Floundering on what home ed is and could do with some advice!

[Amberdays]

I've got a five and half year old and eight year old, eldest went to school til earlier this year, youngest hasn't been. I feel like I'm floundering a bit. I've been unschooling the eldest and when she presented me with a timetable of work including maths and English last week I thought it might be a good time to institute some daily time at the kitchen table doing what we call 'book work'. This is fine up to a point but the youngest isn't that keen on writing yet although loves maths and is really interested in letters. In my mind I get and believe in autonomous education but I think my anxieties about letting go and letting the learning happen are making me sit the kids at the table and do workbooks whilst I'm also questioning what the point of it is! I found myself getting hung up on how to teach phonics to my son today when part of me thinks he'll get there eventually just by asking questions about words he sees in his environment and books etc. Eek. I had notionally said let's do half an hour each of English and maths on weekday mornings to see how that would go but I feel it's a bit much for the youngest. I find myself thinking what is it I'm meant to be doing here? They go off into bedrooms and shut the door and play very involved made up games. Today I looked in to see what they were up to and found my daughter had written a play in three acts and was acting it out using Lego figures while my son looked on rapt! In my heart I feel I know that this is what it's all about, that freedom to be expressive and use their imaginations but yet there's something in me that's saying it must involve books and writing to be valid learning! Like I said ... I'm floundering! Any thoughts more experienced home ed people?

If your eldest came up with a timetable, that can be autonomous ed. If she is writing and acting a three-act play for a rapt audience, that can also be autonomous ed. It sounds like your HE would include books in any case - you read to them and they read to you. They will both find reasons to write, such as the play, cards and letters, lists of things.

All I can say is, don't worry! But you know that already. Can you get involved in more practical uses of 'academic' skills (e.g. cooking from a recipe, using different quantities)? Multiplication and division are just as valid (arguably more valid) for cookery or craft as they are for workbooks.

Thanks incognito, I think you are right. It's me that needs to unschool the most out of everyone! They are both so young, it's silly to worry about any of this, I know. Need to go with the flow more!

Keep the scraps of paper that they do writing and drawing and stuff on.

Workbooks are usually totally boring, that's the problem with them. If you want your child to learn phonics, then get them alphablocks DVDs, play alphablocks games on the CBeebies website, get them "Teach your monster to read" for the iPad/ tablet... it doesn't matter whether there's a paper "product" at the end of it like a workbook. Teachers just need to get children to do paper work all the time because they can't give them focused attention - that's what they need to do to track the progress of 30 people. It doesn't mean the paper work is really a useful part of the learning process for the children, at least, not all the time!

It also sounds like you might be wondering about managing the pair of them with different needs? If your eldest is interested in doing some book work and/or being actively taught for half and hour but your youngest isn't, maybe set him off doing a different activity or off to play on his own at that time?

It might take being flexible and a bit of getting used to for him not to interrupt all the time. But he doesn't need to be doing the same thing. The Lego play sounds great fun.

I really relate to this. DC are 6 and nearly 5 and I constantly switch between 'this autonomous approach is great!' to panicking that I'm letting them down by not following a curriculum of some sort or sitting down every morning to do worksheets for a bit.
Like your DC, mine will quite happily role play whenever we are indoors - I love this, the imagination involved is brilliant and they get so involved in the stories. I can see how important this is and it is one of the main reasons we chose to HE, so they got time to play more, but it rests uneasy with me sometimes.
I wonder if this means I need to 'deschool' more?! Or should I listen to my uneasiness and insist on 'book work' more often?
It's so difficult isn't it?! I thought I'd be more relaxed about our path now we're a year or two in, but I wobble all the time!

We have workbook type things around. Sometimes a child will feel inspired to do a bit of writing in one. but there are so many more interesting ways of developing literacy and numeracy!!! (even involving penmanship if the child is interested and ready).

Thanks everyone. Omm, yes, I suppose a lot of workbooks are pretty boring! Unless it's something the child really loves. Even then ... You got me thinking about 'product' and why I hold it in such high regard. It can be hard to separate out what was useful from school type learning and what was just for record keeping, crowd control and general filler. I was in the supermarket a couple of days ago and noticed they had star wars themed maths books. My son skipped off with it, delighted, he's star wars mad at the moment. Got me thinking, just use star wars words to help him with the phonics. Omm several of the routes to learning phonics are screen based and that got me thinking about how I am sort of anti screen, but maybe I need to loosen up on that front. Yes Third Thoughts, they are at different stages and it's impractical to sit then both down at the same time, I need to mix that up a bit. Tinfoilhat you are totally me! Anyway, had a chat to the kids tonight about how they felt about sitting doing the workbooks and the answer was "well, they're pretty boring ... " so I asked what they'd like to do instead, what's in their heads. My son basically wants to play Lego all the time and my daughter said she was interested in chemistry (!). So we've decided to do some experiments and maybe look at the books to learn a bit about the practical stuff we're doing and take it from there. The workbooks are being relegated for the time being (except that star wars one ... ).

