Be honest, I want everyone's views......what do you think of home ed???

[3Ddonut]

I suspect this may get nasty, but please try to keep it nice ladies (and gents) I really like the idea of home ed, I would dearly love to home ed my dc but there are some problems, firstly I work 3 nights a week and my dh works 2 full days,my eldest dd is 5 and she really loves school, but some of things that she says about school unsettle me, I always said that it is their choice if they want to go to school or not, which is why she is there and my ds is in nursery but I wish she'd want to stay home and the longer that she's there, the more I feel that we're wasting time...

I've read a lot of the other threads and see that you can do some home-ed stuff alongside school but I don't think that it's enough for me, I want them to remain interested and not be moved on from one thing too quickly or forced to spend time on things they dislike.

We're already a close family because of mine and dh's shifts there is nearly always someone in the house and we get to spend a lot of time with the kids. I suppose I'd just like it to be more of the same.

My main concerns are that the dc would resent us for it in the future (although I would not take a happy child out of school) I also worry about the effect of home ed-ing the children would have on future employers and university places, I do worry about the socialisation aspect although the kids are in a few groups and are very social, they interact well with adults as well as other children, I'm concerned about how much time I'd have to work with them with working full time myself (no opportunity to cut hours)

I'm going round in circles at the min, I think my ds would be more open to the idea and I'm considering not sending dd2 to nursery at all.

The other biggie is that the school they attend is out of area and it's a really good one, they wouldn't get back in there if we deregistered, I've considered flexi-schooling but I feel that would bring more problems than solutions....

OK, Open fire!!!

3Ddonut....My view of home ed?

I couldn't do it because, quite frankly, I am not up to the job.

I don't give a flying feck what other people do as long as it doesn't damage me in any way. And since I can't think of any way that someone teaching their child 'the 3 Rs' at home could hurt me, I couldn't care less.

I guess from the number of posts that there's been a row about it all, but I don't care enough to wade through it.

I suppse my point is that we are all far closer together than we tend to think.

We all encourage and guide. To a degree this will limit total, 100% , freedom of choice, because chosing one thing may preculde a secod option, at least for a while.

Total autonomy would be, I would imagine, very , very rare. Since parents will have their child's best interests at heart, and will know, as adults that children need basic skills for later life. So if a child doesn't want to learn to read, the parent would guide and encourage.....a wise option, but that is limiting the child's choice.

Formal education is further down the contiunum, for sure, but we all do similar things, I think. I'm not having this discussion to be divisive, but to highlight the similariries in educational choices.

I think that might be a difference if I understand correctly.
MB you say
"So if a child doesn't want to learn to read, the parent would guide and encourage.....a wise option, but that is limiting the child's choice."

Autonomous educators would give the opportunities for a child to read but if they didn't want to they wouldn't push it. They would trust that their child would realise at some point that it needed to read and at that point would provide whatever the child needed to learn to read if it hadn't already learned to read itself.
The child wouldn't be limited because in the intervening time it would have been busy learning other things that interested it.

I think that's how it works and I wish that I had that trust for my children but I find deschooling myself the most difficult thing of all.
If I'm wrong on this I hope someone (Julienoshoes) will come along and set me straight.

The thing is though, some children wouldn't want to learn to read. My son is one of them. He can read, and is now starting to understand the benefots, because he can read. Before this point he would simply refuse to do anything volentarily that involved reading.

Thanks to the school encouraging him (as I would have done at home) he can read and now sees the befeit. I don't think he would have seen the befefit under his own steam (as it were)

But many of the HE posters on this thread say they do guide.

And many HE posters will guide. There is no one way of HE-ing.
MB your son is 7y, how do you know that he wouldn't want to read when he was 8 or 9? Just because he doesn't now doesn't mean he never will.

Because he is dyspraxic and finds it very hard. because of his personaily, and mild lack of confidence, he will avoid anything that he feels he will 'fail' at.

thanks to his school, and his fantastic SENCO and LSW, his confidence is growing, and he is now choosing to read. But that confidence has grown out of his sucessful reading. And without the sucess and confidence he would have avoided the issue at all costs!

We have (obviously) similar issues on writing. He's not doing so well with that yet, but things are improving.

Now obviously I could 100% guarentee that he wouldn't change....a bolt from the blue, and all that

But I#d bet the house on it that he wouldn't

I'ce been thinking. I'm pretty autonomous outside school- this is partly borne out of necessity - ds1 requires a very high level of supervision (in the last 2 days for example he has fallen one storey off the bannisters, turned on a heater and left it lying on a rug and put pieces of toast on a hot light - this was with a high level of supervision and all day yesterday in school ) so ds2 and ds3 are left to get on with what they want. DS2 wants to play on his DS so he does. Originally my view was that he would play it so uch that he would get bored and get it out of his system. This is different to most of my friends who set time limits etc. Anyway he got the DS for Xmas and shows no sign of getting bored of it. So I'm wondering whether I should rethink. If we were home edding autonomously I'm not sure he would do anything else. Now of course it's helped his reading and reflexes but in that same time at school he discovered a new hobby (bird watching!) - which he loves and wouldn't have found without someone deciding he needed to know about birds iyswim.

