AIBU to think teachers that developed this would be onto a nice little earner.

[confusedandold]

Posting here for traffic.
We're moving back to the UK in November, my eldest has been homeschooled since September due to an operation and my youngest as well since March. When we arrive in the UK I am expecting difficulties in getting my eldest into secondary school (North West Leicestershire) as there doesn't seem to be any places at the catchment area school. I will, therefore, be in a position where I need to carry on homeschooling until there is a place.

I'm following the UK curriculum so I am pretty clued up with the resources that are available out there and I'm subscribed to some excellent ones. One of my favorites was designed by a retired Science Teacher. He has created courses for KS2, KS3 and GCSE where there are narrated powerpoints for all the topics. He also provides worksheets and they work alongside the well known CGP books. I also look for Youtube videos that relate to the topics and mark the work done. It is excellent and my son is absolutely flying ahead with Science, understanding it, and more importantly, enjoying it. It is great for me as all the resources are organised and it wasn't ridiculously expensive either. I also subscribe to another resource for ICT which was approx £100 for the whole KS3 course. In comparison, for other subjects I have to spend a lot of time finding resources and planning what he is going to do.

I think over the coming months there will be many parents who will be homeschooling for various reasons, many who will not have the funds to put a lot of money into it with places such as Interhigh or Wosley College.

AIBU to think that it would be amazing if some ex- teachers (retired?) out there could great something similar to the Science course I mentioned for subjects such as English, History and Geography. They could be used alongside cheap and easily obtained books such as CGP. Keep the costs reasonable and I'm sure there would be lots of subscribers. I know that the ex-teacher who does the Science course props up his pension nicely with it and because he keeps the price at a sensible level he gets lots of subscribers.

I'm not saying this is suitable for homes where parents are not able to oversee homeschooling, but for those homes where the parents are willing and able but don't know where to start.

We use ks2history.com for our history lessons. Similar to the science ones but you have to talk through the ppt yourself.

Oddizzi's great for geography.

Can't help for English though, or anything beyond KS2!

Of course you need knowledge I never said you didn't. But you don't need facts and figures. I am a senior examiner for the paper you took that question from. You could get full marks without a single fact or figure. For example you could talk about Invisible unemployment and talk about groups excluded from figures, you would need to know who the groups were but not figures or how many.
My point is it's a waste of time doing what you suggested of facts and figures learning online

I’m on a few home education groups, and these are often mentioned:
Humanatees, homemade education, echo education, my online schooling, cloud learn, dreaming spires. Several of them are run by and for home educators. Also I highly recommend learntec for computer science, they offer live and recorded lessons.

DGD used Science with Hazel for GCSE last year and found it very helpful (and subsequently got very good results).

DuvetDay- I disagree that History is a skills-based subject. History is a discipline that is grounded in factual knowledge. Yes, it’s true that there aren’t single-mark factual recall questions on the exam papers but the key to getting marks is having a strong factual grounding. Even the source and interpretation questions involve the application of detailed contextual and procedural knowledge to do well. Building a base of factual information is critical and multiple choice quizzing and the use of online platforms to help students Memories factual details can be very effective as long as it is done alongside teaching them the wider historical narratives and how to write essays and develop longer answers. There’s zero point teaching kids how to write essays if they don’t have any knowledge to put in them.

*memorise

@MadameMinimes

DuvetDay- I disagree that History is a skills-based subject. History is a discipline that is grounded in factual knowledge. Yes, it’s true that there aren’t single-mark factual recall questions on the exam papers but the key to getting marks is having a strong factual grounding. Even the source and interpretation questions involve the application of detailed contextual and procedural knowledge to do well. Building a base of factual information is critical and multiple choice quizzing and the use of online platforms to help students Memories factual details can be very effective as long as it is done alongside teaching them the wider historical narratives and how to write essays and develop longer answers. There’s zero point teaching kids how to write essays if they don’t have any knowledge to put in them.

Yes, I agree with all that. Facts, figures, dates, etc ARE knowledge. Skills are an important part of the History course, but you really will not get the higher grades without a good grounding in the facts, i.e. knowledge.

You certainly won't do well if, say, you study Weimar and then take the exam on the Middle East or studied warfare through time and took the exam in medicine over time! If it was "skills" based, you would be able to sit an exam in a subject you hadn't studied and still do well.

