Tag: unschooling
-
How home education looks for us in 2025
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…
-
Home education, how's it looking these days?
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…
-
On not going back to school. Staying at not school?
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…
-
Why we home educate in the holidays
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…
-
Brief reason for home education.
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…
-
100 ways to home educate – launching a blog hop.
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…
-
What do you do if you don't have a passion?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. We’re told to find our passion and follow it, find a way to love our work, or turn what we love into a career, commit, dive in, give it all you’ve got. What if you don’t have just one passion? What if you are interested in lots…
-
Unschooling with Animal Crossing
So this year Small is old enough to be in high school. (When did it start getting referred to as high school here instead of secondary?) Mathematically speaking he’s several years ahead of his peers. In terms of reading he reads extremely well, if sporadically. His writing is excellent, if a little quirky (you can…
-
Yet another change in home ed styles.
Over the years I’ve tried a wide variety of styles of home education. We’ve been structured, used bits of curriculum, tried out Montessori, unschooled, gone childled. And nothing has really worked for any length of time. Which is why we keep changing. I’d love to be able to unschool, but it really really doesn’t work…
-
Potato world – or how many hours do you teach them?
When I mention home education, one of the most common questions is how many hours do you teach? (That usually follows on from do you do the teaching. Which is one that makes me wince slightly.) It’s difficult to explain. There’s very little teaching here. Learning happens as and when it happens – it requires…