Un/de-schooling or just doing sod all?

[Ohthepressure]

We've just started home edding DS who is 12 (Y7). He wasn't happy at school, he's an observant introvert and life in a full on school (overseas but English speaking) with behavioural and bullying issues was never going to be fun. So we've pulled him out (since the middle of December). DH is at home with him, we've bought textbooks and found loads of resources on the internet. Our moderator has come and seems happy.

The problem is twofold I think. DH is struggling with his new role, he's not the patient teacherly type. And DS just wants to play Minecraft and watch videos every waking hour. He had been having trouble getting to sleep for ages, so we've bitten the bullet and let him stay up super late as his uk mates are online after school, and we let him sleep until 11am. I'm happy with his level of education so far, despite his lack of engagement in school the last year or so, but don't want him to slip behind. His friendships are chiefly with his old small circle of friends, he found it difficult making friends in school at all over here.

But still DS won't engage. Any work is met with rolling eyes and trauma, it's like pulling teeth, and I suspect DH's constant mantra of "You're lucky not to be in school you should seize this opportunity" isn't really a sales pitch to a 12yr old brain...

So, are we rushing the formal stuff? Should we let him deschool for months and months? Or will full teenager status kick in and he'll never learn anything ever again??

Sorry if this is disjointed, I'm on my phone on the way to work. Does anyone have any ideas?

It is recommended a month of deschooling for every year in the system. So for you 6months.
Deschooling doesn't mean doing nothing but abandon them to unlimited minecraft. It's a time for everyone to move away from the idea that learning has to look like school. For your son to feel more secure and rediscover his interests. If you want keep restrictions on screen time in place but try not to worry about the academic side for now, if he doesn't write a word or look at numbers for 6 months it won't hurt. Try to discover and develop hobbies,visit places, find other home educators. Get out of the house as much as possible. You will be surprised what is learned from discussion. When everyone is more relaxed and happier you can decide as a family an approach that suits you.

Could you get him to write an idiots guide to Minecraft? Or even to keep a diary of his Minecraft discoveries?

Yes, give him time. You'll see how much he learns, and he'll discover an enthusiasm he may have lost at school.

However, recognise that he may NEVER want to do what you tellingly refer to as "work". (Given that you see it that way, would YOU choose to do it if you were in his shoes?) Learning doesn't have to be a chore, as it often is at school. It doesn't have to involve textbooks or the resources you have chosen for him on the internet; but may instead involve videos (my younger daughter's main way of learning) and resources he chooses for himself.

So, it's a bit of both. I expect you'll see a change in your son in the months to come. But you and his dad may also need some more time to adjust to a different way of doing things, which often looks totally different from school.

A "quick fix" I recommend in the short term is to take your son out to interesting places. Most kids like getting out for a change of scene, so he'd probably enjoy it. Most adults would see visiting a museum or gallery or historical site as educationally worthy, so you and your dh will feel something has been achieved. It would be hard for your son to visit such a place without absorbing new ideas. So that might make all of you a bit happier and get you out of your rut. If your son doesn't have any ideas where he'd like to go, draw up a long list of mainstream and quirky destinations for him to choose from.

Thanks. This is useful. I think I thought we had this all sorted, or at least started. But where we are we have to follow a curriculum, that's what I thought we were doing so we had to hit the relevant topics within the relevant subjects. The "work" I mean is things like times tables, as although he can do geometry he is held back by not knowing the basics as school weren't bothered and we didn't realise. I want to help him remedy that, and not lose opportunities and shut doors because he didn't do, and understand, maths, geography, science, whatever. How do you know your child has understood
something after watching a video? Aaaaggghhhhh, this is tricky.

Anyway, we'll step back for a bit and regroup. Thanks for the guidance.

Treasure hunts can be a great way of developing and testing that sort of knowledge. Stick numbers all over the cupboard doors, and then each clue leads to looking inside the next cupboard for the next clue. That's times tables being developed right there.

