unschooling

Home education, how's it looking these days?

14th January 2019 by Jax Blunt 8 Comments

I still get a fair few contacts via social media about home education, so I thought it was probably time for a bit of an update on where we are, how we’re doing and what it looks like these days. Also, I was inspired by Adele over at Beautiful Tribe who wrote a beautiful post about resetting homeschooling intentions, and that sounded like a great idea to me.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll cover the whole family, even though some of them aren’t home educated any more.

At the moment, Big (rapidly approaching 19!!) is still at home, doing a Level 4 course in Music at college. That’s equivalent to the first year of a degree in terms of qualification level (for those of us at the back completely lost if it doesn’t say A level, O level etc). It’s very hands on, and she’s already gigged several times. If you’re interested in what she’s up to, you can follow her musical adventures on instagram or facebook.

Small, who really really isn’t small any more, not that he was at the time we started calling him that, is also at college. I’m still unclear as to whether he’s technically home educated at the moment, but given he’s in college 2 1/2 days a week, also doing music performance but at level 3, I figure he’s fairly effectively educated should anyone come knocking. There’s also music practice on three instruments these days, music composition, computer club, fencing, guitar lessons and gym and a variety of other hobbies. He’s rarely not busy, and it’s all self directed, which I love.

Which leaves the actual home educated offspring, Smallest of all (who obviously isn’t, on any measure, drat the whole funny giving of online names!) and Tigerboy. Both of them read independently, and Smallest is on a reread of Ballet Shoes at the moment. I did however find her a bundle of interesting titles at the library, including the sequel to the Lotteries, another Noel Streatfield, and the wrong Rick Riordan book. Will add all of them to the Amazon affiliate widget at the bottom of the post. She’s full of scientific type questions just now, and we’ve been working through some of the science kits they were given at Christmas, with admittedly variable results.

The solar puppy for example, not so good. (Have added it to the widget, but for information, not as a recommendation!) I could *not* figure out how to get the incredibly small wires through the very small gap to attach to the also small coil. Suggestions gratefully accepted in the comment box.

I had higher hopes for the food science kit, but while it has a great booklet with it with loads of suggestions, it doesn’t actually include the ingredients you need for some of the things. Like the fruit jellies for example, which was what Tigerboy desperately wanted to do. So that had to wait until I’d shopped for gelatin. (The ingredients actually called for isinglass, but I’ve no idea why they wanted that instead of gelatin. I went vege gel in the end.)

Other than that, we made it to a new group that started up relatively near us last week. It’s held in a soft play, so plenty of exercise opportunities and while we won’t make it every week, mainly because it requires me to be in two places at once, it is good to have it available. Tigerboy is still doing his home ed trampolining session too, and coming along nicely, although it appears the hypermobility that the older two both have has struck again. Unsurprising given the genetics aspect really. I’m told that trampolining will help him develop core strength so that’s good. Also, I read this really interesting article about suncream yesterday, and will be making even more of an effort to drag the kids outside very regularly so that they can build up a bit of a tan to protect them from sunburn. (I will probably stick to sunsuits for beach days though. The in and out of the water, along with the wind makes it too risky for very blond children, and sunburn *is* a cancer risk.)

As to home education intentions and or the resetting of them? Well, I’ve started myself a bujo, but a very pared down version, and when I get the hang of it, I want to get the kids into it too. I want them to form their own intentions and be aware of what they are and aren’t doing, although obviously I’ll still be guiding them. I’m more and more aware of how children can and do educate themselves if they’ve got the environment and assistance to do so, and that seems to me to be the ideal. I don’t know I’d go so far as to call us unschoolers, but it’s probably the nearest label there is. So that’s where I’m going – being more aware of our regular activities, making sure we’ve got group things to go to, they’ve got library, outdoors, science and so on on offer throughout the week.

Did you do anything to reset your home education at the start of the year?

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On not going back to school. Staying at not school?

13th August 2018 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

We went out and about today, and bought stationery for the new not-school year that’s fast approaching. None of this terminology makes much sense. As I’ve said, we’ve drifted into an unschooling lifestyle where there’s really not a lot of division in the day between overtly educational activities and games and playing and just life really.

Having said that, with me heading towards (hopefully) an out of home work routine, I have put a reward chart type thing up on the wall to remind the younger two of their options. I’ve recently signed up to Skoolbo for them which has a batch of curriculum linked materials – little and often is useful in building confidence particularly in core subjects like Maths and English that they *will* need qualifications in. I’m also looking into Doodlemaths after a reasonably successful trial – yes, the more maths games the better. So they’ve got a line on the charts to remind them to do one or the other of those 5 days a week, and I’ve got a line to remind me to do writing 😉

Yup, I’m on the reward chart too. I’m not using it as a reward scheme, I’m using it as a visual reminder – a prompt for the days when I’m not about all day to do the prompting in person. Obviously there will be one or more other adults about (yes, we have two other adults in the household these days!) but I’ve taken the lead in educational terms, and this is my way of keeping that running smoothly.

