Q for home schoolers -- how do you teach?

[boldredrosie]

I was wondering; do those of you whose children are home educated actually teach your kids yourselves? Or do you work in groups? Use tutors? Internet resources?

I think that if I were to teach DS it would be a disaster but I'm not entirely convinced the schools he's been at are doing any better a job.

I teach my son entirely myself. He is ten, Year 5 if he were in school, but studying Level 7 maths which I am still able to cope with. I find I am learning with him (sometimes) and it is quite fascinating.

I keep a little ahead of him in some areas, but in the rest I feel quite confident and happy about the work required.
I think he does too, and he is learning fast.
We are quite structured in our approach and I am very firm. He knows he cannot get away with bad behaviour, day dreaming too much, bad writing etc. We know where we stand and it works well.

It varies from subject to subject. DS1 (13) works at most things independently and comes to me to discuss his work or when he doesn't understand. Some of his English we do orally, so that's with me. DS2 and DD are a mixture of independent work and work with me. They also mark quite a bit of their maths themselves and come to me if there are problems. French/Spanish I teach them in a small group with 2 other families and that works really well too. We are just starting a unit study on the Narnia books which we are doing with another family - so each family reads the chapters and does some 'research' and we get together for some discussion and some activities.

We just do what works best at the time so it's quite flexible - if DS1 suddenly said he needed more input in something, we would sit down together and sort it out.

We home educated our three children all the way through their teenage years, but we found that formal structured styles didn't suit us at all so we developed into autonomous home educators-we didn't do any formal lessons, and they only did any written work when they wanted to.
Instead, they learned through living life and following their own interests.
It's very informal but very efficient, child interest led way of learning, through living life.
Alan Thomas-author of that article has written a couple of books, that are worth a look at I think- about How Children Learn at Home

There's a nice blog post Autonomous Learning-what it means for us that gives a flavour of what I mean.

Must have done something right, our three are all at FE college and at Uni now, doing very well indeed-we had a ball, a great deal of fun all the way through and all three fully intend to autonomously home educate their own children, for all the fun and freedom to learn in a way that suits the individual child, that it brings

Like julienoshoes, I don't really teach anything formally. DD is nearly 6 and has never been to school. We just go about our day to day life, with DD involved in things like shopping, planning activities, working out what we can afford/have time for. And talking lots. If she's interested in something we find out about it together if I don't know the answers to her questions.

We use the computer lots; for games, watching things on, typing, entering competitions. We have subscriptions to a few magazines and educational games. She plays out with the other children in the street a lot. She likes to do puzzles (in magazines, worksheets I download and shove in a box for when she's bored, online) and has just started reading pretty independently (asks what words that don't make phonetic sense say if she hasn't come across them before) after lots of being read to and listening to audio books. We don't use a scheme or anything; she's as likely to read a basic baby book as pages from a text book or bits off the page of a short novel that I'm reading to her.

It's hard sometimes to remember to trust that she's learning, but if I can go with it and stay calm something usually happens to remind me that autonomous education does work, like her 'getting' reading, or finding my old practice exam papers and her knowing enough GCSE biology that I'm pretty sure she'd have passed the paper if someone could read and write for her. Her learning isn't linear; it comes on in leaps when she's interested in something or hits some kind of development stage or something...

We are quite structured too, I prep lessons a day ahead in Maths and English, and the rest is slightly more relaxed depending on what dc's interest de jour is.
At the moment she is animal mad so we are doing a lot of stuff on animals and their habitats etc.
Like muckingout, I'm quite firm, but it works for us and she is really happy doing it that way. She is always telling me that she learns a lot more than she did at school, and she thinks I'm a great, fun teacher :o

Same as julienoshoes and anastaisia: we don't do formal lessons unless the kids want to, which usually they don't. So far it has been quite successful even by school standards: my older daughter tried school for a term around her tenth birthday and had no difficulty keeping up with the rest of the class. She came back out again because she preferred home education, but it wasn't that she couldn't do school.

So I think, if it's possible to skip over the first five years of formal education and then fit in effortlessly when they do start, why not just let them play and learn whatever they want in whatever way they want to do it?

Thank you so much everybody, especially julienoshoes for the links. Certainly given me a lot to think about although I think, if I've read the post correctly, most of you are at home with the children? I work full time and as the only breadwinner in the family I wouldn't be able to give up work to teach him hence, the q about tutors and the internet.

I'm a single parent and work full-time but am self-employed and can be really flexible with when I work (and a good % of the time is admin/advertising/planning/working from home that I do while dd is in bed or otherwise occupied).

I do a whole day out of the house on when dd is with her dad where I fit in as much as I can, and a couple of morning classes which I tend to cover with child swaps with friends so dd gets to have fun while I'm working. When I had lots on the other year I had a nanny share with another family which was really flexible and surprisingly affordable but over time it stopped being practical so we ended it.

In lots of ways I feel I have more flexibility for work by not being bound by school hours or terms. I just carried on with the work patterns I'd set up while I had a baby/toddler and kept adapting as our situation changed - I only used to do 16 hours and increased over time, things like that. But there is a trade off as I know I'm never going to be making a huge amount while I have young children to work around, but we have enough to get by.