Making It Up

as we go along

interhigh

100 ways, 100 days – showcasing the variety of home education

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#100daysofhomeeducation is a picture based challenge so mainly to be found on instagram with crossover on facebook and twitter.

I have to say, I’m loving having that daily picture to look back on to remind me of what we’ve got up to in the last month. (Given that I don’t blog our home ed lives daily any more. Which I should. But somehow never get around to. Sigh.)

What I also ought to do is keep a list of the books and resources we use, and how we use them. This month we’ve been enjoying Picture Book Explorers, written by a fellow home educator Helen, who kindly sent over a couple for review. The idea is that there are five days worth of activities, covering a variety of educational areas/ skills and you re read the book each day and pick from the activities. We used Tabby McTat(Amazon affiliate) this time and focused on the art of Axel Scheffler. Which also led to reading up on his life, spotting links with other books and doing some drawing.

I really enjoyed drawing in the style of, and must go back and finish the picture with a watercolour wash!

Another hit this month was a charity shop find, this rather fabulous Techno Gear Marble Wacky trax set (amazon affiliate link here)

I saw this in a shop window on a Sunday afternoon when the shop was shut – I went down specifically the next day to see if it was still there. (I also decluttered a bag of stuff and a second bag of scrap material, so I get bonus points for that, right?) It cost me £3 🙂

I expected that the younger ones would really enjoy this. Turned out it’s quite a complicated set (hundreds of pieces!) so it ended up being me and Big sat building it with visits from a fascinated Tigerboy. I did share the vids on my instagram story, but annoyingly I didn’t have the phone set to save them, so they’re gone 🙁 )

And the other thing that happened last month was we kicked off the 100 ways to home educate blog hop. It’s been so great to see the wide variety of home education going on. There was a bit of structure with Secret life of a homeschooler then some Girls Unschooled (love the header there very much). With a mix of ages, there’s a mix of approaches at the Grays and then Jo wound up week 1 with her three kids and a gluestick.

Week two started with some more unschooling with the beautifully photographed Paper and String blog and then moved on to some structured autonomy with Maria and do 5 things. Nevine is worldschooling, which is pretty inspirational while Tammie has some interhigh going on alongside a variety of other approaches. We finished the week up with Lydia who’s having a new adventure.

And on to week 3! Elin Sion is doing it her way as a multi platform educationalist 🙂 B Man and L Girl are semi structured (with a pretty full week!) while REOlife have a patchwork of home education (great description). Happy Handley has some delicious baking going on alongside a whole lot of gaming and craft while it’s never the same two days running with Helen and her eclectic style.

Day 16 featured our first home educated blogger, with Midnakit sharing her insight from the drawing board and our final day of February we were adventuring with Monster in a waldorf style.

From today, there’s a new linky, just so that the lists are fairly manageable, but I’ll be doing this sort of round up post once a month, and I’m going to add this nice badge to my side bar which will link to each of these round up posts, so it will be easy to find any all posts on this topic.

100 ways to home educate – guest post Tammie Griffiths from Aspire Chaos to Calm

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As yesterday’s blog on different ways to home educate was on fb, I’m reposting it here (with explicit permission!) so that it can be easily found as part of the blog hop 🙂 You can find Tammie on facebook or twitter

My article is in the comments 😉via Ripl.com

Posted by Aspire-Chaos to Calm-Connecting & Reconnecting Families on Tuesday, 14 February 2017

It was when i was carrying my eldest E almost 13 years ago that i started researching education options, i didn’t know about HE then but it didn’t take me long to stumble across it after looking at private schools, Waldorf/Steiner, Montessori, progressive schools and all the rest in between. I knew straight away that that would be the path for us.

What style/philosophy do we follow? Well it has been a bit of a mix, starting with Waldorf/Steiner with my eldest, she didn’t show any signs of wanting to do any formal learning, although well ahead in her speech and comprehension she just had no interest in the more formal stuff, preferring to play, do art, go to classes and socialise (insert a snigger here)

At 7 we introduce formal learning and even then I was up against her battle to not want to do it. It was tough for me to take a step back and trust that it would work out but it did. As she got older we started adding in maths and English as part of a structure (for me more than her) E went to Explore Learning (the tutor centre) for a time and she did well there.

When E was 6 i had K a whole different character, as she grew and developed her own way it became clear that she preferred to learn at a younger age and the Montessori method worked well for her and still does, in some way she has been easy, or is that i have just become more experienced? Probably that.

As time has gone we have got far more structured in our approach, most likely due to me becoming self employed, i feel i need to establish some kind of routine but also K has always needed much more of a routine than E ever did. And that is what i love about HE, that fact that i can tailor the educational style to the child is great! It makes it far more enjoyable for everyone. We still stick with structure in English and maths and the rest of the time being child led, i remember one time E focussing on a Tudor project for 2 YEARS!!!!! Yes 2 years……..what we don’t know about Henry the viii…hahaha.

It is great for them to follow their passion something they would not necessarily have the opportunity to do in school, they are heavily focussed on their swimming and drama and i love them having the opportunity to do these things alongside voluntary work and HE meets.

E now attends Inter High, an online high school which she enrolled in back in September, it seems to be going well, we hope that this will benefit her in working towards some kind of iGCSE or equivalent, She is off to do PGL with them this year too. This gives me more time to focus on K now she turns 7 this year, i can see where her strengths/weaknesses lay.

I also host Aspire an HE meet for families in our borough, that has brought about some great connections with families and some firm friendships made….for more info on any of the things we do please do get in touch, however you choose to HE, no one can tell you it’s your journey.

Today’s post is with Nevine and her purple sheep and tomorrow we’ll be visiting Lydia at a new adventure

Find the rest of the posts here. And if you’d like to join in, drop me an email