As well as that, today we bought some fab cardboard people templates (Poundland, 20 for £1, and some brill Bic crayons, really bright and not messy, 8 for £1) (sadly not a sponsored post, do let let me know if you’ve got any openings there Poundland!), and then spent some time making paper clothes for them. (Spot that sneaky fine motor control, pen work etc etc.) The conversations were brilliant as well, as Smallest made herself a girl doll, and then gave her a naughty younger brother – no idea where that inspiration came from!

One other bargain today – a copy of Britannia, 100 Great Stories from British History for £1.50 from a local charity shop. (Amazon affiliate link incoming).

We read the introduction and the first story tonight, as we did our Whangdoodle chapter at lunchtime. (I like reading to them as often as possible, and from as many varied types of books – fiction, sort of fiction, poetry – they love pretty much anything.)

And that was our home ed day.

I was wondering if anyone wanted to write a bit about their not back to school plans, and we could have a bit of a carnival, say in about 3 weeks time? A carnival is where you write something on your blog, and send me the link and then I write up a post with all the links in and preferably you put a link in your original post to that post and then everyone can find all of them. So like this – from back in 2013. If you’d like to submit something home education, or flexi schooling, or unschooling or alternative school related, either pop a link into my comments, or send it to me on twitter or facebook. Preferably by 31st August, so that I’ve got time to compile the carnival posts 🙂

Why we home educate in the holidays

30th July 2018 by Jax Blunt 9 Comments

I tweeted the other day about how Tigerboy was enjoying a trial on Doodlemaths and someone replied to ask if that meant we didn’t have holidays. And the honest answer is, we don’t, really.

Over the years, we’ve drifted from a more structured home education approach with some very obvious curriculum related box ticking, to a much more unschooling approach. If you’ve not come across the topic of unschooling before, it might seem like a really odd word – there are some great resources on it out there, like Sandra Dodd or I’m going to try to explain what it means to me.

What it means to me is that I don’t separate off education from life, particularly for the children. So I don’t put learning in a box, and insist on it getting done in a particular way, or at a particular time or split it up into subjects and demand that some are more important than others and have to be done in a particular way.

That’s a really negative way to explain unschooling. Hm. Let’s try that again.

Children are born as little learning machines. It’s what they are designed to do. And as long as you don’t get in the way too much, they will do it all the time. In fact, it’s one of the difficulties schools and teachers have to deal with, that they don’t necessarily want to learn the thing you’re trying to teach that particular day, they might be way more interested in something else that doesn’t fit into the plan.

Maria Montessori talked about this, saying play is the work of the child. Play is how they explore, and as long as they have control over it, they’ll just keep on doing it.

So how do they learn specific things like reading/writing/’rithmetic – I know that’s what you’re thinking.

Well, I read daily to my kids. They see their siblings reading. There is text in computer games, on cereal boxes, signs, the fridge – everywhere. They are curious about it – they want to learn to read. So they do. I’ve written before about Tigerboy’s process – he binge learnt. It was fascinating to watch to be honest, and did involve apps, and books, and a very different process to what you might expect, particularly if you’ve read any of the articles about how difficult it is to teach reading.

It might be difficult to teach, particularly when you’ve got a plan that’s different to the one in the child you’re teaching. The learning part can be more straightforward.

For a while he was behind his peers – now he’s probably a little bit ahead. But right at the moment he’s not that interested in fiction so he doesn’t read by himself all that often. He’s got access to all sorts of books though, and he often rereads whatever I’ve read to them at bedtime, so it’s ticking over nicely.

Maths – we do day to day stuff. Talk about money. Telling the time. Fractions come into life, so does measuring, weighing, adding, dividing. And then I might wave an app at them to try, and they do for a bit and acquire a few more building blocks. They like playing with my montessori materials and other manipulatives and at some point they will probably want to do something that requires a qualification, so like Small, they’ll knock it off pretty quickly. (He’s done GCSE maths in a year, get back to you in a few weeks about how that went.)

Writing, much the same. And because they see TV programs, read books, and have relatives and friends that do go to school, they’re aware that children generally learn specific things at particular ages. Sometimes this is viewed as pointless information, sometimes it’s seen as a challenge.

I have an awareness of the overall educational achievements. I might get out something science based if they haven’t done any for a while, and they’ll deep dive for a while then do something else. I’m confident that they are learning pretty much all the time, and very efficiently, so I know I’m discharging my legal responsibility.

