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Home ed

Find advice from other parents on our Homeschool forum. You may also find our round up of the best online learning resources useful.

Original poster

How many hours a day does your 8 year old spend doing foraml written work?___wifeswap__ch 4__now__

26 replies

RTKangaMummy · 22/04/2007 20:51

She only spends 1 hour a day but seems to be spending the rest of the day playing or mucking out the horses.

One of my Canadian friends have HE their children until they went to school around 12 years old.

OP posts:
Original poster
RTKangaMummy · 22/04/2007 20:51

It would help if I could type couldn't it?

OP posts:
Fillyjonk · 22/04/2007 20:52

RT you will have to explain this

is this on telly or is it YOUR kid?

Enid · 22/04/2007 20:53

I have a good friend with the most fantastic children

turns out she HE her (now) 12 year old son for 3 years

they only had to do 1.5 hours a day formal work

sounded brill (also he is the most clever, gorgeous fab little boy)

Enid · 22/04/2007 20:53

and has just passed common entrance so clearly 1.5 hours a day was enough (mind you you have to be pretty thick to fail it)

Original poster
RTKangaMummy · 22/04/2007 20:54

sorry it is on TV

very bad advert for HEing

OP posts:
bananabump · 22/04/2007 20:54

I'm watching wifeswap too. The little girl seems really bright! Lonely though, poor little sod.

The blonde tarty wife is a bit mental. Her cheese slid right off her cracker when the other hubby said he wasn't going out clubbing!

Fillyjonk · 22/04/2007 20:55

oh god, just what we need, here we go

why can't they just show a sodding normal HE'd family?

Original poster
RTKangaMummy · 22/04/2007 20:59

My friends in Canada I am sure did it for a morning

They got up early cos they have a farm so the dad goes to milk the cows and the boys started work

They had a room converted to a classroom

I was therefore surprized that this little girl did 2 pages of workbook a day

OP posts:
Julienoshoes · 22/04/2007 21:56

I didn't watch WifeSwap so can't comment on that.
We took our children out of school when the youngest was 8 yrs old.
We have never sat down and done any formal written work-we are totally autonomous in style and the children have learned what ever they have been interested in as formally or informally as they liked. They have learned maths by being interested in how much interest the bank would pay them, or how much paint they would need to redecorate their bedrooms, or how many slabs we would need to create a path in the garden covering a specific area. Maths in the real world, numbers that mean something.
All other subjects have been covered in this way too-by living life, watching interesting programmes, visiting places and talking to interesting people. Lots of one to one conversations about subjects that interest them. The love of learning has been much more important than anything else. We have had a fantastic social life along the way too and have learned a lot from the home education workshops and gatherings we have attended nationally and locally over the years.
The children have turned out to be confident, articulate, bright people.
The older two are now at college and doing impressively well academically and socially at A levels, according to their tutors.
The youngest will be stating an OU course this autumn.
And until they went to college we didn't have a work book or any sort of formal work in sight anywhere!

Runnerbean · 22/04/2007 22:58

I HE and my 7 yr old dd does about 6 hours 'formal' work a week, however we have covered most of KS2 in a year and some KS3 and loads more as well.
This doesn't include the educational visits the hours she spends reading and on educational websites and tv programmes.
There's also tennis, karate, dance, Brownies, gardening, playing in the park, painting, drawing...I could go on....

Education just isn't about sitting at a desk with a worksheet.
When people finally grasp this they might just understand HE!!

TheodoresMummy · 23/04/2007 09:36

Well said Runnerbean !! Should not just apply to HE tho IMO...

terramum · 23/04/2007 13:56

I be surprised if a school child did much more formal written work than that tbh. Theres only so much you can cram into the 6 hour day with assemblies, breaks, lining up & getting the whole class settled as well as doing all the other national curriculum subjects

frances5 · 23/04/2007 18:03

i work as an ICT technican at top primary school. Time is spent as follows

30 minutes a day taking the register. (ie. 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the after noon)

60 minutes for lunch
20 minutes for morning break
30 minutes for assembly

Every time they change actvity it take a good 5 to 10 minutes to settle. They spend time changing in and out of plimsols and shoes everytime they go outside.

I havent even included time wasted by badly behaved kids or time wasted by being given inappriopate work.

