how did you 'discover' HE?

[ilove8pm]

Hi. I am still quite new to MN and thoroughly enjoy reading the HE threads. I have a ds age 5 and dd aged 3. I knew very very little about HE apart from a brief exploration of alternatives to school as a teenager. (I attended school, never tried any alternatives, just little research into them). My ds attended a local nursery and enjoyed the most wonderful year there. The group was small, and he thrived. I naively (SP) assumed school would be a similarly positive experience for him, but he has had a very unhappy year there. This was the trigger for me finding MN and your threads! I have recently posted on the SEN threads, as I now believe my ds may have Aspergers, but its undiagnosed. (thanks for bearing with me on this long thread!!) anyway, he is happier this year, having a wonderful, enthusiastic and positive teacher is a big part of that, but I think longer term we may still HE. I really wondered how you discovered HE? Was it a gradual process or was it through your own childhood HE experiences? Or another way? What books would you recommend for people who are interested in HE? I dont know anyone in RL who HE's, and I would love to meet people who do. I have visited the education otherwise site but am hungry for more information! thanks for reading this.

I was HE'd until I was 10. Did the last year of Primary school as my parents thought I should go to Secondary and it would break me in.

I am not sure what will happen with my DS (4.2). We have applied for a school place because my DH wants him to go to school, but I am not at all sure about it. Would ideally like to send him to an 'alternative school' part-time, but nothing local and DH not convinced enough to move.

Am about to read John Holt's books, 'How children learn' and 'How children fail'. They are highly recommended by many people on MN.

I had three dyslexic unhappy children.
Our home life was awful, as all three struggled and were made to feel stupid in school.
Then one New Year's eve as the champagne corks popped my lovely then 13 year old boy burst into tears and told us he didn't want his life anymore
"I just don't know what to do to make them like me!
My heart broke and i started to search desperately for alternatives.
No school locally was any better than the one he was in and our youngest child's dyslexia was so severe that we had already decided that she couldn't go to the same schools as her older but more mildly dyslexic siblings.
We looked at Steiner education and I started searching for full time jobs and remortgaging to pay for it for the three of them.
I knew nothing about home education but somewhere somehow had heard the words Education Otherwise and put that in the search engine.
BINGO! I knew instantly that I had found the answer!
I didn't know what or we would do it but anything was better than where he was at school at that point.
Dh discussed it through that Friday night and discussed it with the children on the Sunday-the deregistration letter went in on the Monday morning.

We have never looked back with regret. Not once.
15th January is the 7th anniversary of the day they left school for good.

It is the single best thing I could have ever have done for my children, without a doubt.
We have learnt what we needed to along the way-things were too desperate for us, to wait to read up and ponder about it.

Just recently our son now aged 20 got rather drunk and a whole pile more stuff came out about what happened to him in school-and so much has come out from the three of them over the years.
I will never forgive what they did to my children.

My son and my youngest daughter have both independently said they are sure they would not still be alive if I had left them there.

My elder daughter was headed for trouble mixing with the wrong crowd.

Instead of that happy people live in our house!

We went out and met the local home ed crowd and then the national one and the rest is history.

The home education community caught my family when we were falling I can never repay it.

That is why I am passionate about telling people that home education is a legal viable option. Give parents the correct information and allow them to make an informed decision about what is best for their family.

To start with I would suggest you look at the other main home ed site, besides the EO one
home-education.org.uk/

www.homeed.cjb.net/ is another independent website also owned by another HE parent-full of resources for UK home educators.

www.he-special.org.uk Resources and information for families with children who have special educational needs. This is THE place to go for advice on home edding a special needs child.
There is a email support list link there and real experts in this subject hang out there-I can't recommend it highly enough.
Some of us have also blogged a month in our lives too that page too.

www.muddlepuddle.co.uk is a webpage especially for HE families with children under 8 years old. Home also to the Early Years support list
groups.yahoo.com/group/EarlyYearsHE/

As for books there are several but two books written by several home educating families are;
Free Range Education: How Home Education Works edited by Terri Dowty

and even more appropriately perhaps;
Home Educating Our Autistic Spectrum Children: Paths are made by walking
also edited by Terri Dowty
synopsis;
Mainstream educational provision for children on the autistic spectrum can be inadequate or inappropriate. An increasing number of parents dissatisfied with the education system are looking elsewhere for an approach that will suit their children's needs. In "Home Educating Our Autistic Spectrum Children", parents who have chosen to home educate their children with autism or Asperger's syndrome candidly relate their experiences: how they reached the decision to educate at home, how they set about the task, and how it has affected their lives. Following these personal accounts, the final chapters offer practical advice on getting started with home education, legal advice from an expert in education law, and contact details of support organisations

details of other books can be found on the UK HE website and on the HE Special Needs page too

