preparing children to leave school

[barnowl]

Hi, I'm considering taking my 3 school age children out of school to home school them. My eldest is in year 4 at present. I'd like some advice on how others have introduced the idea to their children and how they have prepared them for the transition.

Thanks in advance

Home education wasnt something i introduced my children to, they werent happy at school, werent coping. School wasnt working for them, wish i had pulled them out earlier it would have prevented a lot of heartache. It was just no more school and happy times at home.

I have one son in school, 2 home ed and one that is in a special school but is not happy there and contemplating home ed again. For my son that is thriving at school and happy, I wouldnt even think about pulling him out unless he said 'mum i dont want to be there'

Are you children happy at school?as it could be upsetting to pull them from somewhere they are secure.

I found out that home education is a legal viable option on a Friday.
Dh and I discussed it on Friday night and Saturday.
We asked the children what they thought on Saturday evening.
They went to bed on Saturday night saying to each other "Don't bank on it, how likely is that?" (they told me that later)
We all talked some more on Sunday
The deregistration letters went in for all three children on the Monday morning.

We never looked back!

I suppose it depends a bit on whether you think they are likely to worry about missing anything particular when they leave school. You might want to check out local home ed. groups and maybe even take them along to one (assuming there is one where you are) before they leave school. I think it helped my son to meet other children who were home edded when he was still at nursery but all his friends were being prepared for school. It gave him other children to identify with and reassured him there'd still be lots of people around to play with. It may be helpful to find out what activities/groups are on in your area so you could start to get an idea of what a typical week might look like in terms of what you might want to go to regularly.

I have just done this - I had one going into year five and two into year three. Due to difficult family circumstances, I just felt it was what we needed - to take a break and reevaluate everything. So I described to the boys what it would be like, and that we would do it for a while and see how it went. This put a lot less pressure on me and them to 'make it work!' I said we might do it for a year and then see. We've chatted about the things they miss from school - things like assemblies apparently - and incorporated elements of them into our week, eg, singing a favourite song when we have family meetings, and having Star of the Week, etc. The eldest has started at Cubs where a couple of his old school friends go so that's helped to keep the contact there.

A bit like lilyfire said - we already knew another family that were HEing so that made it less 'weird' and gave them both a frame of reference for what it looked like, and they love meeting up with them regularly. In fact, before I suggested that we were going to HE, I just threw it into conversations a couple of times: 'Some kids don't go to school, they learn at home and by going out on trips, etc' so they knew that such a thing existed and had time to picture it before embarking on it!

Ds has AS and ADHD so didn't have the necessary logic or emotional capacity to understand how miserable he was in school when we deregistered early in Y5. He truly believed he had friends and that school was fun, because that's what he'd been told that school was like (the reality was very different). Yet he couldn't cope with the day to day anxieties and he was losing his grip on coping and I feared for his mental health, so we had to act urgently. But given his skewed understanding of his feelings we had to encourage him to make it his decision to come out of school and not just ours.

He's always responded to visual learning so I typed out everything I could think of in terms of potential pros and cons of home ed (there weren't many cons ). I used lots of different colours and fonts and cut all the suggestions into strips which I folded up like tombola tickets, and we made a game of 'finding out about something to solve the school problem'. The idea was that we'd have one pile of pros and another pile of cons and decide whether it was a good idea or not.

It worked really well and the 'pros' pile was getting bigger. About halfway through the game ds clicked and shouted out "It's home education, isn't it?" and started bouncing around the room. He was thrilled and got straight on the phone to tell his grandparents. We wrote the letter that weekend, handed it in at the start of the week with the intention of him finishing up to half term, but ended up pulling him out the next day (a whole other thread!).

It was essential for us that ds fully understood what was happening, and why, and that it was his decision to leave school. We made it exciting and fun and emphasised that he'd gain more from HE than he would from school, something that he hadn't grasped before.

All this was three years ago and he's thriving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Good luck with your adventure .

We didn't do much preparation because DD2 was so unhappy at school it didn't take us that long. However, I did discuss with her things she thought she would miss.

Her main worry was (it was October) she would miss the school Christmas dinner, party, etc. It's funny that the things that seemed big to me, like friends, didn't bother her at all, but the things that seemed small, like "I won't get my breaktime fruit" seemed to matter most.

We unpicked all the stuff she would miss and talked about how we could replace those at home with something similar or better. Then we talked about things she would like to do that she couldn't do whilst she was in school. Once again, things that seemed insignificant to me were big draws to her. She accepted that some things weren't really replaceable like for like, but that in balance, home came out as the much better option. She was 8.

Then we told the school mid week and she came out on the Friday, to give her chance to say a quiet goodbye to her teacher etc.

It was the best decision ever. Over 4 years later and she's loving it, and has been joined by her older sister. :)

Thanks for all the feedback

I like the idea of finding a home ed group in the local area Lilyfire. My kids do lots of extra activities where they socialise and the older 2 each have a close school friend that they'll be able to keep socialising with. My eldest is doing ok in school he's the one who is least likely to want to drop out so I'll try sounding him out. My 2nd Ds is always saying school in boring etc so I think he'll jump at the chance because he loves learning but school isn't his thing and my DD isn't settling well into reception she's spending half her time in first aid just trying to get some attention.
eestro & musicposy I like the idea of working through how we can do the school things they like at home to make the transition easier.

Can I also ask how other people reacted to your decisions and how you handled it? I think my mum will be supportive as it was something she wishes she'd been brave enough to do but I'm not sure about m&pil.

If you discuss home ed with your eldest and he isn't keen, would you consider just taking the other two out for the time being? There is a very good chance that he will want to come out later anyway once he has seen what fun his siblings are having...

I think home education is much easier if the child is eager to do it.

yes saracen that would be an option especially as ds1 is in separate junior school and other dc's in infants

I have had my 2 children out of school since half term. We casually dropped the idea into conversation during the summer holidays. After a while ds1 who is 7 started asking more and became desperate not to go to school. Ds2 who started reception still doesn't really get it that the other children are in school. I know that he's much happier at home though. I am so glad we did it. I am loving the fact that I've re-claimed my boys. Amazing. Good luck.

Other people's reactions - lots of my family are teachers, so I was a bit careful how I put it and tended to say things along the lines of 'it's the right decision for us now and we'll see how it goes and review it'. My family haven't been too bad. The other mums at school thought I was mad - they told DP this, not me. If people express worries like 'how will they cope socially without a class full of children...' or 'how will they learn without a properly qualified teacher....' I found a reply along the lines of 'I was a bit worried about that to start with but then I researched it/talked to experienced home edders and found out xxx and it's not a problem'. It stresses that you've really thought about it and done research and generally the person expressing the worry doesn't know anything much about h.e.

I didn't tell many people at school as I didn't want to have debates. I told a few that I knew would be supportive. DS1 knew that he wasn't going back after the holiday so loved secretly clearing out his desk on the last day. It made him even more excited I think. With DS2 so young, I didn't really talk too much about it with him. He was already struggling and anxious about various aspects of school so I didn't want to confuse him and make him more anxious. I have also made it clear that it's a bit of a trial run until Easter to see how we get on. I really hope neither of them want to go back though. Even on tough days, I'm still loving it!!