I’m not quite so sure how this all measures up against the stuff LAs talked about in their submission to the recent government consultation. It seems to me that this kind of free range education is very poorly understood, and at some point that might make my life a bit more complicated. But that’s a bridge for another day and in the meantime, I’ll go on facilitating their unschooling lives. Yes, even in the summer holidays and on learn nothing day. 🙂

Brief reason for home education.

11th July 2018 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Today in the post I got a form from college – additional information for home educated students. There was a little box headed up “brief reason for home education”.

Brief? You want me to summarise how we came to home education briefly?

There were a couple of years of research that spun off reading I did while on a PGCE way back in the 90s. (Eek, that’s a long time ago now.) There wasn’t an awful lot kicking around back then, but enough to whet my appetite.

And then I kept looking, and I kept searching. And when I had children, starting in the early 2000s I was still intrigued by the idea of home education, and I really didn’t like the way primary education was going, with the national curriculum and very little flexibility for schools or teachers to actually meet the needs of the children in front of them.

So we found Muddlepuddle, and other families with young children who were home educating, and local groups who met in soft play areas, and annual camps, and holidays in youth hostels, and gradually more and more families online and we didn’t look back. (Apart from the Montessori school segment while I was working, but it’s hard to home educate when you aren’t actually at home to do it and Montessori is an interesting educational philosophy too.)

And then we moved to Suffolk 10 years ago, returned to full time home education and had more children who haven’t been to school either.

For a while we did ‘normals’ – a bit of maths. english, science, maybe some history, a bit of french, dabbling in the curriculum approach. But as the older children got to secondary age, it became apparent they had their own ideas and interests and as long as I could see that they were doing stuff, that’s what we did.

Appears to have worked. Big went into school, her choice, and held her own perfectly well. She’s just finished A levels, works as a lifeguard, and has Plans. Small (NotSoSmallTeen most often these days on twitter so as not to confuse people who haven’t read 15 years of archives and think he might actually be little) has just done his GCSE Maths and English in a year with a not very local college. They were only teaching foundation maths, but got in touch (in February!!) to ask if he wanted to do higher, so we did, in a bit of a rush, and fingers crossed it went well enough. Don’t know until results day obviously, because he didn’t do months of mock papers like they do in schools. (He also didn’t do 28 exams and a lot of stress.) He’s planning music at a college in September and if you’d told me that 4 years ago I’d have laughed until I cried.

They need room to grow and explore, and yes my role is to guide and facilitate and at times challenge and push, and sometimes catch and hold. It’s parenting, without a communal safety net of professional educators, and it can be terrifying and exhilarating and actually, if something doesn’t work out first time, you go around again. It’s schools that demand that things be done to a particular schedule, and it doesn’t always work, or colleges wouldn’t be having to do maths and english over and over again for 16 yos, would they?

There’s been a lot in the news about home education recently, and it’s about monitoring and maybe curriculums and evidence of progress, and so many times over the years that isn’t how it’s worked for us. It would be a massive shame if people who can’t imagine education outside of a school get to constrain home education because so many children don’t work like that, don’t learn like that, and will be damaged by it. And so we fight on – because I’ve two younger children I want to have the chance to find themselves, explore the world, and chase down a passion just like their elder siblings have.

Now, tell me precisely how to fit that briefly in a box?

(I put philosophical 🙂 )

100 ways to home educate – launching a blog hop.

6th February 2017 by Jax Blunt 5 Comments

It’s Monday morning, and all over the country children aged from 3 or 4 upwards are heading to nursery, school, college, what have you. Education, after all, is compulsory.

There are lots of different schools out there. Mainstream, special, private, academies, and lots of different ways of educating within them.

There’s also home education. A perfectly legal and valid alternative.

Some children didn’t head out to school this morning. Some of them stayed home. Maybe some got up and sat down at the kitchen table with books and it looks quite a lot like how you might imagine a schoolroom. Maybe some of them headed out for the day, to a zoo, or a soft play, or a music lesson, or a stately home, or a library. Possibly some of them are still in bed, and will get their day started later, with a book or a film, or computer time or arts or crafts.

Basically there are as many ways to home educate as there are families home educating, and I’m hoping that the blog hop this post is kicking off will show you a whole bunch of them. (I don’t know whether we’ll make it to 100, that could take a while, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.) There’s also a #100daysofhomeed photo challenge kicking off on instagram/facebook/twitter if you want to check that out.

Tomorrow’s post up now with Care at Secret Life of a Homeschooler, today I’m going to tell you how things work for us.

Once upon a time we used to do typical day picture posts and I thought about doing that again, taking a picture every hour through the day to illustrate what we get up to. But there’s not really ever a typical day here, and it wouldn’t show you the wealth of what we get up to, so instead I thought I’d tell you about the week around today as it were.