Get him to bake something to be the prize. That's weights and measures covered.

If you have a foreign language he's developing, then have some more puzzle-type clues in that foreign language.

We do treasure hunts at least once a week - it's the closest to formal learning we do :)

My son is 12 and is loving minecraft homeschool. He's signed up to a course about engineering, learning loads and loving it,

DD2 came gone from school a few weeks ago having 'watched TV' about volcanoes. Not terribly impressed, I decided to enrich her knowledge, so said 'ok, where does the lava come from?' I expected 'from inside the volcano'. Her actual reply was 'from the magma chamber.' I shut up

Some children learn visually, some from doing, some from hearing, etc.

Thanks, again. I think what I'm really struggling with is how DS gets the curriculum content - the detail, which takes up whole text books. DVDs are great, but there's no real understanding, no depth. I expect that's my problem, expecting that depth, and I fully appreciate that some people can run with natural schooling or whatever it's called and have amazing, well balanced kids, but surely without the actual content and depth of Y7, 8, 9 science, geography etc, which takes up reams of resources, how will DS get that information?

I hope no-one takes this as being rude about your homeschool choices, I'm just struggling.

I'm not suggesting you abandon all structure forever at all. Just that you don't rush it. 6 months on a lighter approach to relax and find the right approach.
We're not autonomous but we aren't really textbook people either. I see them as not being in enough depth and really about passing tests rather than understanding.
We learn through visits, reading around a subject (fiction and non-fiction), documentaries, lots of discussion and as many hands on projects as we can.
Personally short videos like Khan Academy really don't work for us but lots of people engage well with them. Some children will learn well from textbooks.

The beauty of home education is you can fit the way you facilitate an education to the way your child learns best. Deschooling is a time to not worry about what they are learning at this particular moment but to find out how they learn best. A break will do no harm, happy children learn so much more and so much quicker.
If you have to meet targets or follow a particular curriculum it is obviously more complicated but you will have some room to adapt things to fit your son.

For what it is worth I home educate because I believe there is very little depth to the school curriculum and at yr 7, 8 and 9 in particular it is random collection of topics for science, history and geography.

You can (and I did) take 7+ GCSEs from scratch to A grade in a year, if you are of fairly average intelligence.

I did English (lang & lit) 3 sciences, maths, history, RE, and French and got all As and Bs.

My eldest is planning on a similar route.

The earlier years are just filling and fun.

Once his peers hit exam fever, or he can see a goal/necessity, you will find that your child applies themselves.

The GCSE exams are not very taxing, and FE colleges have been putting students through on 1 year courses for decades, with very good results. HE students have years of autonomous learning behind them, and over the course of a year can easily consolidate it.

It's just a question of when motivation kicks in - it generally does, when the prospect of uni raises it's head

"I think what I'm really struggling with is how DS gets the curriculum content - the detail, which takes up whole text books."

HE parents often quote William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." According to that philosophy, you expose him to many things which you think may possibly interest him. One day, a spark is lit and he will go find the fuel to feed the fire. At first it may not look educational, but the fire quickly spreads to engulf more and more areas. It gobbles up subjects you thought he'd never touch.

It starts with Minecraft, and then he wants to know about architecture, and perspective, and then art. Then he wants to do a bit of programming, so he needs logic skills and what's with this xyz coordinate system, and how do you figure out the maths to create something new? Then he wonders if he can possibly make a living from doing what he loves, so he has to find out about running a business and learn how to read the law so he won't get burned selling something which Microsoft claims the rights to. He tries to explain to his online friends how to do something, but they keep misunderstanding, so he sees that he needs to organise his thoughts so they can follow his instructions. If he wants to make money from Minecraft blogs then he sees he had better develop an engaging writing style and use standard spelling and grammar.