You need both, i.e. the skills to be able to understand and pick out relevant information from the sources provided in the exam, augmented with your own knowledge (i.e. facts, figures, dates, etc). Maybe you could say it was 50:50.

In the Weimar example re unemployment, you surely wouldn't get marks for writing about the jobs market/unemployment figures 20 years earlier or 20 years later, so dates ARE important. Yes, you're not asked to regurgitate dates like the old days, but you at least need to know time-lines and the rough dates of the important events.

It would be fabulous if an English, History, Science, and Geography teacher got together to formulate something so that it had a common look and feel to it.

I was talking to a friend about, 'topic' something trendy in the 1970s. Your class would do a 'topic' for about a month.

Say the topic was 'Romans in England'

You would look at the geography of where Roman forts, settlements were and why.

You would look at the science of how they used running water, built aqueducts and roads.

You would look at Roman numerals in maths.

etc.

We were not told that we were doing maths or geography and I don't remember anyone not liking 'topic'.

OP

Have a look at TES, lots of teachers put free resources up.

Also which year will your son go in to? Some schools start GCSE work in year 9 so your son may need to choose GCSE options quickly.

Don't dismiss a school because it is a bus ride away, have a look at the subjects they offer and see which best suit your son. Eg if he is bilingual in Spanish he may end up in a school that does GCSE German.

Also have a look at the computer science curriculum, there is no GCSE ICT anymore so if your son wants to do it as an option he needs to know what it is about.

For science, does the school offer triple or just double? Will your son be given the option or will he be put in lower groups? Best practice is to start with the child in the top sets but this rarely happens in practice due to numbers.

Most schools list the options available to students on their websites.

@sashh
Thanks for that. He is bilingual in Arabic so I intend for him to do the GCSE privately. He's already had a go at the writing, reading, listening, and speaking element with his tutor here and did well so hopefully that will at least be one good grade in the bag when it comes around. He went to a German school until he was 8 and was fluent in that too but it has slipped. The schools in the area only do French, no Spanish or German so he won't be doing a language through the school. I said ICT but it actually a Computer Science course that he is doing via a company called Learntec.
His English reading is good, his written English is weak mostly from confidence and I think I will need to use a tutor when we get to the UK.

Badbadbunny- That example is a really good one. They need to know dates, not because they will be asked “when did X happen?” but because they need to be really clear on when things happened in order to work out which bits of their knowledge are relevant to the question they are asked. I’ve seen kids lose a lot of marks with exactly those sorts of slip ups. There’s a question about Israel-Egypt relations 1973-76 where kids who know the outline of events but not the dates invariably spend more than half their answer writing about the Camp David summit and the Washington treaty, which are both out of the date range. The other classic trap for kids who don’t know their dates is the use of transportation as a bullet-point prompt on questions that end in 1700 on crime and punishment. They all merrily plough through their detailed knowledge of transportation to Australia, which didn’t start until the second-half of the 18th century.

OP- you may find some of the stuff on Seneca learning helpful for him in terms of helping with content. It’s pretty well tailored to the English curriculum and exam boards for key stage 4 and they have a lot of key stage 3 stuff now for English in particular. The problem with key stage 3 stuff is that in some subjects schools have a lot of choice about what to deliver within the NC, so the likelihood that their stuff will overlap with what his new school cover is lower. Maths and sciences vary less from school to school and I think that’s why it’s more commercially viable for companies to make online resources.

I was talking to a friend about, 'topic' something trendy in the 1970s. Your class would do a 'topic' for about a month.

I've often thought "topical" teaching would be really good and interesting, especially for weaker pupils. They do similar in primary, but it's rare in secondary. As you say, Romans would be brilliant in bringing together lots of "subjects".

I've often thought a move to "modules" rather than subjects could work very well in secondary schools, where pupils can choose modules which accumulate marks towards some kind of school leaving certificate. Basically, the University model. It would eliminate the "move up a year" mentality as kids could chose modules based on ability rather than age (i.e. have different levels such as starter, intermediate, advanced). Of course, it would be a nightmare to organise so we're stuck with "the way we've always done it", but it's nice to dream occasionally.

Our son's school did a "topic" once in year 9 - it was Elizabeth I and was a joint project between the history, food tech and art depts, where they ended up having to create a piece of art based on EI, and produce a meal inspired by the EI era - apparently it improved engagement etc in the history lessons as the kids were inspired to research other aspects of E1 which aren't normally covered by the history syllabus.

