Temporary home ed for 4.5 yo

[vvviola]

I hope someone might be able to help a little...

We're moving house/country/continent and as a result of the education systems being very different, we'll be left with a bit of a gap.

DD (4.5) is coming from a system where they start full time school at 2.5, and now in her second year there, she's used to a very structured day, with periods of 'work' interspersed with free play. She won't be able to start in the new system until August/September.

I'll be a SAHM at least until then. I was thinking of trying to 'home educate' (I've got it in brackets as I realise it isn't true home education, as it's really just a stop gap measure) until she can start mainstream school. Knowing DDs personality, she's going to find it very hard to go from the structure of her previous school to the idea of no school for 6 months.

Some questions:

• how would I go about it?
• is it worth it for 6 months?
• how do I get an idea of what I should cover?
• my main experience of early education (outside of education policy, which I worked in for quite a while) is the Montessori system. Would I be able to home educate with a Montessori flavour?

If you are still with me after all that rambling, thanks for reading & any advice or insights would really be appreciated!

I did this with my eldest when we accompanied my DP on an overseas placement (although she was almost 6 ). I think the main thing is to realise that you can still have a structure to each day but not to just stay in and treat your home as a "school" with one pupil - that is way too intense.

I basically had an outline plan for each week (which I sketched out on the weekend) and did "project style" stuff - visiting museums and places of interest in our new city and following up on things from that that piqued her interest (e.g. egyptian mummies - we read a DK guide, made a mummy and papier mache case and decorated it, made some clay tomb artefacts , wrote our names in hieroglyphs etc) We kept it all fun and not " you have to do this". On rainy days and days when we were tired we read together or watched good DVD adaptations of books. We also did a lot of simple science experiments and some maths worksheets and baking etc. So the subjects taught in schools were covered but in a fun, practical way. We also went to local parks and signed up for some dance/sport classes so she mixed with other children.
It was truly lovely time - your DD is young -just relax and have fun together

As your child is going into school in your new country - you could see if the local school can provide you with their learning plan for the appropriate year or if there is documentation on the state curriculum for the appropriate year and use that as your baseline to plan from.

Thanks javo, that's a great help. Especially in relation to not needing to make it too "school like". A weekly 'theme' could work too.

I'll look into the local curriculum too - but the reason she'll be out of school is that they don't start until 5 - so I would be covering what she will do once she starts school.

I've got a 4 month old too - but she's mellow and fairly portable, do hopefully I should manage to juggle the two