'm excited about what the future holds!