I agree with itsstillgood: textbooks aimed at schoolchildren are shallow. If your DVDs have no understanding or depth, perhaps you haven't found the right ones? Some are light entertainment, there's no doubt about that. But for any subject, you'll find someone with a passion for it has delved deeply into it and written a book or made a video or is volunteering at a specialist museum eager to demonstrate and discuss it with all comers.

Ah, thanks so much, those last few posts are just what I needed. This will be fine, deep down I know it's definitely right for DS, we just need to find the right balance.

Thanks again you guys!

Saracen, very interested by what you say, and eager to get some more indepth infor before we decide whether or not to HE. Can you give me any examples of any videos which are in depth but suitable for primary kids? Be great to test some out and see how ours respond...

This is how we did it:

We agreed to spend the time finding out how ds likes to learn.

I did all the research into all the resources available. I presented each type to him and we tested some examples out and then discussed how he felt that type of resource suited him.

Then we discussed all the nc topics and found out which was his favourite, which he tolerated and which were to be buried in a very dark cave (dancing and drama apparently).

Then we looked at all his interests and types of careers they could lead to. (ds was 11)

We then drew up and ethos (?). Mainly with the council in mind but it was also useful for us to have a "plan". It was very broad in it's statements: when we would study formally, which subjects we'd formally cover, how else we find education, that we'd join a HE group and his intention to take exams leading to his chosen career.

Then we set a date to begin the formal work.

That took several months to explore and whilst waiting for our start date we just lived a life of the average HE person. The only difference was that there was no writing and no books and no PRESSURE!

Just before the start date I took ds shopping and bought special stationary and art supplies (he'd suddenly become a blooming artist) and made a special event of it. We also tried a bit of magic (some sort of mind therapy but it seemed to work like magic). Ds had to think about all the negative emotions he felt at school. He then wrote a name for each feeling on separate sheets of paper. Ds went to the woods and collected sticks. We made a fire at home with these 'special' sticks. Then one by one he thought about each emotion on a sheet of paper, screwed it up and then burned it in his special fire. - It was very liberating.

Since then we've changed styles many times, we use a mix of resources, we've relaxed and we've had oodles of fun!

[If interested in what learning resources we tested/discussed:
workbooks
textbooks
online information
curriculum in a box
curriculum on line
subjects on line
courses on line
ds working on his own
ds working with me
me lecturing
tv documentaries
tutors to the home
tutors in a centre
visits to education events
self research
visual learning
auditory learning
kinaesthetic learning
and more probably ]

Hi WindowDonkey, here are a few we've watched in the last few days. Depends what happens to grab your kids' fancy, really.

There's a Facebook group you can join, where you mention a current interest your child has and people suggest things to do, books to read, videos to watch, or places to visit: www.facebook.com/groups/383815885025681/ It's for people who do "unschooling" or "autonomous education" so only for things your children are interested in, not for things you are trying to educate them about!

If any of the iPlayer videos look interesting, be sure to check how long they will be available for and watch them soon if they are expiring.

Vi Hart: "Doodling in Math Class: Triangle Party"
Physics Girl: "Stacked Ball Drop"
"Back in Time for Dinner": www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05nc7ph/back-in-time-for-dinner-1-1950s
"The Private Life of a Dolls' House" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054fkzz/secret-knowledge-15-the-private-life-of-a-dolls-house
"Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0367dsf/fit-to-rule-how-royal-illness-changed-history-learning-zone
"The Genius of Invention - Communication" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01s72rg/the-genius-of-invention-learning-zone-3-communication

My DS was unschooled for 3 months and he'd only been IN school for 4 weeks!! (and by unschooled I mean, we did nothing 'academic'. Nothing!)

It reset his mental health, our new equilibrium without school.

Two years later, we have found a good balance for academics and are looking to further social groups (DS is nearly 7)

Good luck!

Thanks Saracen, thats really useful! Slowly building up my knowledge and trying to decide if i can do both my dc justice as a homeschooler...every piece of info i can get my hands on helps, so thanks.