Why not find a local group and see if you can go along and meet with them?
we have new families coming along to our meetings all of the time-sometimes when they are just in the process of thinking things through.

hth
regards
julie

Home Educating in Worcestershire
www.worcestershire-home-educators.co.uk/

thank you for your replies. I really appreciate you taking the time to pass on that info and tell me more about the reasons for your decision to HE. Julienoshoes thank you for the websites and the info and for being so honest about your own experiences as a family. Since finding the HE threads on MN I have felt so much more empowered as a parent. ITs been a real eye opener to discover there are other possible choices for us.
Our lovely ds has been miserable at school since the first day we took him, and I am so sad that he endured a year of feeling like that. Things have improved massively since sept, when he had a new teacher who seems very caring and gentle. but underneath it all I have a feeling he would still really like to be at home. We are thinking of giving him this year at school, and possibly taking him our ready for next year. he attends a c of e school which received fantastic results academically, and is always high in league tables etc etc etc. And I do believe there are good things about it. But whether it is just that school in general doesnt suit my son, or whether it is that we dont seem to 'fit' in that school, I dont know. Or maybe it is because he poss has Aspergers and therefore socialising in large groups is hard for him, but anyway, school has taken the twinkle out of him. I think I will search out local HE groups and go along and be brave!! Also I will look up those other websites tonight, thank you! And thank you for your supportive advice.

Theodoresmummy, I plan to read John Holt too, so I will come back on here soon and if its ok would love to share my views with you? based on your own experiences would you plan to do as your parents did and send your dc to secondary school?

ilove8pm - I hated going to secondary school, but by that age it would very much depend on DS's preferences.

I didn't mind the year at primary so much. It was a small village school (60 pupils) so was not too intimidating (I was shy) and very friendly. But to be honest I was very bored. Not so much with what they taught, but with the way it was taught. Too much sitting down, going over things that you grasped weeks before, writing everything down instead of just learning stuff.

Also the peer pressure at secondary stopped me from enjoying things I was interested in. You had to be into the cool things or you were teased (was not a terrible school either. it is the comp in a very nice town.)

As i have said before, I would ideally like DS to go part-time to one of the 'alternative' schools that I have found, but....we will see.

I am reading John Holt just now. Would love to chat about it all.

Excellent. I expect you will finish reading way ahead of me but I will let you know what I think and we can chat. . Are there particular schools you are exploring? what are their strong points? I really worry about the pressure on young people to fit in. In fact I think it is already starting with my dcs age 5 and 3! I noticed my ds often mentionning little things now, you know, about labels on football shirts, disney holidays etc. we are a very non labelly house!! its just not our thing. so maybe already my ds is noticing ways in which we are different. I just want to find ways to give them confidence to be happy about being different.

The trigger to home ed, was Mumsnet. We had for years wished there was a way to get DS2 out of school, but didn't know how. We had lightly researched home educating but didn't believe we could 'do' the work needed, as in 6 hours of school work a day etc. (another BIG myth). But I stumbled on the Home Ed forum on January 4th (I think) and read a few topics and turned around to DH and said can we Home Educate DS2 and he said 'why' so I told him to read. We de-registered DS 2 at the start of this term.
We still haven't sorted out any method but we expect that to take a couple of months, ATM we are concentrating on bringing his reading and maths up to par, and just enjoying time with him. BTW he is already starting to signs of boredom with his computer games, to such an extent that he came out into the garden today to ask me what I was doing. So I ended up having to explain how a compost heap works, whilst stood covered in it but isn't that better than doing it in a sterile classroom environment?

I think that should be the only place anyone ever explains a compost heap

I always vaguely knew that HE was possible, and knew a chap at university who had been HEd (though he was a very bad advert for it, as his parents had managed to raise a little prince who believed that anyone who thought differently from him was both wrong and stupid - the fault of the parenting overall rather than the HE, I realise!)

But I only started to look into it seriously about a year ago, when looking into school options and failing to find what I wanted. I went fairly quickly from "at this rate I'll have to home educate him, I'd better read up on it!" to finding an option which works very well for us.

We're unusual for HE in that DS is studying with an internet school and working towards GCSEs, which puts us right at the very formal "school at home" edge of HE, far from the autonomous education which most people think of, but it's still HE... which shows just how broad HE is, I guess...

AMuminScotland do you have a link to your internet school please? I have a couple of friends who may be interested in something structured like that. Is it expensive, and do you think it's value for money?

The one I have experience of is Interhigh - the fees are £2100 for the year. After only a term it's maybe a bit early to say if it's value for money, but we've certainly been happy with it so far. I guess "expensive" depends what you're comparing with - it's certainly a lot less than a bricks&mortar independent school, which we were also considering.

I'm also aware of a couple of others - BritESchool which also has some primary classes and First college which seems less mainstream - but I've no personal experience of them.

thanks for those links - I'll pass them on.