So is this really ok? Surprised.

[Newsenmum]

I’ve always been really interested in home ed and honestly try to be open minded, so please donf be offended. I seriously considered it for my ND son and would have done it if we weren’t so lucky with his mainstream school having a place for him within their arp, as he has no ehcp yet.

I follow someone online who home educates her 4 kids. The oldest one (9) is ND and couldnt cope in mainstream so I totally get it. The others are 6 and 4 and never tried school. Also a baby.

I always assumed she must this amazing creative person who does so much, but she did a couple of reels, which she used to show her week. She said she worried she hadnt had a good week but writing it down made her feel much better about it. She has chronic illness btw!

it was basically:

Monday: get up and do phonics cards with middle two and then read them books, whilst older one reads to herself. Then play in garden all day building dens as sunny. Fine. Mum busy with baby and hose chores but pops out as they play.

Tuesday: bad health day for the mum so they read in the big bed all morning and then she lay on the sofa and they watched TV for the rest of the day!

Wednesday: mum feeling a bit better so they made cookies and the kids counted out/weighed items ie maths and Home ed. Then they played maths related computer games all afternoon whilst mum did chores.

Thursday: raining all day so played the maths based computer game and then tv all day! Mum busy doing loads of chores and got kids to help when she could.

Friday: loads of appointments in the morning and food shopping - kids helped ie maths. 🤔Then playground. Gross motor skills. Walked past a construction site and talked about that.
All helped cook dinner.

Is this supposed to be a good week? I feel like that’s what I do in the school holidays or weekends! There is so much that they learn at school that is not nearly being covered. My son does music, crafting, sports, geography, history, science, everything! Yes it is adapted for him as he has additional needs and is in a tiny class, but he gets so much! Also what about mixing with any other kids?

I understand that some kids especially SN kids cant cope with much more, but these kids seem academically able so it seems like theyre missing out on so much, especially with the reasons often being the mum’s health :( thoughts?

It does worry me. As I said there are so
many resources, many of them free, that there really is no excuse.

Home education wasn’t my plan, I’m a social work student so I’m also studying, but my daughter hit burnout last year and it really came down to prioritising her mental health. She wouldn’t have survived staying in school.

We’re coming out of the other end of burnout now and she’s a very bright little girl but I do worry about failing her, so I work really hard to plan what we’ll be doing and follow it all through. Don’t get me wrong, in the beginning some days were unstructured while she recovered and we had to take it slowly but we have a good routine now.

I do hear of parents in the HE community who are very relaxed about it, they refuse to engage with the LA, and one has had an order imposed to return her child to school. The thought of that absolutely terrifies me.

I did home ed with my eldest as a 9 year old, we did about an hour of maths and english in the morning and then he worked on his chosen projects in the afternoon, we often visited the library too for research as it was pre-internet! He was very interested in science and history so his projects tended to focus on that, for example The Romans, Tudors, oceans, chemistry experiments etc

If it was a nice day we'd often skip the afternoon work and go swimming, legoland (had season pass) or walk in the woods and picnics! The nice thing about home ed is that you can be flexible ☺️

When children are at school the amount of time dedicated to each child for actual "learnjng" eg phonics, maths problems etc is tiny. So much of the day is wasted on just organising large numbers of children and getting them set up to do things. So much time is wasted on sorting out behaviour problems for a minority. The actual time needed to get the learning tasks done is quite small- 2 hours max. The rest is just fluff. I'm not saying the fluff isn't sometimes important but it's not hard-core learning. This is why home-scholelrs have so much more time to do other things which may, or may not, be "educational". But generally that week sounds OK to me. It would be better if there was more interaction planned with other children but otherwise it sounds OK.

I think it sounds very poor and not what I consider home ed. The stuff she described is pretty much what we used to do an extras on top of attending school.

We home educate and tbh, are probably fairly similar to what OP describes. We have a 6 year old, 4 year old and 1 year old.

The 6 year old couldn’t cope in a school so it’s not exactly a choice between her getting a mainstream education and home education because she wouldn’t be learning and would be having her MH decimated instead. My 4 year old seems to have learned more literacy and numeracy than his sister did at the same age and yes they are just different kids but it’s also because he’s not stressed like she was at the same age struggling in nursery.

