NotSheep

Thought it was about time I wrote something about home-education rather than just posting photos of children, however adorable they may be

Although it’s still summertime for the schoolies, we’ve been doing a bit of schoolwork/seatwork/whatever this week - the weather’s dull and wet, and we can always take days off when it’s sunny As I’ve mentioned before, we’re a bit more formal now than we used to be, for a variety of reasons. It’s autonomous in some ways: I follow the boys’ interests and we take as long as we want over the topics that appeal to them - plus we’re flexible enough to change our minds about what we do and when. I do suggest topics and activities I think they’d enjoy though, and in some ways, we’re actually very schoolish: I plan what they’ll study, and we have a rough schedule for when we’ll do certain things. We also make use of workbooks, though we also make use of lots of non-workbooks too. Right now our favourites include the Usborne Children’s Book of Art, a wonderful book about Shakespeare by Michael Rosen and the Kingfisher Encyclopedia of British History. Of course we also use resources from the internet and a variety of other sources. Information is so readily-available these days that I really think that any family with the will to home-educate is capable of doing so effectively. I suppose that’s probably always been true, but lack of resources certainly isn’t a problem for home-educating families in the 21st century.

Despite enjoying the mod cons of the current day, Barney, George and Freddy are all still enthusiastic about learning Latin. People are always impressed when I mention that we do Latin, but I don’t think it’s a difficult subject really. We like Minimus very much, and the older two have nearly completed Minimus Secundus. I’m thinking about what we should use next - the natural progression would be the Cambridge Latin series, but there are a few other options too.

Freddy is, at his own request, now learning French, though I’m using a range of resources from publishers like Usborne for him, rather than the CGP books I’ve used for Barney and George (though I’ll probably move on to those later). All three - well, four, actually, because Jack does it too - are also using the Rosetta Stone software, which is excellent. I’ve only got the first couple of CDs, unfortunately, and it’s very expensive, so if anyone reading this has a set they want to sell cheaply, let me know! I wouldn’t mind getting the Spanish and German versions of this too - there’s interest here in learning both languages. I took French, Latin and German to O-level, and French to A-level, so I’m not finding those difficult to teach, but if anyone starts on Spanish, I’ll be learning it alongside them - I think I know about three Spanish words and one of those is “ole!”

We’re working on handwriting as a group right now. Writing has never come easily to Barney (I mean the actual letters-on-page bit, not the putting words together bit), and while George has naturally good handwriting, he’s recently been getting a bit… er… well, you could call it creative but you could also call it wild Freddy has a double-whammy: parents who struggled with handwriting and he’s left-handed. So we’ve been using this site, which has a very different approach to most handwriting resources - it concentrates on the movements needed for comfortable and legible handwriting, rather than repetitive copying.

They are all still fascinated by Roman history, and we’ve a huge range of resources on that now - mostly they’re using Usborne Internet-Linked Romans at the minute.

Barney, George and Freddy read What I Believe together a year or two ago, and the older two have now progressed to Religions of the World, with which I’m very impressed. I’m learning as much as they are from this

They’re enjoying a project on the human body too - that’s been an on-again-off-again interest for some time now - and the older two are using the CGP books on writing fiction too. There are several websites where I collect ideas for writing topics, art ideas, etc - I’m not good at coming up with such ideas myself, so I’m glad to have found those

We’ve also got all sorts of other books here - there always seems to be at least six or seven piles of books waiting to be put away! Our own collection runs into the thousands, and although the local libraries aren’t up much use when it comes to getting hold of specific items, there’s always something to be found there in the way of reading material

We’ve several computers, one of which was built from scratch by Scratchy (heh) with help from Barney and George, and a couple of which comprise bits of hardware salvaged from other computers. The computers are used for quite a variety of things - the boys find it hard to imagine what life was like before computers! We do have and use some ICT workbooks, and although the boys all have a pretty good handle on what they can do with computers, the books do throw up some interesting projects and ideas.

What haven’t I mentioned? Oh, maths! We do maths fairly traditionally, though since it’s not a subject that any of them struggles with, and since there’s so much maths involved in everyday life, we tend to work through the formal bits quite quickly. With one-on-one, it’s easy to see when a concept is understood or when it needs explaining in a different way, so it’s completely different to teaching maths (or anything else for that matter) to a class.

I think that covers most of what we’re doing right now. Topics come and go, projects appear, and we make the most of whatever opportunities come our way. Looking over what I’ve written, it sounds much more schooly and formal than it is in practice. I understand the concepts behind autonomous education, and actually would really like to be doing that, but what we’re doing now works better for our family in terms of giving our home a positive atmosphere, and it certainly seems to be working in terms of “educational provision”: the boys are learning lots and are enthusiastic about learning. I think that enthusiasm is probably the most important factor, to be honest, and I’m so glad I have the opportunity to spend my days with them and see it in action