What 'subjects' have your home ed DC's done today?

[discoverlife]

I thought this would help those thinking of Home Educating their children to show the spread and depth of subjects that can and are covered by their DC's.

Each childs needs are different so what is commonplace or regular for one will be totally different for another.

So today I did with DS 10yo with SEN.

20 minutes on the trampoline and playing catch to get his neurons warmed up for mental activities.

20 minutes on his gardening project where we have sunflowers seedlings, analysing why one set have not sprouted yet (probable answer 'not warm enough') writing down in his book a few sentances about todays readings eg. height of seedlings.

30 minutes Oragami, (maths) angles etc.

Then as long as he likes on an online game called 'Eve' where to get on you have to mine asteroids and sell the metals then buy new equipment or training etc. (economics and socialising in one).

discoverlife what an interesting thread.

Your days sound really very stimulating but you have to admit, some others sound rather ..empty in comparison! There must be quite a range in the amount of work home ed kids do, depending on the parent.It must be very easy to let a whole day go and not actually teach them anything real. Are you quite disciplined with yourself?

Hi There.Just a quick pot as sort of tidying.People home ed for all sorts of reasons and there are lots of different approaches.Some people are led by their children and do not impose anything formal upon them ie the 3 R's and then there are people who have a very rigid approach and of course lots of styles in between!
personally we want our son to be responsible for himself,to question,challenge etc and to think outside the box.Also to be able to do things at his own pace.And,not meaning to be sensationalist [honst]the schools where we live seem to be churning out cannon fodder.

So what about GCSEs/A-levels etc etc. Where do they fit into the HE plan?

Children can take them if they want to!
There is a college near me that teaches children who want to have formal qualifications or need them because they want to go on to do something that requires them.It's just a process to get to where you want to be really.
Now I must continue the tidying.

DANCES.

I've just written a huge post and deleted it because I've realised that everything I'm trying to say is written in a much clearer way on the 'Education Otherwise' website. Have a look. It addresses all of the questions you've raised in the form of FAQ and journal writings of HE families.

We need Julienoshoes here! She's my HE guru.

DANCES. Have a look at the 'GCSEs' section on the EO site.

Two families I know locally have children who have skipped GCSEs and gone straight to A levels. Some HE children don't do any formal examinations.

Actually, you don't teach a child who is being Home Educated autonomously. (there are as many different ways of home educating are there are people doing it). You end up being the 'facilitator'. You help the child find out what he/she wants to know, and there is the kicker. The child WANTS to know about whatever its interested in, the child will therefore remember what it has learnt.
There are no set limits with home educating either, every subject can and frequently does flow into another. For example you asked about fractions, well how about music & fractions? A quaver is a quarter of a note.
A child does not need to learn Algebra, can YOU remember ANY algebra (please don't be an engineer) so unless the child wants to go into that type of learning or trade why bother. When a child decides to go for GCSE's they generally sit down with their parents and figure out which ones to study, they then do 3 or 4 a year starting at 13 or 14, so much less pressure, and they can learn so much more in a 1 to 1 situation for a few hours per week than in school. Think how many hours a week you spent doing english literature, it was probably no more that 5.
A lot of Home Educated children quite often miss GCSE's and 'A' Levels altogether and go straight to Open University and do well their because they already are self motivated learners.

As to letting the whole day slide, once you are in a Home Edding frame work, its amazing how much you find to talk about. And yes there are days when PJ's are obligatory and slumping in front of the box (National Geographic is a favourite channell ATM) but that is what weekends and holidays are for surely. Don't forget my DS wont be getting a 6 week summer holiday, he will still be learning. Even on our actual holiday to Portugal we will have learnt a bit of the language, something about the geograpy, and about the religeous festival we will be there for.
As for me being disiplined, I think of myself as being one of the lax ones. I don't want to put DS under any kind of pressure, as I want him to regain his love of learning, humans are built to learn, and I am of the belief that school knocks this desire out of kids. I never wanted to see the inside of a school for 14 years after I left, and that was when I went to college.

I see what you are saying, but then you could argue that our children don't just stop learning in the holidays either. DS will learn about whatever country I manage to book a holiday to, hopefully something of the language and culture and history.

Also I would be worried (in fact I am despite his hours of schooling) about DS being a bit one track and football obsessed. While we can learn quite a bit from football - there is the physical aspect, DS has a fantasy football team which involves lots of maths re the points, cost of players, etc and also logic/problem solving, geography with the location of players/teams etc, English and other languages with reading football books etc - I feel that DS, if given total free reign, would be focused too narrowly.

I love reading these HE threads, it sounds fantastic! . I would like to do it and if we do not win our appeal for a school place we might have no choice. The only thing that concerns me is the social side, ds is very sociable and even gets upset if he doesn't stay for lunch club because he worries that he is missing out . If we were to go down the HE route I would want to meet up with a HE group at least twice a week, where can I find out if there is a group in my area?

Sorry for thread hijack!

"A child does not need to learn Algebra, can YOU remember ANY algebra (please don't be an engineer) so unless the child wants to go into that type of learning or trade why bother. "

Hmm actually I am an engineer honest, and if I was never exposed to algebra and logarithms etc then I would never have known how much I like the challenge of them. But if as a mum you never got it yourself(understandable) how does your child get that opportunity to find out how truly yummy it all is???

If you join Education Otherwise, £28 per year, you will be given a contact book, listing all the people registerd with them who don't mind being contacted for socialising. There are also Yahoo groups of home Edders just do a search on Yahoo for one that is close to you.
I and many other Home Educators find that there isn't enough time in the week to include all the sociallising that is on offer once you get going. We also find that the socialling in school is very artificial. Where else would you be locked up with 30 other people of the same age for 6 hours a day with only one other social contact of a different age (teacher). The sociallising aspect is one that does not worry you at all after the first few months. But it always the great big bogey man that is brought up as a reason why not to HE, by the ignorant.