We have some new friends (6/7 year olds) who have just deregistered from school and I’m amazed at how many of them can’t read or write but they were struggling my DD1 was in nursery. Mine can’t read or write much yet either but I don’t expect them to, we’re only just clicking with it very recently which is late for England but about average for many other countries.

We do talk through and research things that interest them though, so they do get an understanding of things that way and overtime they should end up with a fairly wide range of knowledge.

I am constantly amazed at how little adults who have gone through the school system learned/retained, I’m ND and one of my quirks is remembering more than average. People look at me like I have two heads when I bring up something that was on the NC as basic knowledge and they have no idea it was even taught let alone the detail. It does make me question the point of teaching so much only for it to be lost after the exam.

No one has any idea if any of the activities was age and ability suitable for the children. Home Ed works for many children (and doesn't for others!)

However... if the mum has health issues, it sounds like she needs more support as her health will just deteriorate and the children will suffer. If she isn't well enough to get out f bed, is she really well enough to be looking after them all day every day?

(We also don't know how good the school is... it could be completely awful and she's trying to protect them!)

We did home ed. Most days we covered English and Maths (daily) and one other subject in the morning for an hour or two, but on days where my ND DS was not co-operating it was pointless. We would try other activities, but on a miserable wet day with not many options, he would be allowed to watch something educational on the Discovery channel so I could help my older DD with her work without disruption.

Afternoons were spent doing something more practical, but still with an educational element. That may have been cooking, forest walks, geography field trips, museums or just doing science, art or music at home.

It is much easier now, with so many resources available for free on the Internet. When I was doing it we had to buy most of our resources or make it up ourselves. I would do it again in a heartbeat. My DS went from being over a year behind his peers to be a year ahead in reading and maths and scraped both English and Maths GCSEs (which I doubt he would have done had he stayed in school) and my DD excelled when she finally went back to school for GCSE years.

I do think there should be checks on Home Ed, but most people who are prepared to have their DCs home all day, particularly if they are ND, are just doing the best they can. It would be better if home ed. parents had to have a minimum level of education themselves (GCSEs in English and Maths maybe) but there is no need for them to be qualified teachers to teach their own. If parents don't have a minimum level of English then I do think it is disasterous for the children growing up in an English speaking country.

I think people forget though that lots of us do learning with our DCs at home outside of school too. My 5 year old DC just finished reception. The week described in the OP we would be doing a similar amount of home learning across the week, minus the hours spent on screens (which are replaced by school in our case). As well as school, I read with her and do phonics flashcards every day, writing practice, we do baking and crafts together and she has extracurricular activities every week after school. Lots of parents do this.

My point being that I don’t think the week described in the op is ok, just some reading then the rest of the day doing usual family activities and then being in the garden with little interaction or on screens by themselves the rest of the day. That is way less learning then my DC even taking into account the majority of her education if in school with bigger classes.

Huge numbers of children struggle in primary schools. The failure rate in schools is a problem that never gets tackled.

It's common to compare home ed to the best school cases, whilst pretending the worst school cases don't happen.

The OP explained the mother said it wasn't a standard week. That was the whole point.

Getting aerated over someone's week off in the USA system where home ed is common seems a waste of energy.

I wouldn't send my kids to a UK school if I only looked at what they do the week before Christmas (basically nothing) but you look at the whole picture not one week.

I never said schools were perfect. You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m saying that what the mother offered was woefully inadequate. I’m also not saying Home Ed is bad and I very much accept that for some children, school doesn’t work. As with most things in life, it depends how it’s executed and that definitely applies to Home Ed. Just because I taught for 30+ years doesn’t mean I think schools are perfect. But I do think those decades of experience equip me to make a judgment on whether what someone is providing educationally is sufficient or not!

I didn't say 'you' said anything , I haven't put any words in your mouth.

To repeat what I said: Huge numbers of children struggle in primary schools. The failure rate in schools is a problem that never gets tackled.

It's common to compare home ed to the best school cases, whilst pretending the worst school cases don't happen.

