We gave a gift to our children

It is called, experience your own childhood. Our kids grow at their own pace, leave their toys behind when they need, scoop them up again to play when they want.

Home educated kids explore the world

If you want, you can call that Key Stage 2 Target 4. We call it Look what I found! And talking, sniffing, laughing, asking questions, holding, finding out, wondering, enjoying.

Home educated children are at the heart of this society

Literally. Here, on a workshop led by a photographer. The assignment: to photograph the flowers loved in everyday gardens.

The sun shines!

Hands up who wants to be locked inside on a sunny day, when they could grab some friends and head off out to play.

Primary science

Experiential. Would a child freely say, No, sit me at a desk instead, and teach me to a test.

'Home educators control their kids'

If I had control over Tiger, believe me I would eat that chocolate horse. As it is, I dare not risk it.

With home education, we have time to look at the world

We choose outdoors everyday, come rain or shine

Apparently, 72% of children want to spend more time enjoying themselves outdoors. That's the stuff according the npower I read today in Shark's copy of First News. I wonder what proportion of respondents to their questionnaire were home educated?

Home education grows botanists, poets, geologists, artists, scholars and scientists

And best done outside, interacting with the stuff of life.


Not via an hour a week inside a class of 30 others, with a dog-eared textbook containing black and white photographs, supplemented with one supervised 4-hour visit a year.

(And I hear fifteen minutes of that are taken up with a health and safety lecture on the hazards of water, grass, doorhandles, pencils, carparks, straying from the group, and sheep.)

Play

Free from adult control, free from adult direction, free from adults. It is a child's precious time. Adults do not benefit by stealing it and replacing it with a uniform, a worksheet, a reminder to work harder, a reprimand, and a new set of targets.

Home education is a choice to live differently

We make a conscious decision and we live it, in all its consequences, joys, miseries, pleasures and pains. That's what it is to make a choice; to choose not to be swept along by the tide, to do what everyone else does, just because they expected us to do it too.

For that bold and independent choice, I'd say we should be supported and celebrated, not persecuted and vilified.

We celebrate the individual

No matter what they look like when they wake us up in the morning.

One day all children will have the choice

Because more people are asking, What is so great about the idea of compulsory schooling?

Is it the way kids have to leave the house at exactly the same time everyday? Is is the way they have no evenings or weekends free because there's always guilty homework to do? Is it the way that work always must pass someone else's judgement? Is it how they must be monitored, controlled, watched and supervised? Or have to sit in one place for hours at a time? Is it how they must ask permission to use the toilet? Or take a sip of water? Is it to prepare for assessments, tests, hurdles, barriers? Is it so they can stand up to peer pressure, bullying, humiliation? Is it so someone else is always in control, who tells them with absolute certainty this is the one way, and the only way to do things, even when their hearts tell them different, yet they dare not say so?

And more people will conclude there are simply more satisfying and fulfilling ways to spend a childhood.

What do you do when you want to learn something new?

You might ask questions, experiment for yourself, read, rearrange what you thought you knew, join a class, read some more, talk, look things up, think about stuff, take a visit somewhere, sit and dream about the step you take next.

And that's exactly what happens in the world of home education.

It's OK to learn in any order

A person can learn the difficult stuff first and the easy stuff last, and they can learn it all back to front and upside down, and piece it all together for themselves. And that's how learning is.

Learning is non-stop

Not divided into artificial blocks of hours, not tick boxed, not only done one way, not always obvious.

I learn stuff from my kids

Sometimes, how to shut up and let you get on with it, in your own, thoughtful way.

We work together

We're not always rolling around the floor knocking each other senseless with puffins. Sometimes everyone just gets up and puzzles out the best way to solve a maths problem.

Home education means being involved

Young, old, from many beliefs and none, from different countries, with diverse viewpoints, with many ways of living. This is but one of our social networks.

It's human nature to want to learn

The only way we could impede it, is to give someone a fundamentally bad experience.


(Hmm. How many times do you hear, I hated that subject at school.)

An education suited to age, ability and aptitude

Who better to choose it?

We choose differently

Someone, somewhere, will try and make sense of our freedom, better to contain it. Perhaps they'll call home ed an 'alternative learning structure employing displacement management techniques'.

Home educating is full-time parenting

We are dedicated, committed, engaged, attentive, aware. We are parents, supportive and involved in our children. Just like you.

Home education means instilling a life long love of learning

For everything. From understanding the impact of solar flares on earth, to making daisy chains.

Some people think home education is dangerous

Perhaps because we can't easily be controlled, supervised, or pinned down.

We are confident, inquiring, free-thinking.

No wonder we look out of the box.

There is no subject we cannot study

And no resource we cannot access. So let's just start today with Books, Teachers, Print resources, You, Other children, Google, Workshops, YouTube, Wikipedia...

Creative thinking

Comes from being able to live a full life, think about experience, wonder what if, and know your ideas are heard, and valued. Yes, home ed is a creative place to be.

Truancy?

What's that?

Home ed kids have opinions

And you can bet they're not afraid to use them. No joke.