I worry that autonomous decreases exposure to things you might never think you could like but actually you end up loving. (This happened to me on the 'pointless course' that I had to do in order to research autism- I found my methodology- I wouldn't have found it alone as I didn't know it existed- and I love it!)

Yes MB that's the sort of thing we had at a more extreme level with DS1. He didn't learn from his environment. So we had to force him to learn to imitate for example and now a whole new world os open to him.

If DS wasn't keen to read I would encourage (subtley ), but no I would not insist. One way would be to leave books/magazines/(whatever) around that I thought would be of interest to him and might make him see that reading is a skill worth aquiring.

Reading schemes drive me mad.

No choice, just going through the motions, ticking boxes.

Teachers must get so bloody fed up of hearing the same books over and over year in year out.

Less opportunity to get to know what kind of thing fires each child's imagination too.

TM, reading schemes drive me bonkers too!

Biff, chip and farking kipper!

Oh, we've moved on from reading.

Must post quicker.

What does autonomous learning mean? Following their interests. So if a child is interested in birds, you buy relevant books and binoculars.

Reading schemes don't last long though and serve a specific purpose. DS2 is in year 1 and hasn't had a reading scheme book since about November so in total he had about a year of them. He now reads chapter books (which are a lot more interesting- but they're also a lot harder and most children need to get there in stages).

We're now trying to force ds1 to read - which is interesting as he can't talk. If he learned to read though and more specifically if he learns to type then he won't be at the mercy of social worker's idiot decisions as an adult so I think its worth trying to force him. (Although our chances of success are I estimate about 10%)

Yep exactly NKF. but my point is that ds2 had no idea he might be interested in birds. I had no idea he might be interested in birds. He 'did' birds at school (so decision made by the teacher) and it grew from there. Now he can autonomously educate himself about birds (he'll have to I know bugger all - he's already teaching me stuff) but I don't think it's something he would have stumbled on.

My experience with my dd is that she wasn't reading at all when I took her out of school at the end of reception. She refused to even pick up a book because 'she couldn't do it'. Attempts to look at keywords were met with her throwing herself all over the place and generally refusing to look at the words. We took her out of school(not for this reason) and although we read to her (which she enjoyed) she still refused to have anything to do with reading herself. We haven't forced anything, we've let her do as much or as little as she wants, when she wants. In recent months, at almost 8yo, she has become increasingly interested in what words are, what books say, what the story is, is asking questions and is now reading. Still below her reading age but with seemingly very little input is reading simple stories to her younger sister and is improving all the time.

Reading schemes make me think of a factory production line.

Would it be that much more difficult for a teacher if kids chose from a selection of proper books (at an appropriate level) ?

That is great juuule.

I don't think that ds would ever have done it though. While ds has always been read to, and enjoys it very much, he simply would not do anything if he felt it could lead him to 'fail'. Anything at all.

He still treats pencils are the work of the Dark Lord , but he is getting there.

Left to his own devices, he would play with his DS all day (and somehow he circumvents the need to read with it!) or play Lord of the Rings, on the computer or watch TV.

Part of his improvement has come from us drastically reducing his screen time, I think.

TM, it would if they also had to factor in the need to avoid drunken horses

Theodoresmummy at ds2's school they do. They always have a 'reading' book (so initially a reading scheme book) AND a proper book (of their own choosing). DS2's current proper book is about space and as he's off reading schemes his other book is something about a magical rabbit. I don't get him to read to me aloud now I leave him to read the book himself although he still reads aloud in school.

His teacher said that she likes to get them onto proper books asap as they're so much more interesting - she also said that they are a lot harder to read (which is why they can be more interesting I guess) even when they look simple. She didn't go into why that was the case but I would guess its because they stray from keywords and use less repetition.

We had biff and chip for a mercifully short time - ds2 had dropped them by year 1 thank god.

INcidentally ds1 LOVES PM readers which are used in NZ i think. He loves the "I go to school' book especially the pic of the kid in the wheelchair (bearing in mind about half the children in his school are in wheelchairs).

We had the same situation with dd. She was 'off reading scheme' very early on.

Because ds has struggled he is still on it at age 7 (y3) In part this is bacuse he's needed books with very limited structured vocaularies for much longer. But the school uses a range of schemes, at least 4, as well as 'real' books, which it does grade. So he is on 'Pale blue' and brings home real books one day, and ORT ones the next. He has a reasonable choice but his LSW 'guides' him to avoid him being discouraged, by having a book that is too hard

Can highly recoomend Marion Blanks books on 'the reading remedy' for anyone with a child struggling with reading btw.

Do you think they would be useful for us, given that ds is 'over the hump' as it were?

Why is it not possible to question any element of HE without people feeling that they are being 'bashed"? I would really like to have the debate because it's interesting, but I don't think either side should expect to have theri point of view held sacrosanct. Questioning is not cirticising.

I don;t know MB as I read them from the POV of ds1 (she has a separate reading programme teaching non-verbal kids). If he;s over the hump I wouldn't worry, but it's dirt cheap and easy reading so.....

Agree seeker. And I am genuinely interested in whether people think I should limit ds2's DS. I'm beginning to think I should as it shows signs of being addictive rather than a choice iykwim.