Regarding the week being discussed, the OP explains the mother described it as a non-standard week. It's foolish to judge any educational offering on a single non-standard week.

It’s also foolish to pretend that what was offered during that one off week was acceptable. Even the poorest school would have provided a significant amount more learning.

@Macaroni46 "Phonics needs to be taught every day as does maths."

I think many home ed parents would find that idea laughable. It may well be true in school, where you are trying to chivvy children to read before they are interested and often before they are developmentally ready, and teaching them maths abstractly before they have enough real-world experience to ground it in. If we all tried to teach our children to walk from the age of three months, I am sure we'd perceive that to be an arduous process too. After all, it would take the better part of a year, and progress would be extremely slow for most of that time.

What holds true in school does not always hold true in general. If your experience of education is limited to the school system, that is an easy mistake to make. It's like assuming that the way tigers behave in zoos would be how they'd behave in the wild. The environment is very different.

I never taught either of my children phonics at all. No doubt they intuited it by being read to. One of them did no formal maths until their GCSE year, and got a very good mark. This sort of thing is very common. Other home ed kids may benefit from being taught phonics, but there's no hard and fast rule, and IME doing it every single day is quite unusual. A few times a week seems more typical among the people I know.

Do you not think it’s important to be aware of the wider world and care about other children?
And I have an interest because I am considering it later on.

If you're considering home ed your time would be better used learning about it.

Of course it's important to be aware of the wider world, that's why I referenced the US system.

Your OP said She said she worried she hadnt had a good week but writing it down made her feel much better about it. She has chronic illness btw!

1. Having a chronic illness does not mean someone can't home ed to a high standard, it depends on their illness and the needs of their children.

2. You are judging on one week defined by the parent as 'hadn't had a good week'.

All your posts suggest you fundamentally don't understand home ed - it just isn't the same as school ed. The delivery doesn't have to be flat.

Now OVERALL this person might be doing a good or bad job - I don't know - but the single week is just that.

You can't judge home ed from one week, and comparing home ed to school ed is meaningless. It's a whole different approach.

As I said above: OVERALL this person might be doing a good or bad job - I don't know - but the single week is just that.

I don't really know what the rules are for home ed/home schooling in the US or her state so no idea if it's acceptable there.

She's only home schooling one of her children, maybe 2 (not sure what school age is in the US? Is it 6?) and this is a bad week for her - and they've still done phonics, reading, maths, outside play, cooking etc.

So based on the fact that we don't know the legal requirements or what a normal week/month/school year looks like, hard to tell if it's ok or not.

Sounds fine to me, she said she wasn't well that week so it was less than normal, and tbh it sounds like much more than I did in a week at primary school anyway. When I was a child so much of the week was spent dealing with disruptive behaviour from other children, and various faffing about, that there wasn't that much time for actual learning. I don't have school aged children but many of my friends do and they have many of the same issues now, large classes with teachers struggling to deal with endless disruptive behaviour, as well as additional needs of children who aren't getting the necessary support.

I know someone who home eds her 3 children, and she will post about the days out they are having and they are just the standard kind of day trips we would do at the weekend / in the holidays when our kids were younger, and I don’t really get it I must admit!

I had one son in school, one son HE, they are both young adults now and if you were to meet them you wouldn't know which one was HE. My eldest who attended school throughout is a financial adviser, my youngest one is four years younger is already out earning him.
I faced exactly the same kind of judgement from people like yourself, who couldn't wait to see my youngest fail. He proved them all wrong and l hope these children are the same.

I know 3 dc from 2 families who are HE.
The oldest is in her 3rd year at Oxford and the other 2 have just entered university.
They all belonged to HE clubs and had tutoring for some subjects.
However they mostly had dedicated parents who put the hard work into educating their dc.

My two went to school and fortunately had a good experience.

My poor nephew was bullied terribly at secondary and is the least educated of all because he struggled to learn in the terrifying environment that was school.
HE would have made a huge difference to his life.

I really wasn’t trying to be unkind. It sounds like you did a lot more with your son than this person.

And that’s why I think HE is a vital option.