Now part of me just wants to parp this because of the word 'facilitator' but I shall restrain myself
I just feel that you can do the things that people have described on this thread (that they do with their children) can be done in day to day life, at weekends, on holidays but by sending your children to school also equip them with the 'formal' tools that mean that when they get to a point in their life when they decide what they want to do they are not hampered by a lack of recognised qualifications.
If I'm honest the thing that gets my goat about alot of the HE threads is the inherent smugness about it being so much BETTER in every way to school.

Like the use of the phrase 'locked up with 30 other people'...it doesn't at all make you sound crazy or massively biased

bozza. The whole thing with HE is that, as a parent, you need to lose the 'school' mindset. This is very difficult to do as most of us went through the formal classroom experience ouselves.

I've just finished reading a fantastic book written by an ex secondary school maths teacher who is now HE his three children.

He believes that children in the UK are taught to read and write before they are ready/physically able (something that the rest of Europe seems to agree with.)In his view, four and five year olds are often labelled as dyslexic when they are, in fact, displaying signs of having been taught to read at too young an age. And once this 'damage' is done it carries on and blocks the ability of a child to read.

Equally, with writing - cursive script is difficult for little hands to master but is taught in the UK as the first stage of learning joined-up writing. He encouraged his children to draw with easily handled-crayons and to then progress to paints etc. Once his children were happy and confident with these mediums he then went on to writing in capital letters (easier to write) before his children naturally wanted to learn to write with curly cursive letters.

So he encouraged confidence in holding crayons, pencils etc before teaching the letters. His children didn't learn to write until they were eight but, as they viewed writing as just another form of drawing- the
whole process was painless.

Wish I'd known about him when 6 year old DS2 was holding his pencil like a rattle and soldiering through pages of writing practice.

The above is just an example of how 'child-led with adult putting knowledge (ie. the letter shapes) in the way' works.

I'm not anti school. I am anti the NC and the govts target fixation.

I'm a school parent gov and I know that the teachers are fed-up with the amount of time they have to spend ticking boxes and filing pupils' work as 'evidence' of learning.

I don't think home edders are at all smug.Quite the opposite.Ido ind that people who don't hoe ed can be over sensitive and think you are undermining their decision to send their children to school.Each to their own.

Apologies for missing letters and dreadful spelling.Totally knackered..we all recovering from virus[that's my excuse]

And that if they're teaching a class and the children are enthralled, they can't stay on that subject and 'work where the light is' - as they have to move on to the next time-tabled lesson.

I sort of see what you are saying bubble, although in DS's case it is more that he holds his fork like a dagger than his pencil like a rattle. But I still think that DS (who is obsessive by personality) would just be channeling his football obsession if he was given the opportunity. And although I have listed the various educational aspects that can be applied to it (also art, he draws football pitches, and literacy, he writes commentaries) I think it is a bit restrictive.

Also bubble I thought you worked (owned/cooked in nursery) so how are you reconciling that with home ed? That is not criticism, just pure nosiness. Also you mention your DS2. Is DS1 staying in school?

Bubble - you are a wise lady, if I thought all HEducators were as level headed as you I would certainly be more confident with the idea.

Oh and I agree 4 yrs old is FAR TOO YOUNG to be at school.

Bozza. We're now (hooray!) at the point where Mr Bubble and I can both work part time so one of us can be at home during the day. DS1 is staying at school for the time being as he is happy and self-motivated (natural nerd )

Also he is in a very small class (18) so there is a lot more one-to-one teaching and extension work.

I reckon the difficulty in talking about the merits of HE and schools is that both sets of parents (with a small number of exceptions) have made the decision that they feel is the best for their specific children in their specific circumstances, but the discussion tends to be "this is better because..." instead of "this suits my child better because..." and so both sides tend to dig in to their relative poitions...

I've been on both sides of the fence, and think both choices were the right ones for my DS at the time...

Agree AMUM. At the moment home ed is right for us and DS.He may decide he wants to go to secondary school so we will look around for schools for him.Ds2 is 10 months so at the moment we don't know which way he will go

Microwaveonly you will have to wait till Julienoshoes joins in she has HE'd her kids to Uni level and in quite a technical subject.

As for being biased, looking back my DS1 would have done better being HR'd, as he was totally bored for the last 3 years of school life, only maths was taught at a level that kept his interest, and even then he only got an AS grade 2/B at age 16 because he lost interest again. DD loved and thrived at school, I would no more have taken her out than kept my DS2 in.
HEing is a choice, one that most people DO NOT KNOW ABOUT, a lot of HE parents preach about it so that the choice is made obvious to the general masses. Most people won't or can't HE their kids, a small percentage would like to for various reasons but don't know that they can.
As for being smug, we have tried it and found that it works for us. Lots of other parents are smug about how well Jonney is doing in school, but thats allowed and accepted, so why can't we be smug about our kids and their abilities?

You will actually find most HE parents are less biased in their views about HE suitability than the rabid 'schoolers' we sometimes get confronted with on here and in RL. As a lot of them have Schooled and HE'd kids and are open to the idea of their children going back to school if they want. But have any of you been approached in the street and argued with because you chose to school your child? or had people say they are going to report you to the police or SS, or that you are a 'hippy freak' because your kids don't go to school? We can be and are defensive because we have to be.

But anyway could we please not turn this thread into another school versus HE thread as so many other threads have been.