after 11

[CheerMum]

Hi all,

I'm new here (first ever post eek). We home ed our lovely daughter, she's in Y5 at the mo and we're going to home ed 'til the end of primary, after that it is HER choice.

At the mo I suspect she will want to carry on with home ed SO can anyone recommend websites/work books for KS3? If you home ed'd from primary through secondary did you find your approach changed? would you separate subjects out or just continue with topic based themes?

Thanks in advance x

We do some topic work - we are currently doing a unit study on the Narnia books with another family, which covers all sorts. But mostly we cover subjects separately with a lot of independent work. Galore Park do textbooks for years 6-8 (prep school) and these are a good prep for GCSEs as well. So we use quite a lot of those. They aren't cheap but we have 3 DCs so paying £13 for a textbook isn't too bad compared to £5 workbooks which each DC would need a new one of!

Our approach did not change until DCs started doing formal courses. There is no particular need to change unless your DD wants to take exams. At that point, you'd need to help her ensure that she covered the syllabus (available from the exam board online). However, you can cover IGCSE maths (for example) in six months so you may not want to bother until she is 13+. If she wants to do a foreign langauge, I'd suggest studying it over a longer period but you don't need to work on the syllabus for a great deal of time.

we use Galore Park too - a mixture of the Junior books & So You Really Want to Learn (which takes you up to 13+/GCSE), for maths we've used Singapore which gives a really good grounding for iGCSE imo.

I have an 11 year old Year 7 and I haven't changed my approach. The maths and science etc is harder, but that's a natural progression rather than something we suddenly did in September. Otherwise, her life is much like it was last year.

My eldest, 15, works to a very different structure because she's doing GCSEs so we concentrate solely on those at present. But even that has been a gradual thing that has built up.

I think you will find if you keep going it will kind of fall into place naturally.

As for books for my 11 year old, we pretty much haven't used KS3 books. So much is the same as GCSE foundation that we've just gone straight to GCSE in science. In maths, though, I've found the WHSmith Revise Maths series very good. They do two books for Y7, two for Y8 and two for Y9. They explain everything really well.