Hello Op
I’m an English teacher and examiner for one of the major exam boards. I could see your suggestion working but agree that there is a difficulty in English when you get lots of very different answers.

My speciality is breaking down exam questions-I work as a tutor-but my real problem with this would be that it’s a lot of work to set up and I’m not sure how I would promote it. If anyone can suggest how I’d definitely be interested in creating these courses.

Of course, what would help FAR more is for the exam boards to drastically reduce the breadth of the syllabus for Geography and History. The sheer amount of content they need to learn is ridiculous, especially as they're supposed to be "skill" based exams rather than content based. Not to mention all the options - I think the History GCSE was a choice of 4 modules out of a possible 12/15 - just why - it's a massive problem when kids move from one school to another during exam years (or even one class to another as some schools aren't even consistent in the modules between exam classes).

Same with English. Learning 15 poems and studying them all in excrutiating detail - really? Just why? You could cover most themes, eras, etc in 5 carefully chosen poems.

@Eatteachsleeprepeat

My son is bilingual which has impacted his written English as the other language dominates. I've spent lots of time this academic year brushing up on his grammar and spellings. We've been working on PEEL paragraphs and short essays. I found this really hard to find good resources on. I would love some good powerpoints from an English Teacher that explains PEEL paragraph and some ideas for practise linking in with analyzing text. Also planning an essay. There are lots of resources on grammar and comprehension questions and book related resources but not much for this.
As for promoting it, there are several Facebook Homeschooling UK groups, one with 25k members, a great place to start with promoting anything you worked on. I can't tell you how many parents are on there who have been pushed into homeschooling, not from choice. English I would say is the one subject area where there isn't a single effective resource for KS3 that will prepare the student for KS4 study, you end up taking bits from different places and it becomes a nightmare.
I guess what I am is asking is, as a secondary school English Teacher, what skills would you be teaching in KS3 to prepare for KS4?

@Badbadbunny
That is interesting what reducing the content of GCSE's. I was also thinking about the necessity of studying 9 or 10 GCSE's. Is this really necessary to move onto the next phase of study? Many homeschooling parents have their children sitting 5 or 6 which is enough to move onto a BTECH or A-Levels. Is it not better to study fewer but do them well? Particularly with the pandemic?

Most schools make students study English Language AND English Literature. My son is a bilingual student and I know we can him through English Language but I think English Literature for him will be like pulling his own teeth out.I've finally got him into Reading; he's read 30 quality books since September, but for him analysing them takes the joy out of reading. I loved English Literature as a child and excelled at it but I think some students would benefit from focusing on English Language alone and binning English Lit.

I must say, it's been very lovely discussing this with you all. It's nice to see an education related thread without a load of teacher bashing.

Hi
I think that ks3 should prepare students in terms of skills and topics-interestingly topics mentioned upthread as a 70s notion, I taught in a school where everything was topic based and skills were tracked from ks3-5. Very interesting to me pedagogically and I did some of my MA work on this.

So-as a brief summary I would expect to be taught:
Analytical writing
Transactional writing eg letter, speech, blog etc
Creative writing eg from a stimulus such as a picture
Reading for meaning-explicit and implicit
SPAG
How to tackle poetry analysis
Language and structure techniques
But also an appreciation of different genres eg dystopian, gothic, Romantic, detective and some periods eg Victorian
Shakespeare
Modern plays
Set texts-LOTF was mentioned

I’m getting more into this idea!

@Eatteachsleeprepeat

That is an interesting list and there is some parts of that that I've attempted to cover, using a mishmash of resources. I'll give you an example.

Transactional Writing - I subscribed to a 6 week zoom course with a tutor who did group tutorials at a very cost-effective rate. There was a time for this but if you couldn't attend, she emailed through the powerpoint and recording. There were ideas at the end for homework, but for the parent to mark. Each week was a different type, speech writing, letter writing etc.

Shakespeare - We struggled with this. I got some presentations from Twinkl and we looked at Shakespeares life, The Globe and a bit about some of his plays. A couple of worksheets from Twinkl and some Youtube videos of a performance of the Globe.

Gothic Literature - Again PowerPoint from Twinkl which we worked through together along with some worksheets from there. We read some extracts of Dracula and Frankenstein with questions. We've also started a course with the tutor mentioned above, (6 week zoom tutorial live or recorded on the Gothic Theme)

Poetry - We read some poetry on an online programme called Ed Place which has comprehension/analysis questions

Plays - Didn't do.