Friday was mainly a home based day. We’re not early risers – I’m a bit of a night owl and the kids seem to take after me. Big gets herself up and out for sixth form, leaving for her bus about 7.50 – I try to get up and make her lunch to take with her, and most of the time I manage it 😉

Next kids appeared between 8 and 9, Smallest and Tigerboy. Breakfast together, and then getting dressed, and I had a plan to do some science, from a rather fab folder I got from the works.

(Check it out yourself here The Works – affiliate link)

We went through it together a while ago and basically they want to do science that ‘looks like’ science, so I’d ordered some borax from ebay and we made slime. (See science bob here if you’d like to try this one. )

Prepping for that, doing it and clearing up (carefully and thoroughly given that borax is poisonous – we took precautions including aprons and so on) took us nearly up to lunch time, so more food on the go and then I was out and about shopping and picking up Big, which meant that there was some duplo, Scratch and cbeebies. When I got back in I finally set up Slime Rancher for Smallest – she’s been looking forward to that for ages, but we didn’t have a computer up to running it until last week (graphics card issues. Don’t ask me, I don’t do hardware.) Small must have got himself up and organised at some point – he is pretty self driven at the moment, and his days include Japanese, coding, guitar and a regular walk – he usually covers around 5 miles.

Evenings usually include a family sit down meal sometime between 7 and 8, although Friday was a bit later than usual because Big teaches with the swim club until 8.30. Then the little ones have bedtime stories – I read to them, then Smallest reads it over again to Tigerboy, then songs and finally lights out.

Saturday was a bit unusual in that I got up early with Small and we headed out to a not very local college who are exploring the possibility of putting on GCSE courses in Maths and English for home educators. It would be one day a week for a year, and would be a massive help, as accessing qualifications outside the school system is hard to organise in terms of access to materials, and actual exam centres. It can also be very expensive, as centres often charge way over the actual exam price. We were very lucky that Small’s computer club organised an iGCSE course for computer science last year, which included the exam at cost (£52 iirc for the exam itself). Anyway, the college visit was very promising, and there’s even the faint possibility that the course will be put on more locally which would be amazing.

Then I dropped him off at a charity games jam, and came home to spend the afternoon doing more Slime support.

Sunday is our slowest day, apart from swim club in the evening. Smallest has just moved up to the big pool, and it’s a stretch from her comfort zone, the club have been being very supportive though. Big teaches with the club on a Sunday too, and today she was called in to do a lifeguard shift as well. Because of that we had a split meal – I fed the little ones before Big got back. Too many late evening meals don’t do them any good. Tonight’s bedtime story was a family favourite – Tom and Small from Clara Vulliamy. Apparently the word once was particularly challenging, not surprising given how weirdly we pronounce it.

Monday. Starts with guitar for Small taught by a very experienced guitar tutor who also happens to be a local home ed dad. All sorts of skills in the home ed world. I’m planning to do some more science with the little ones in the afternoon, or some art (we’ve been looking at Picasso, I think I’ll do a separate resource post during the week as this is already kind of long!) Tuesday is our monthly skate and play meet up, in the same not so local town as the college. Other Tuesdays we have soft play at a local sports centre which is lovely as it’s actually a walkable meet up 🙂 At warmer times of the year we’re planning to do more out and about meets with local families, but soft play is a good fall back when it’s cold.

Hopefully this post gives you a bit of insight into our approach to home ed. I wouldn’t say we’re complete unschoolers – I’m a little bit too nervous to completely trust the flow, and I stick my oar in to guide activities, like giving Small a shove towards GCSEs. I view this as meeting my responsibilities to not foreclose his opportunities in the future – if he’s got the basics covered, he’s got a lot more choices open to him. It has to be said though that there are lots of ways to tick those boxes now, and I might do a more detailed post on that sometime soon.

So there you go – a few not very typical days in our not very typical lives. Hope that’s given you a little insight into a child led/or semi autonomous approach. It varies from child to child and time to time – if I wrote it up again in the summer, the pattern would be very different and involve a lot more out and about. (I might just do that actually, think it would be interesting.

If you’d like to join in with the blog hop and host a day on your blog, feel free to drop me your details via my contact form and if you’re wondering about the technical ins and outs of home education, I’ve a page on that too.

As people blog, I’m hoping they’ll include their links in the blog hop code below, so that we can all find all the posts easily as well as by jumping from blog to blog. I’ll also be back this afternoon with a blog badge – but I’ve kind of run out of energy and time for now. Sorry!

Don’t forget to check out Care at Secret Life of a Homeschooler tomorrow!

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