Home Ed for kindergarten stage then school?

[LostInMoab]

I’m wondering if anyone has followed this route and how it worked out. My DD is in her second year of primary school and is doing brilliantly and loves it. I would like DS (currently 4 years old) to have the same experience but I don’t feel that he will be ready next year for formal schooling (we are in Scotland so age 5 start) and that, if we send him too soon, there might be a lasting negative impact.
He can stay at his nursery until he is 7 (they follow a Scandi influenced kindergarten model) so we could do that, and I would have to get him academically school ready on his days off. But I’d love to hear if others have done this or similar and how it worked out socially, academically, etc.

We started with the idea when my eldest was approaching school age that we'd home educate until age 7. That was a long time ago. My youngest is 15 and never been to school. We loved it and kept going.

We were planning on doing exactly this but she liked preschool (which we only did a couple of days a week with no intention of school) so much we thought we would "try" reception with a low bar for homeschooling- but she loved it and has thrived at school! I was in with some homeschooling groups etc and all. We then planned to homeschool for a "year out" in Year 6.

However if yours will be in nursery til 7 that's not homeschooling is it? More choosing an alternative school until 7? Like some do Steiner Kinder?

I imagine you would be absolutely fine joining school at 7. The main thing you'd need to cover if nursery didn't would be reading.

Thanks for the input both. Yes you’re right that he would still be in nursery so it’s not exactly home schooling, however the nursery is only open 3 days a week and he wouldn’t cover anything academic there (it’s a forest nursery and the model is purely outdoor free play, so he learns a lot of great practical things but all the literacy and numeracy would very much have to be done on his days off at home) so I suppose it’s a bit of a mish mash.

Like itsstillgood, we were going to home ed until 7, but it went so well that there never did seem a good reason to send the kids to school, so there is that danger

My eldest did eventually try school for one term at nine, having never had any formal lessons at home - she'd learned everything through following her interests. To my surprise, she wasn't particularly behind in any area except writing speed. With practice she made rapid progress with that within a few months.

I was sure the lack of formal maths would show. Her times tables were patchy and she hadn't taken up my suggestion of brushing up on them before starting school. But she reported that few of her classmates had completely mastered their times tables either. However, there was a key difference between her and them. She thought the reason she wasn't yet proficient at multiplication was because she hadn't got round to it, and she was confident she'd be able to do it whenever she did bother. But her classmates had years of experience already of being tested on multiplication, and had decided they were failures. They said they "couldn't do maths" and that it was "too hard". So I agree with you that early experiences of failure at school can do long-term damage. My kid finally got around to learning the multiplication tables when preparing for maths GCSE. She did the whole maths curriculum in one year without difficulty, having done no previous formal work. Readiness and motivation are everything.

If you're planning to use school later on, you may want to push reading and writing more than you otherwise would. Home educated kids who can learn to read when they're ready and interested tend to choose to do it rather later than the age at which school expects it. This isn't a problem if they're going to remain HE, but I wouldn't want to send a nonreading child to school at seven. For one thing, schools value reading and writing highly and it would be made clear to the child that he's considered "behind", which could be hard on him. For another, as kids get older, schools deliver education in all subjects increasingly through reading and assess it through writing, so inability to read and write can affect all the other subjects too. This was one reason I discouraged my child from trying school early on; reading didn't click for her until she was nine and I expected that going to school before then would be a bad experience.

Thank you so much for your post Saracen. Everything you’ve said makes so much sense to me - especially kids learning things very easily when they are ready to do so, and the British school system being set up to push a lot of children into things for which they are simply not ready. It was easy to send DD to school because she was already reading and writing, that’s just who she is. DS is completely different. And my heart has really been broken my seeing some of DD’s peers already feeling like they’re no good at certain subjects - despite being young enough that, in most of the world, they wouldn’t have even started school yet. Anyway - I digress!

I think what I’m really taking from your post is that we should by all means give this a try, but that if DS is still not particularly interested in reading/writing by age 7, we need to be prepared to commit for the long term. And indeed that we may well want to commit for the long term - which has all sorts of career implications for me, so something that I need to think carefully about.

You're welcome!