Autobiography - We read together Roald Dahls Boy and there were chapter comprehension questions on Ed Place that he worked through.

SPAG - CGP Books

Creative writing - we used Ed place as there are pictures on there to write creatively about. I also downloaded a book about planning a story and character development and he wrote a 1000 word piece of flash fiction.

Set text - We've been reading Skellig, Holes, Private Peaceful (also watched film)and Tulip Touch and get worksheets from Twinkl or Ed Place

As you can imagine, from a non-teacher, I spent huge amounts of time looking for resources. I'm in the Middle East so no Amazon delivery either so all resources have to be Kindle Books or things I can print off. Also because I have no access to an English teacher I don't know if I am covering the right areas.

It would be so wonderful if a teacher were to compile a website that homeschoolers can subscribe to that covers with voiced powerpoints and worksheets ( or suggestions for textbooks on Amazon) that cover the areas that you mention i.e transactional writing, analysing poetry, Gothic writing, Dystopian fiction and a couple of selected set texts with comprehension questions, worksheets etc. There are some English courses out there like Catherine Mooney which is a correspondence course where you email work over. We didn't get on with this and it was abandoned after a few weeks. Something that utilises technology, and even with a list of suggested Youtube videos that link in would be good. Suggested reading for different genres. Basically all the areas I've been manically trying to cover under one 'roof'.

I personally think that if something like this could be created, at a reasonable subscription it would fill a gap i.e people that want more than textbooks but can't afford a full, online school at £3k a pop.

Almost forgot - we also subscribed to an American course called Time4Writing (check it out) for writing paragraphs. A teacher marks the assignments but my son would get penalized for using British spellings and not using a comma before and which was annoying.

One final thing. I also think that when it is a homeschool environment it is ok to create normal worksheets, it doesn't have to be creative and 'fun' like in a classroom. The reason for this is that when you are at home you have access to the internet and online documentaries etc which you can use to bring the subject to life if that makes sense. For example, when we did Private Peaceful we watched some online videos about conscientious objectors etc and would read the chapters, then watch the film to that point.

I just wanted to say this is a brilliant thread, I’ve noted down all the resources i’m case we need them later in the year.
Thank you to everyone for sharing ideas!

Most schools make students study English Language AND English Literature.

That's because of the government and progress 8. Both English lang and Lit are double weighted.

OP

If you can get the school to accept him as ESOL, this gives them some funding and allows for some flexibility

Sashh is correct and for that reason many schools will not exempt him from lit. That said, many esol students find lit easier than Lang once they are past a certain level of proficiency

Both of my children have been bilingual from toddlers. My husband is an Arabic speaker so he has always spoken to them in Arabic and I speak to them in English. It makes it rather interesting around the dinner table as the language keeps changing. As they've been to school here, Arabic is the dominant language. However, to speak to them you would think that they have never lived overseas as they speak English with a Southern England accent with no trace that they also speak Arabic. Likewise, they speak Arabic with a local dialect with no sign in their accents that they are British. Arabic is a far more complex language than English and it has dominated. They are both now fluent readers and writers of Arabic which I am happy with as it gives them lots of scope to work and live abroad when they are older. English spellings have always been a battle. I taught them both to read at the age of 4 but we had some unusual problems along the way. Arabic is obviously written right to left and my youngest once presented me with three perfectly spelt and formed English sentences...but they were written from right to left with every single letter backwards. lol He's 8 and will still on occasion turn the b's and d's the wrong way around.

My fear when they go to England is that they will be treated like pupils that have always been at school in England, as solely English speakers. My eldest went to a German International school until he was 8 before moving to a Language school where the core subjects were taught in English. The English here focuses a lot on the technicalities of English, grammar etc with very little on writing creatively. I've been working with my eldest a lot this year building his confidence in this area as well as lots of vocabulary work. My biggest worry now is that with Covid-19 they will just disappear in the chaos and not get the support they need to be on track. I honestly think that 6 months in a UK school being solely taught by English speaking teachers will see them come on in leaps and bounds.

I don't know whether I need to push that they are ESOL pupils. Their mother tongue is English but in the home, they speak to each other in Arabic, their Dad in Arabic and only me in Arabic. It may be the only way that their unique situation is identified? They will have gaps that will probably get missed otherwise.

whoops - they speak to me in English, not Arabic.