When we first considered home education, I pictured handwriting practice, daily reading tasks, desks and mini-projects. I used to be a teacher; I imagined some kind of co-op, where I'd teach four or five children Stuff I Knew and another parent would include our children in a similar group for Stuff They Knew.
We decided to opt out of the school system after a brief dabble with preschool for Evie, who's now five - her four-year-old sister Clara won't be starting school this September either. Society can sometimes laugh, with varying degrees of mirth, about the lack of fun and creativity in schools. But given the government push for testing and an ever-narrowing curriculum, we stopped laughing and just felt a bit sad. We decided that home educating would suit our family better.
Of course, we had early worries about doing the right thing for the kids; qualifications; making friends; the embarrassment of telling people.
Although I'd initially envisioned a kind of school at home, my children don't learn that way; in fact, few of us learn that way. It's how schools work because there are 30 children in each group with one adult, and that's hard to manage. It's what has always been done.
We're usually wet or muddy or covered in ice cream or - on good days - all three. Some days I'm Queen Elizabeth I at Hampton Court Palace (but a nicer one at Evie's instruction, because our ginger queen wasn't known for her benevolence) and the girls are my daughters (but secret, illegitimate daughters, because she didn't have any really). Other days we might go back to check on some tadpoles at the park. The girls are enthusiastic explorers and biologists. I'm a rather repetitive and slightly irritating Protector of the Tadpoles. No tadpoles have been harmed, but many have been stroked.
I always knew that these kinds of activities were legitimate ways of learning, but surely you'd also need lessons, or some form of structured teaching. I had read a bit about unschooling but I wasn't really convinced. The essence is that you live with your children and allow them to live: offer lots of opportunities and resources, and allow the children to choose how they spend their time. Be supportive and talk to them. It's the parenting that most of us did when our children were babies and toddlers. They learnt to talk and walk, and recognise individuals, they knew their colours and how to count, and how to stack things, and what would make them feel better if they got hurt. As I started to look for and find learning in ways that don't look like school, this way of educating, and living, made the most sense to me.
We're lucky these days that lots of unschooled kids have grown up and been to university; they're getting good jobs and living satisfying lives without ever having faced the stress of year 6 SATs or last minute Sunday night homework or bullying.
So we're unschoolers. We don't do it in exactly the same way as anybody else, because everyone has their own set of interests and learns in different ways. We go on all sorts of trips organised by home educating parents - to museums and nature reserves and sites of historical interest - and a whole lot of unorganised trips to parks and IKEA and the swimming pool. We read lots of books and go to the library to get more. We play with toys. We watch a lot of Netflix and YouTube and are currently in a phase of playing an abundance of Kirby's Epic Yarn on the Wii.
We spend time with lovely friends and travel around the country to see family. We never take tests; we're never limited by a curriculum; we don't sit if we want to run, nor do we run when we need to sit.
I don't worry about the same things any more, which luckily leaves me time to worry about the mess, or the sibling squabbles or what we'll have for tea instead. I know this is the right choice for us. If they need qualifications there are plenty of ways to get them; they have lots of friends of all ages; and I'm not at all embarrassed to tell people that we're not on holiday, actually, we home educate.