A nosey beak question, if you would be so kind as to humour me.

[perpetualworrier]

Huge respect to all you home schoolers, how do you get the children to work?

I have terrible difficulty getting my DS's (4&7) to do the few minutes homework they have to do each week. How on earth do you get them to do a full week's work at home?

Mine do well at school and are not badly behaved generally, but they are very resistant to "work" at home

My DS is a lot older (14) and we've not been home educating long, but he has reached the stage where he can see the point of getting a decent education for his future life, so is generally self-motivated.

With younger ones, I think part of the problem with homework is that it seems unfair after a full day at school, and also that a lot of it doesn't seem to have much point. With home education you have the advantage of timing things so they do the tricky tasks when they are least tired (or fed up), you can do the right amount of practice for your child (some need to go over things a number of times, others just once or twice), and if they really don't seem to be "getting it" on one area you can always leave it for a few months till they are more ready, without feeling that the teacher will be marching ahead without them if they haven't kept up with the rest of the class.

Once you take the stress and "you just have to" of school and homework out of the equation, I think most parents find that the children's inbuilt curiosity about things gives them plenty of motivation.

I think maybe it is the idea that it is "work" they are doing and therefore a "chore" can be a problem.

My dd's do "Braintastic" maths and english on the computer which includes games so they don't really see it as "work", just fun!

Today we will be looking at a David Attenborourgh book on animals then finding out where they live on the globe, we can talk about geography and climate and habitats, they don't think they are doing 'work', we're just doing stuff together.

In this months EO magazine there is an article which answers just your question, and it talks about how school just 'turns off' children's love of learning.
I don't think endless 'worksheets' help enthrall kids very much.

Also we don't really do "a full weeks work at home",
so much can be achieved in a small amount of time because it's one to one, my dd has my undivided attention, we might be distracted by going off on a tangent sometimes, but if she doesn't 'get' something I try approaching it from another angle or just leaving it to another day.
We might have a week where absolutely nothing educational seems to have been done, and another week where we do loads, there are no targets or tests to pass or even anyone to compare her to.

Occaisionally I do worry that we are not 'doing enough' but when I look back over the past two years and look at the stuff my dds peers are doing in school I know I've absolutely nothing to worry about.
Most importantly I'm in control of my dds education and I'm not entrusting it to someone else, which feels very assuring.

agree with other posters. ime, and that of thousands of other HErs, kids want to learn, unless it has been turned into a chore that they have no choice or control over.

I must say I was skeptical about this but we don't usually do any structured work at ALL. No workbooks, nothing. And ds is NOT behind his peers, not at all.

FWIW he learns by testing out ideas and discussing them. So the alphabet he has learnt by asking what letters are, by asking how to write a word, etc. But he has also learnt by talking to his HE'd friends (they are all very very enthusiastic about writing atm) and by "teaching" his little sister.

Homework was a nightmare in our house too.

I was not sure how getting down to work might go for our ds1 nearly 11 who is getting back into the homeschool routine.

He looks forward to his weekly assignment emailed from dad that is tailored to suit his learning needs and our objectives. It has been 8 weeks and so far no strenuous objections like the homework battles.

I am trying to be more structured about how much 'work' gets accomplished because ds1 is getting older and is starting to understand the concept of working to learn rather than working to fill the page. IYKWIM

I agree with the other posters who suggested that your children have already done a day's worth of work by the time they get home and they want some family time to decompress. In our experience the homework was exactly as described above as well: irrelevant and uninspiring.

PW, I think your dcs response to homework is completely normal! When DS2 was at school, it was nigh on impossible to get him to do homework as it didn't interest him in the slightest and also he'd done a full day/week of school stuff and was frankly keen to put it behind him and chill out.

Once we de-registered him, though (aged 9), his innate curiosity led him to want to study all kinds of subjects, and we abandoned all attempts at 'structure' so we could just go with the flow.

He decided to take a maths GCSE (because he was 'interested in maths') and passed it easily at 13, so he's definitely been keeping up even though he hadn't done any 'formal' maths - curriculum stuff, work sheets etc - until he got the GCSE syllabus.

I think most of us (children and adults) learn when we're interested and having fun, and some simply aren't suited to structured study, while others thrive on it.

Have to say I've never been a fan of homework, unless kids choose to do it, and I have an 18yo who has gone right through the school system and is taking A levels this summer.