Considering Home Ed - please come and talk to me about it

[lisalisa]

I am seriously thinking of trying home ed for my dd3 aged 7 - perhaps not for ever but for a short time. I have already taken her out during term time to educate her at home and the biggest eye opener was how much we covered and how quickly just the two of us. We seemed to have done enough for the day in about 2 hours! By that I mean a few maths papers including some new topics, an English comprehension and some simple science discussion triggered by an experitment.

A friend of mine who does home ed corroborated this and said she does about 2 hours work a day with her dses and then the rest is sport and/or a project of interest/art etc.

Is that about right or is longer normally spent?

[TOMOLBEN]

I will watch this thread with interest. I am starting HEing my DS2 in september. He to is 7 and has been at school until now. I have DD1 11 and DS1 10 at school and DD2 is 2 so hopefully i shall HE her from the start!!

I am really looking forward to it, as is he but i am quite nervous!! So I find threads like this very interesting and useful :)

[julienoshoes]

It depends on how you home educate really, some people do school at home and some home educate completly informally/autonomously-and there is just about every combination in between.

But yes if you do a couple of hours of one to one work, you'd easily cover a days work.....and more I'd say.

Have you seen the threads here about books on home ed and websites on home ed?

[mumette]

hi, just wondering if anyone lives in the Leek area of stoke on trent, ive got 3 children home ed, 14, 7 and 5. the younger 2 have 'lost' most of their freinds as the parents dont agree with what we are doing. it is heatbreaking when i find out that there has been parties or such without my children been invited, especially when they were such good friends before. we are a very freindly family and i always welcome kiddies of all ages with open arms. my 16 yr old ds, just about to start college, has friends round all the time helping the younger ones out with everything 'schoolyfied'. my 7 yr dd is having a dyslexia test tomorrow, all her ex friends parents are telling me thats its my fault she cant read or write still !!!!!!, my 5 yr ds, whome i adoree , has some form of sens, but of course ive been blamed for this as well by some ex friends too!!, but my 14 yr ds is so excelling in some studies the person who assecced us asked if he could take some GSCEs early, so i dont k now what to think tbh. im begining to think that ive done the wrong thing at times. please help :(

[mumette]

im sorry ive just realised that this didnt go onto another thread, i feel so rubbish again.

[mumette]

hi lisalisa, ive been home edding my 7 &5 yr olds since last xmas, and we do about the same amount of work each day. we are having such good fun. we've just bought some chickens a few months ago, so we some studying with them, feeding cleaning etc, we go on 'nature walks' to the local woods, where they have good fun running around and of course looking at plants and trees lol. we go on bbc bite size, such good fun again as they love playing around on the pc. they both love baking and cooking which helps with their maths, and science, then there is your usual games like snakes and ladders, jigsaws etc, its all part of their normal learning skills and of course lots and lots of play time too That they dont realise also involves learning in a roun about way :)

[Saracen]

It's true, you really do cover a lot in a short space of time when everything is targeted directly at what the particular child needs and wants to learn. Did you know that when a child is off school long-term and being educated by the LA (because of illness, for example), the LA is only obliged to provide five hours a week of home tutoring? Tutors report that that is plenty. In rare cases a child might get ten hours a week.

Last year my daughter wanted to see what school was like, and spent a term in Year Five. She'd been autonomously educated and had done virtually no formal learning in the previous five years. She was "behind" in only two areas. Her handwriting was very slow because she hadn't had much practice; it's now average. Her spelling wasn't great, because she hadn't been reading for long. I was interested to notice that it did not improve as a result of being made to memorise spelling lists at school: she scored 100% nearly every week and yet had forgotten how to spell those words within a few weeks. The spelling has improved massively since then, no doubt due to reading extensively and writing blog posts about her favourite online games. She seemed to understand science and history better than her peers and came top of the school in a general knowledge quiz competition.

So even if you choose to do no formal "work" whatsoever, children do learn. They don't learn exactly the same things at the same ages as they would at school, but that doesn't matter. The school curriculum is fairly arbitrary after all.

[CheerMum]

we have been HE for a year now and when we first started out we were still quite regimented in our approach, i timetabled lessons in for most of the day etc etc. however, over the months we relaxed and i finally got my head around the fact that my dd can learn so much more in such a short amount of time. (did you know that the local authorities have to provide tuition for sick children in hospital and they do 5 hours per week which they say is sufficient to keep up with what they are missing in the classroom!)

we do english and maths from workbooks so that i am sure she is learning what she "needs" to. everything else is topic based, which my dd chooses. september our topic will be "rainforests" (though she had a fab chemistry kit for her birthday so we'll be blowing things up too!)

what i struggled to grasp was that she is learning all of the time, not just when we sit at the table - it sounds silly but even playing on the wii improves her hand-eye coordination, EVERYTHING is a learning experience.

mumette - it sounds like you need a new group of friends - do you have much contact with your local HE scene? I would recommend you and lisa (and TOM) go onto Yahoo Groups and search for Home education xx area, i think most of the local groups are on there. there is also one for gcse's (search for HE exams) and further ed.

phew, i've gone on a bit - sorry, but HE was the best decision we ever made and i am a bit passionate about it

[CheerMum]

hehe, x-posted with saracen about 5hrs a week!

[homeedmam11]

Yes, we do about 2 hrs per day,plus playing out, library etc.:)