Single working mum wants to HE. HELP!

[ChefRuthie]

Hellooo

I have a very disenchanted 5 year old son who doesn't particularly enjoy school. He says he's bored and doesn't fit in, he has already been bullied and when I speak to his teacher she appears to glaze over when I ask to see her AGAIN..He is held up in some subjects and left behind in others, he's not a happy boy.

I was HE educated myself and have been considering it for my son.

I am a single working parent though and am a bit worried about giving him the time he deserves. I'm a chef and work roughly 2 hrs mon-fri lunchtimes and 4 hrs 2 evenings a week. He has a good close relationship with my Mum who cares for him in the evenings when I have to work, but if I was to HE I would have to arrange childcare during the lunchtimes.

It's at this point I get the wobbles, would I be doing the right thing for him? And what HE resources are available to satisfy a curious 5 year old? Are the LEA going to interfere?

So many questions! I not sure how to approach it from the parent side!

Any advice much appreciated thanks x

Hi ChefRuthie,
I think that your job could fit very nicely around home educating. The thing with home ed is that it doesn't have to be 9 to 3 as it is at school. You could go for totally autonomous learning (where daily life and whatever the child expresses an interest in become the basis for learning) or set up a timetable to suit your hours or anything in between. Who would look after your son while you are at work, your mother? Was it she who home edded you? It could work out really well if you decided on a plan of action together. And if someone who doesn't feel that they can offer anything on the learning side ends up caring for him a couple of hours a day, could you ask them to do baking (lots of maths as well as creative stuff there) or painting or go for a run around in the park (PE ;-)). Almost anything he does could be seen as useful, depending on what way you look at it.

As far as the LEA interfering, it will depend very much on where you are. Some don't get in touch at all, some can be helpful, some awful. I recommend you get in touch with your local home ed group and see what they say.

It's also worth seeing if there is a local teacher's resource centre that you can use. I find ours very helpful.

Anyway, good luck. I also have a 5 year old whom I'm home edding and think it was the best decision I could have made for her. Hope it is for you too.

How did you manage before he was school age? How do you manage in the holidays? Just do that!

HE would, IMO, fit brilliantly around your work. For our family, children learn from life and living it, and that, of course, includes the need for someone to earn and manage money. But curiosity is something that can be satisfied in many more different ways when HEd than when at school - the internet can be used whenever you need to find something out...not just when it's 'computer time'. You can watch interesting documentaries on tv when they're on and when theyr'e relevant to you. You can visit interesting places when they're quiet during term time. Youc an have interesting conversations with mum (or grandma!) when something comes to mind that you want to know about.

LEAs don't have a right to interfere, even the ones who like to think they do! Check out all the many threads on here about the rights of LEAs and how to deal with them. Whereabouts in the country do you live? Some are way better than others at supporting HEors.

Hook up with some other HEors - you may find you become friendly enough with some families that, some time in the long term future, it becomes possible to do some sort of child-swapping arrangement to make your work easier, and you help out another family in return at other times.

And kids learn the 'essentials' from everytyhing they do in life - baking, shopping, playing, climbing, building. Myc hildren have just learnt about negative numbers from seeing the outside temp display in our car! And they've learnt about the temperature water freezes and boils; and other substances; from conversations spurred by jsut that one thing

It sounds to me like you have plenty of time for your son!

Apologies if anyone is getting bored of me repeating this but... did you know that when a child is off school with a longterm illness and the LA sends a tutor out, the LA is only obliged to provide a minimum of five hours a week of tutoring? Tutors report that is usually plenty, because the one-to-one attention is so beneficial.

So if your son is being looked after by someone else for a few hours a day plus a few evenings a week, that is really no big deal and hardly makes a significant dent in the time available for you to do things with him.

When my daughter was that age I was working part-time while she went to childminders. They were HE childminders so she could play with older children, which worked out brilliantly. She would have been reasonably happy with a childminder who only had younger children to look after. We both enjoyed the change of scene from our usual routine.

Hi all

Apologies for the delay in replying we have had a traumatic few weeks!

The last few days of the term at school have been terrible in the mornings with my son clinging to bed clothes crying not to go to school. It certainly was not worth putting him - or me - through that kind of stress so we wrote off the last week of term and I kept him home.

We did some learning at home, writing about what we had seen on TV, talking about books and playing counting board games. I found it incredibly rewarding and was so pleased to see him relaxed and enjoying learning new things again. I shall spend time over the xmas holiday period looking into childcare options over my lunchtime shifts and hopefully we can do this ourselves.

Thank you all so much for your advice, I felt much better for reading about others situations and how it can be done. Respect for you all! x