I have been home educating, on and off for over 20 years now. That feels like a bit of a milestone that swung by without me even noticing. We’ve made changes over the years, obviously, and home education in 2025 is pretty different to when we got started way back in 2003.
Back then, if you wanted to find other home educators, you either joined Education Otherwise and got sent a list of contact details, or you trawled through yahoo groups, hoping you would find someone local to you. Nowadays, you can find groups on facebook, in your local libraries or even at youth clubs. Back then I put in a group order of Schofield and Sim’s workbooks (should have known that was never going to work!) nowadays I pop a search in google, find an app, buy something off Amazon. One thing that is unchanged though, I still trawl through charity shops looking for resources!
So let’s talk about the practicalities of home educating a tween and teen: what we’re using, where we found it and how it all works.
My kids have different balances of self awareness and self direction with plenty of ideas about what they want out of life and education, and that looks different for each of them. Smallest (for newer visitors, the 15 yo) is approaching that college age, and wants to be able to do art related things at college with age peers. So we’re doing some background level maths, and I probably should do a whole post on the type of resources you can use for it all, but right now our go to is Everything You Need to Ace Maths in One Big Fat Notebook (UK Edition): The Complete School Study Guide (Big Fat Notebooks) (affiliate link). This is quite an easy read textbook, written as if it’s a top student’s notebook, but quite a bit neater. It does have exercises in it from time to time, but if you want practice books (and they are going to be next on our list) I’ve been looking at both KS3 Maths Made Simple Ages 11-14 (Key Stage 3 Home Learning) and KS3 Maths: Foundation Skills Workbook (with Answer Key) | Exponents, Roots, Ratios, Proportions, Negative Numbers, Coordinate Planes, Graphing, Slope Yes, I know all of these look like ks3/ middle school books, but most of GCSE maths actually happens before KS4, and you’re never going to go wrong really nailing down the fundamentals. We’re hoping for one year maths and English courses at college, much like NSSTeen (who is no longer a teen, very much an adult) did all those years ago.
Side note, who has run off with decades of my life??
Other things that Smallest gets up to – lots of art. Mainly self taught, interests are around animation, anime, fan fiction, but there’s also a great awareness around the state of the world, politics, moral philosophy and oddly enough, greek and roman myths. Thanks, Rick Riordan, we love you! As well as Percy Jackson, I’d recommend things like The Owl House, Hilda (books and cartoons), Gravity Falls and for the moral philosophy, a really great starting point is The Good Place. I do recommend watching it yourself if you’ve a younger teen and you have any concerns around what they watch regarding physical relations. 😉
And of course, TC. Youngest offspring, and in some ways, the one that takes up most of my headspace. Some parts are easy. TC loves stuff, particularly getting new (to us) stuff, and charity shops are a great way to satisfy that urge. Last weeks bargain was a particularly colourful one.
This is Busy Beetles Never-Ending puzzle. I thought it would keep us out of mischief while waiting for sibling at swimming. Turns out that 1) it’s vintage and possibly moderately valuable, and 2) it’s an absolutely fantastic resource for kicking off all sorts of mathematical/ logical conversations. So we get into looking at the shapes, the combinations of shapes and colours, which ones connect with themselves and what the commonalities and differences are, which ones don’t and why. There was even biological conversation around the actual beetles and their parts. And all that before we get into the aim of the puzzle to see how many beetles you can connect. (We’re up to 8 so far, in the first session anyway.)
To summarise – we’re still home educating. We’re still dealing with understanding our own neurodivergencies. And I am still writing.
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