I remember when my four year old had a maths workbook. She used it like most kids would use a colouring book, skipping around and doing whichever pages took her fancy in any order, sometimes not touching it for weeks and other times doing a dozen pages at once. And we had conversations like these:

Dd: Which stickers am I allowed to stick on this page?
Me: It's your book. Stick the stickers wherever you want.

Dd: It says I have to colour in only the frogs with odd numbers on. But the other frogs feel left out.
Me: Well, we can't have that!! Colour them all in if you want.

Dd: I am supposed to put a ring around the bigger number in every row, and put an X through all the children who are wearing numbers less than five. But I want to put a box around every third number instead, because it makes a nice pattern. And the children don't like Xs. They want to wear crowns.
Me: Go for it. IT'S YOUR BOOK. Those are only suggestions, in case you can't think of anything else to do with it. Nobody is allowed to tell you how you have to play with it.

She learned maths fine.

Omg Saracen, that really chimed with me! I hated maths at school and used to think similar things to your daughter when doing those kinds of questions except I just suppressed them because I was at school! It makes you realise how absurd a lot of things seem to a child's mind. And they are absurd really, not what you could describe as being real life learning. Today we are shopping, baking and making snakes from old tights and socks. I think that's enough on a day. No workbooks required. Oh and my daughter has already spent an hour reading and half an hour writing and son has been constructing a Lego spaceship for the last half hour. Note to self: all these things count!

Yes, and it isn't just the question of whether it makes sense to them or whether it is boring, although those things do matter.

To me, in the context of autonomous education, it is also about ownership. Who has the right to try to control what the child is thinking and learning? By and large, the child is the best person to know what she needs to learn and how she should go about it. If the parent, who knows the child really well, feels that the child must learn something then fair enough: for my part, I've been quite pushy about forcing road safety information on my kids because we live on a main road by a corner shop where people execute all manner of dodgy manouevres on the pavement, sometimes at speed. But we are definitely not handing over that responsibility to the publisher of some workbook, who has never even met the child!! The workbook is her tool. She is not its tool.

I like what you say Saracen but the voice of my mother in law still pops up: aren't there experts who 'decide' what's useful for kids to learn and when it is appropriate? Etc. What you say is radical by comparison to the majority who sleepwalk into compulsory education (myself included until I had my John T Gatto epiphany). We just assume that experts with reams of research decide on curriculum but I don't think that's the case at all. Some would say how do kids know what they need to learn, after all they're kids. But I always relate back to my experiences of undisturbed birth where if left to it in an unstressful, appropriate environment, it all unfolds beautifully most of the time. I try to apply that to home ed too.

Sure there are. But who are they, and what's their agenda?

"If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement." - Ken Robinson, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" (Ted Talk)

Now, I can certainly relate to curriculum-makers who try to shape people in their own image. It's a temptation which I've had to fend off. What easier shortcut to self-satisfaction than to use any power you may wield to define your own specific achievements as the most desirable? So academics breed more academics.

The trouble is, not everyone wants to be an academic. (If we could persuade everyone that they would enjoy this career, and even if everyone had the right talents for it, who would build the houses and create the music?) The 97% of people who don't end up as university professors are ill-served by a system the aim of which is to produce professors.

Come to think of it, the professors often find their school education came up short also...

Oops, I mean that 99.975% of people aren't university professors.

Funny you should quote Ken Robinson, just been reading his book on finding your element this very morning. And I read aloud the part about Matt Groening to my daughter to illustrate how poorly school serves us finding our talents in so many cases. I love the story of Gillian Lynne too. I think I might put all the workbooks in the bin ...

If you are not sure what you are doing, have you thought about sending your DC back to school so they can learn while you work out what you want to do? Your youngest is a year behind his peers already. I would worry about him getting too much further behind.

I've been experimenting with a little structure too but for us it means structure is 'when' we learn - so we have certain sessions throughout the day dedicated to different things, but other than literacy and numeracy the 'what' we learn is basically led by them, and I don't really pay any attention to when they should be learning a particular topic.

Mmm, interesting fuzzpig. It sounds similar to the kind of structure I was experimenting with. When I was doing the literacy and numeracy it felt a bit sort of forced but maybe that was the workbook thing. It's an ongoing evolution.

Yes I agree, it's been quite challenging for me to learn to relax in that sense (I am very 'all or nothing')! I'm just trying to accept that we will gradually get there and that there's no harm in experimenting.

(FWIW though, I am very glad I did insist on reading daily - DS could barely read at all when he was at school but he's caught up very quickly and now actually likes it. I bribed him with Mario though

My children read extremely well when the subject matter interests them - I don't have a problem at all with reading books that are part of some USA screen-based franchise rather than the Oxford Reading Tree :)

Literacy time might mean a compulsory sit down with the Beano, yk?

Yep, reading is reading.

My DSD is severely dyslexic and at age 15 had literally never finished a book, despite trying really hard. Then she discovered Manga. And yet people were STILL telling her 'but they aren't proper books...'

Lol Omm. Is it just literary snobbishness that drives these opinions? Quality is quality whether it's a cartoon strip, novel or otherwise.

In fact it could be argued that you are exposed to a wider range of style if you follow your interests. You will read news stories, magazines, screens, articles, comics, fact books, how to manuals....