How To Choose What Style of H/E To Take?

[Lupins71]

My dd is currently in reception and doing very well, I have no problem with her being there, what concerns me is secondary school and the later years of primary school - as I feel they are just there for exam results rather than learning. This was actually backed up by a teacher I was talking to last night who home ed's herself.

Anyway I'm waffling, how do you decide whether to take a structured approach or to take live as it comes and learn by experiances ( which we do anyway).

My concerns at pulling dd would be that how to cover everything she needs to know on a structured routine and whether she would learn enough with a more casual relaxed approach

Also how to decide what age to pull her from school, I would like her there for another year, ds stilltakes up too much time and they are a fab school and her reading writing maths ect is really taking form

Will be joing EO soon but any info greatly appreciated

Riven - thanks for that,your right se does seem to like some structure atm, however I just feel it is too much sometimes - she is never keen to talk about what she has done at school which makes me wonder how intersting it has been as therefore fairly pointless as she wont remember it. Well done on yours doing so well that is very impressive - I wonder how the teacher felt about how the other children had done in comparison considering the input.

Do you know how long it takes to de-reg?

I will go off and look at that website, thanks again

if you're in England or Wales, it takes as long to de-reg as it takes to write a letter to the headteacher and hand it in(sample letters on the EO website). Scotland is slightly different (google Schoolhouse for help in Scotland), and not sure about NI. There are some threads in the rest fo the HE section whcih explain it a bit more and have proper links).

We've gone with a very structured style, but that's because DS is studying for iGCSEs, and it works for him. I think you can only go by trial and error and a knowledge of your own child - if she likes to have a settled routine in general, then she probably will for learning too, whether the separate parts are "formal" or not, eg always going out for a walk after lunch. On the other hand, some children love to jump from one thing to another and do whatever they feel like at the time.

Same with books and worksheets - some children like to see how they're progressing and have an organised structure to what they're learning, while others pick up seemingly random chunks and don't worry about the structure.

I remember being told long ago that people could be divided up into "spiders" and "ants". Spiders build webs, and want a clear structure so they can see how all the pieces join together. If you give them lots of unconnected pieces, they'll be uncomfortable until they can join them up into a coherent whole. Ants on the other hand (I always picture the leaf-cutter ants here) always deal with small separate pieces and don't have any worry about how they interconnect - they can pick up a chunk at a time and make sense of it in isolation.

Thanks both of you, I like the spiders and ants

I think it will definatly be trial and error she is fairly unstructured altho does benefit from a loose structure if that makes sense

Will no doubt be back for more info

There's a nice article 'Organic Structure' by Ian Wild, that I like a lot.

It says, in words much better than mine, why we home educate in the way that we do.

But just because somebody?s teaching, doesn?t mean anyone?s learning. Maybe that?s the biggest lesson the system has to learn

I really like that