I missed the programme, which is a pity as it sounded really interesting.

Original poster
RTKangaMummy · 23/04/2007 18:15

REPEATED ON SUN iirc

OP posts:
Original poster
RTKangaMummy · 23/04/2007 18:15

or maybe sat

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frances5 · 01/05/2007 15:40

I seen the programme and it showed the the quality of home education depended at lot on the person giving it. The little girl did a range of educational activites and not just work sheets. I think the the week the little girl had with the other wife was an unsatisfactory education. However I expect that her mother gives a lot more than just one hour a day of worksheets.

I was not sure what to make of her mucking out horses. When does helping out with the horses becomes child labour. Was the child an unpaid stable hand?

Should home educated children be allowed to choose to go to school if they want to?

Saturn74 · 01/05/2007 15:46

I think the child should obviously have a say in what they want to do.
But with young children the final decision should rest with the parents.
In the follow-up programme, the HE parent commented that she had left more educational work for the other mother to do with her child, but it didn't get done.

Runnerbean · 01/05/2007 16:05

I didn't see this programme but I have been told by someone who knows the He family invovled that the HE child was told to take all the posters off her bedroom wall for 'legal reasons'.
........Then they made a big deal about the fact that there were no posters on her bedroom wall in the programme!

pesme · 01/05/2007 16:09

i only saw alittle of the 'aftermath' program adn was really saddened by the mothers reaction to the fact the child said being HE was sometimes boring. instead of taking it on board and maybe doing something the mother was just really spiteful.

Julienoshoes · 01/05/2007 18:12

Hi
The HE mother who appeared in this programme is on a HE support list that i am on.
Typically for channel 4 and Wife Swap this programme was edited to make home education appear to be a poor option-after all they want contreversial televison don't they.
From what the HE mother she has told us, has made it clear that much of the other social activities that this child does were edited out. And yes, they only showed the child doing short periods of formal worksheets each day, although much more was set by the HE mom than the other mom actually did.
Many home educators do less formal work than this (including my family) with very successful results-a sort of learning through life, with children choosing their own educational path and parents seeing themselves as facilitators of the childs education rather than as teachers.
It is astonishing how much you can cover on a one to one basis with very little or no formal work at all.
Our older two children have now chosen post 16 to return to FE college and have very successfully settled in academically and socially onto an A level course, with excellent results at AS level. Many home educators choose not even to bother with GCSEs going straight to A levels. Our youngest child will not even do A levels choosing instead to do OU courses to provide evidence of abilty to undertake a university education when she is ready-we know of other families who have done this.
There is a very good article written by an educational professor looking at formal and informal home education here;
www.infed.org/biblio/home-education.htm

frances5 said;
Should home educated children be allowed to choose to go to school if they want to?

Do people ever ask if school educated pupils should be allowed to be home educated if they want to?

juuule · 01/05/2007 18:20

Frances5 - "Should home educated children be allowed to choose to go to school if they want to?".
Should school-educated children be allowed to choose home-ed if they want to?

Pesme - How many school children are taken seriously if they complain that school is boring?

All children should have their feelings and wishes taken into account but it is up to the parents to make the final decision about what is in the best interests of younger children.

frances5 · 01/05/2007 22:57

"All children should have their feelings and wishes taken into account but it is up to the parents to make the final decision about what is in the best interests of younger children. "

There are plenty of governant agencies that regularly overrule the decisions of parents or children.

No child has 100% choice about where they go to school. For example if both parents have to work then home ed is not an option. Nor is it an option for poor families to choose private education or send a child to an over subscribed school a long way away.

The girl in wife swap was nine years old. She is not a young child. She is intelligent and has direct experience of home ed and being at school. I thought that both daughters in the wife swap showed more maturity than the either set of parents.

I couldnt help wondering if her parents were choosing to home educate to meet their own needs rather than that of the child.

chipmonkey · 02/05/2007 00:11

Don't know anything about HE but would take any CH4 "documentary" with a pinch of salt.

Runnerbean · 02/05/2007 15:14

Why oh why oh why does HE put some people on the defensive!!!!?????

chipmonkey · 02/05/2007 16:52

Runnerbean, it's a bit like a bf/ff thing really, I'd say!