Well, I was implying that some kids aren't ready for school even at seven, but I hope I didn't give the impression that this means you HAVE to be prepared to continue home ed indefinitely once you've started. For example, if your son still doesn't want to read and write when he's coming up to seven (the age when you'd intended to send him to school), you could work hard on those subjects at home during the previous 6/12 months and then send him to school at seven anyway.

That might not be ideal, but he'd be at least as academically prepared for school by the age of seven as he would have been if you'd sent him to school at five. He'd have had the benefit of a year at home with no pressure to read whatsoever, followed by more effective reading instruction at home than he would have had at school. (More effective because of being one-to-one and tailored to his individual needs, so for example if he's always ratty in the morning you can teach him in the afternoon, if he hates fiction you can teach him through nonfiction, if he likes lots of repetition you can let him read the same few books over and over rather then pushing him on to the next one, etc.) And because he'd have had that extra year as a 5yo with no reading pushed on him, he'd be more ready - or less unready - to start working on it at six.

What's more, during his two years at home he will have accumulated many experiences of success in all of the other things he's been doing instead of school: climbing trees or learning to ride a bike or producing an amazing Lego creation. So he will know he is a clever and competent person. He won't have been spending many hours a day in an environment where his worth is measured largely by his reading ability. So when he does go to school at seven, he will be more likely to believe in himself and will get off to a better start.

In this scenario the ideal solution for him might be continued home education beyond seven. But the next best solution would be home ed until seven and then school.

Yes you can follow your plan and start at 7, but you may find it hard to get the place in the school you want. You may find that you can send child to kindergarten and then do some more formal lerning when he is out. (unless you don,t want to home school but unschool which is a different approach.) Most forest schools still teach the three R,s but they do it in a different way.

BTW an alternative to changing your career plans could be to find some form of childcare other than state school. For example, your son could go to a childminder during the day while you work. It isn't cheap, but it's an option.

The education side of things is less time-consuming than most people think. The CM would undoubtedly be talking to him, reading with him, and taking him places and he would learn through all that. You could then provide any additional formal education you wanted him to have during the hours when you aren't working. With one-to-one attention this is very efficient. In fact, when a child is off school with a long-term illness and the Local Authority has the job of educating them, the LA usually provides only 5-10 hours of tutoring per week.

So it's all about childcare, really - coming up with an arrangement where he will be safe and happy. For several years I used a CM for my eldest, though I only worked part-time. It worked brilliantly for us. She got to play with the other kids and have some variety, find out how other families do things, and interact with another adult with different knowledge and style from mine. They went on a lot of outings. Meanwhile I had a good time working and had a break from my relentlessly sociable child!

Aren't Scottish children pretty much guaranteed a place at their catchment school regardless when they join?

Do many children stay at the nursery past 5? That would be my only reservation with your plan- My DD is 7, lives all the outdoor forest school learning style stuff, but with children of a similar age, not preschool aged children. She gets her outdoor education through Beavers, so 6-8 year olds.

That’s a very interesting thought about a CM Saracen, and home school not necessarily meaning not working. I’ll be part time for quite a while in any case as I also have a 1 year old.

Yes, Scottish children are guaranteed a place at their catchment school, and we also live in a county with lots of massively undersubscribed, small country schools, which might suit him better anyway.

Most of the children at the nursery are 3 or 4 but every year there are a couple of 5 and 6 year olds. Possibly he would stay for the year when he was 5 turning 6 but not the following one - I agree that it wouldn’t be much fun being the only 6/7 year old in a group of 3/4 year olds. That said when my 6 year old daughter went back for a few days in the summer (nursery had started; school had not yet) she was in heaven and the staff gave her a lot of extra jobs and responsibilities to ensure that she felt valued as the oldest member of the group. Of course, that’s just a few days, and quite different to an entire academic year!

I think it might be hard for a kid to socialize later at school with another level of education, but you can manage to teach him well by yourself.

Socializing is the main thing children learn in kindergartens, so you shouldn't take it away from your child. In general, going to kindergarten is beneficial for a kid, and forest one is especially. As for me, I take my DD to the little scholars daycare because it's the best Brooklyn Child Care, according to my friends. I trusted them because their son goes there, and they told me that their son loves this place, which is quite unusual.