Home Schooling for Year 7

[EMMJAY]

Daughter on waiting list for preferred school. Offered schools unacceptable so now considering home schooling, she will be in year 7. Any advice, tips, experiences for this age group (11 year old) ?

Thanks EJ

Hi,

I've been educating my daughter at home for approaching three years. She is now 12. Using the excellent textbooks offered by www.galorepark.co.uk/will keep your daughter abreast or ahead of her school-educated peers. She'll also find www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks3bitesize/ extremely useful and fun. My daughter also enjoys www.mathletics.com/ and www.spellodrome.com/, though they're not free.
You may both find that you like home schooling so much that you don't want to stop!

I think it may depend on how long you think you may be waiting. If you are high up the waiting list and there is a lot of movement in your area, perhaps it might just be a matter of weeks or a few months, then you might want to contact the school to find out which programmes they follow so you could use the same thing at home and your dd will find it very easy to slot in academically when she starts at the school.

On the other hand if you aren't sure whether she'll ever get into the school and you may be home educating indefinitely, then you can afford to adopt a relaxed approach and choose from any materials or approach which you think may suit your daughter. Some people like to follow a curriculum, though many of these don't buy in just a single curriculum but pick and choose from different suppliers for different subjects. Others make their own plan by researching various books and visits and experiments to fit in with their themes, and still others like me let the children decide exactly what they want to do - which may be very informal learning which looks totally different to school. All of these approaches are well recognised as valid and you can choose whatever seems right to you.

For that matter, even if you think you'll only be home educating for a short while, you could take a break from the school model and take advantage of the flexibility of being out of school. For example, you could do one or more projects based on your daughter's interests, whether that involves researching the space exploration programme or 18th-century fashion or games design. Or you could do some visits to interesting places such as museums and historic sites. Some families do a lot of road trips and the kids seem to learn a lot from seeing these places.

You may like to get in touch with local home ed families to see whether they have some educational or social activities you can join in with, or tips on local places of interest. I am lucky enough to live in an urban area with many HE families and we have quite a busy schedule with things like target shooting, ice skating, bowling, fencing, physics and philosophy.

Thanks for all the advice, really useful ! My daughter is actually first on the waiting list for the preferred school but not much movement on waiting list so far (hoping to find out in the next few days). Have looked at all resources mentioned so now feel more confident about homeschool option and indeed can see its many advantages.....

EJ

That's good. Well, unless it is a tiny school then I should think somebody will fail to turn up on the first day, having enrolled at a private school or left the area without bothering to tell the LA... or having secured a place at another school for which they were on the waiting list! Sounds like your chances of getting your daughter into that school are very good.

Good luck and I hope she'll have a good time whichever way things work out!

We homeschool my daughter; just started on our second year! She is 11. She doesn't do the National Curriculum, though what we do is very structured - we do four languages, including Latin and Greek. We use Kumon for both Maths and English. We also do lots of history and associated reading and project work. She does riding, ballet and fencing with other kids, and occasionally skating. It's been pretty straightforward and I'd say just do it...FWIW, we homeschooled my son for 18 months and it evidently didn't wreck his life; he just got 12 A* at GCSE, though he was then at school.

Sieglinde,

My 12-year-old daughter is also doing four languages: French, German, Latin and Greek. She'd like to add more! Hope my girl does half as well as your son when eventually she goes to school. . . congratulations!

Snap, LastSummer! Exactly the same languages. Thanks too for your kind words on my son. Whereabouts are you in the UK?

when your dc learns 4 languages at once, are you practising each of those 4 on a daily basis (i.e. 5 x week)? That would take up a lot of time...

We're in Greece, hence the acute need to home educate: schoolchildren here are expected to learn mainly by rote and without discussion or debate. My daughter is using the rigorous So You Really Want to Learn French series from Galore Park, Wir Grundkurs Deutsch fur junge Lerner, the Cambridge Latin Course/So Your Really want to Learn Latin, and Greek to GCSE. She has some good tutors. We'll be coming over in late November to visit boarding schools and see the Nutcracker at Covent Garden. Where are you?

We're in Oxford - and we are seeing the Nutcracker too, and Sleeping Beauty. DD loves ballet and we're doing a small project on it.

ZZZ - she does one or two things every day in each language. We also use Cambridge Latin - she's on Book 2 - and Greek to GCSE with a bit of JACT Reading Greek. She also uses a range of materials for French and German. It doesn't take up all her day, though; normally 2-2.5 hours a day on language work, occasionally 3. She starts school at 9 and finishes at 5.30. She also does other activities - fencing, ballet, riding, sometimes skating, and she has a 20-minute morning break to take the dog for a run. I don't think she's overworked. Bluntly, I marvel at how little 'real' schools get done.

My daughter added languages one after another, from the age of nine. She started with French, then added German, Classical Greek and Latin. Each school day starts with French, she has German lessons two or three times a week and does Latin and Greek just once or twice a week. Homework is set after every lesson. My daughter loves languages and works diligently at them: learning languages gives her a great sense of achievement. She's on course for a GCSE in each language at 16 or earlier.

I wasn't criticising sieglinde. Just curious about how you organise it.

Sieglinde,

We wanted to see Sleeping Beauty as well as the Nutcracker but just can't fit it in. Though very different, we may add Manon instead. We'll be in Oxford for Headington's 13+ interview day!

Interesting LastSummer. Message me nearer the time if you like.

DD also loves languages... so too my ds, who did Mandarin, French, Latin and Greek GCSES.

Sorry if I sounded cranky, ZZZ. I didn't mean to. Just explaining...

no you didn't . It is fascinating how people organise education and how different set-ups work.

What I am a bit confused about is that I often read on HE threads HE is so much more effective than a school day in an institution so that only a couple of hours are required to cover the material a school covers in a day or a HE parent wants to cover; yet your school day with dd is quite long by comparison - more like 6 or 7 hours altogether with breaks I'd imagine and not just a couple of hours before lunch. I suppose that way there is the time to cover 4 languages in some way in the course of a day, whereas in a couple of hours along with other subjects like English, maths, history, geography, science, I couldn't see how you would manage to fit in 4 languages too.

sorry rambling a bit...

Hi, ZZZ. It's no longer than her day at Real School was 2 years ago... and yes, she does all those things, though I know lots of homeschoolers have different views.

Hi sieglinde,
can I ask how you went about the languages with your daughter, did you have to get separate language tutors? I’m on a waiting list for my daughters school until then I’m going to have her home schooled but I’m struggling with where to start. If anyone has any advice for me please feel free to share it with me, I feel so guilty she may not get the right amount of education being home schooled. Thank you so much.

I have been home educating my daughter (year 6) for around 18 months now. We love it! The freedom we have. She is learning more. There are lots of Facebook groups for local HE families. Thankfully, my local authority are very supportive of HE.

We still follow the national curriculum, where possible.

What county are you in?