New to HE- dont know where to start?!

[Lily15]

Hi my son is 7 nearly 8 and in Year 3. We are moving to the UK in February and instead of putting him into school for just 1 1/2 terms I would like to home school him until the summer. We are then moving again and he will start school in September.

Does anyone have any advice re. temp HE? My son is very adaptable and after 5 years out of the country I know he will benefit greatly from hands on learning and being able to visit museums etc

I just dont know where to start though- do you dedicate a specific number of hours a week to sitting down and learning or is everything unstructured?

Any advice, experiences, links etc would be greatly appreciated

Thanks x

[Lily15]

I forgot to ask- does anyone use tutors for areas of HE too?

[throckenholt]

I would keep it very laid back - do what interests him. Make some time to have some fun and visit places you wouldn't normally go to.

Do a bit of maths and keep up with reading as much as he likes, read to and with him a lot. Encourage writing when you can (if he is anything like my 7-8 year olds he will be very reluctant to write so don't make a big thing of it).

Fairly unstructured works for us. For example today with my 2 8 year olds and a 10 year old we started to do some writing exercises, got side tracked into googling where Claas tractors came from, then got on to Fendt (also Germany but a different area), then moved on to Massey Ferguson (Canada originally, now in Georgia) - looked up all those on the web, got sidetracked into where the Titanic went down (following their recent interest in Titanic), got into looking for images of icebergs online. Then later we watched a documentary about camels and their physiology. Now they are busy reading Mr Men books (I asked them to pick anything from the book shelf !).

Days rarely go as intended but they always end up finding something interesting.

Lots of great documentaries aimed at adults on BBC2 and BBc4, and channel 4 - still very digestible for 7-8 year olds.

Have fun.