What home schooling looks like in our house.

Don't Replicate School

People often ask how do I manage to home school? Does it take up a lot of time? What curriculum do I use? Am I qualified as a teacher?

I imagine I thought the same things before I started. That there was only one way to do it, and that was to copy a classroom and try to be like a school.

Except we weren't home schooling for religious reasons, or location reasons. We were homeschooling because school didn't work for my son. So why would anyone think replicating a classroom would work?

When my son was first out of school, I made efforts at timetabling the mornings for learning, and buying books, and using online lessons. The meltdowns I thought were caused by school continued at home. But once I understood PDA was the challenge, I changed my approach and gradually things started to work and the meltdowns stopped.

Priorities

Remember education is broader than academic learning. Think about your priorities. What do you want to achieve? For a traditionalist like me, it has been challenging to have to think about this. School does it for you, offering a mainstream path to the future that I didn't question. Now I question everything, and have discovered a world of alternative learning thinking and others who feel school is limiting for all children.

Now I'm prioritising academic learning of subjects of interest, social interaction, physical fitness, life skills, emotional regulation, speech and language understanding in all interactions with my son. Learning how to use money is a higher priority than algebra. Learning to cook is a higher priority than learning a foreign language.

Use Technology

When my son was young and in school we had Jump Ahead cd roms at home. He loved all learning when it was fun. We watched brainpop animated videos.

So the first thing I did once he was out of school was setup a second laptop with an animated video from www.brainpop.com and leave it beside my son gaming on his own laptop. I left the room, and when the lesson finished my son leaned over, selected another video and carried on watching.

I paid for full annual access to brainpop for a couple of years. I bought a science course from USA www.k12.com to do offline. A box of experimental material arrived by post. We did some of the experiments but little of the writing up.

He was very shutdown after his experiences in school, told me he had lost his passion for reading, and that he was bad at maths and hand writing (not true).

He taught himself to type while gaming. He now types in his own way very quickly and effectively.

I signed my son up for the free closed Minecraft community for children at Jokaydia. It cleverly translates online skills in Minecraft into real world relevant achievements https://massively.jokaydia.com/

I found www.khanacademy.com free online learning. We covered my son's basic maths education from this site. It operates in a game like way, earning points, gaining badges. I would log in, again on my laptop beside him on his. I had to take things slowly, and stop regularly to watch what he was doing. In other words everything was at his pace. For a while, the badges were fun. We did some programming levels then. This was to help teach me about programming, so my son would show me how to do it, and I would try and do it then myself.

I had already tried the no technology, no tv approach and decided instead on embracing a high tech house.  I have invested in and continue to invest in technology for my son.  Luckily, he doesn't care about designer clothes or sports or going out like other teens, so my money can be directed to tech.

Don't discount the social opportunities online. Skype, Discord allow my son to communicate with family and friends without having to go out. In fact, he is in contact with family and friends in USA now in a way that is new and exciting. He is making friendships online, some he has met in real life, others not. Often I think he has had a more positive social day than most. He also has to deal with difficult interactions online, but in a way that is safe and one he can walk away from. I see a confidence developing in dealing with conflict. Is playground isolation or dealing with school bullying really a better way to learn?

More recently, my son has designed and built a personalised desktop computer for me.  A trial run before building his own gaming pc,  I am delighted with it.

Environment

We had a couch in our living room that he was glued to. In an effort to engage him more I wanted him in the kitchen. Instead of trying to move him, I did some room design work with him and we moved the couch! Success.

Physical

I've written before about building OTinto the everyday. We have combined our physical activity room into our tech room now, and he is using the pull up bar and exercise bike himself.

Board Games

We play scrabble and chess. There are times when this is daily, then they will be dropped for a while, then they will reappear. We break the rules in Scrabble, always have access to the dictionary, sometimes swop letters with the aim of using up all letters and covering the board, or making up the highest scoring words possible. We have gradually worked on learning to lose, and learning to play by the rules, and he can now cope with both.

Books

My son's book reading was voracious when he was young and died in school and is limited now.  He does sometimes read books that come from others like his cousins. Often he cannot stop and will read non stop until the book is finished.

I do still buy academic books though, at the moment we have school books for astronomy and physics. These are presented as books for me so I can keep up and ask him intelligent questions. Often I just leave them open on the table. He does read all day though, online, and I discover more and more that he is reading plenty of what I would call academic material particularly about science.

Discussion/Debate

We discuss the news headlines daily, which leads into research of background, debate and discussion.

An example is the #metoo movement. He wants to know what it is about. I explain as best I can. We discuss consent. We discuss the feminist movement. This leads into a history of suffrage and women's voting rights. This leads into a discussion of minority rights. This leads to talk of racism and oppression. This leads to research on Hitler and World War 2. Throughout our discussions we use Google for research. We discuss checking the validity of our sources, what valid research looks like. This might all happen while he is also gaming and I am also cooking.

Art

Art has been valuable at different times. We have pottery clay, and paints and drawing materials. It's always very spontaneous, and often I'm doing my own version alongside him. In other words, we don't do the activities as learning for him, we both do them as fun. He has developed better fine motor skills this way, and has can now use the scissors without it every being mentioned as a challenge.

Learning Windows

Learning happens when my son is relaxed and receptive. I need to be at home with him most of the time to gauge and respond to these learning opportunities. Sometimes that might mean looking things up at 1am in the morning. The commitment is constant and does not stop at 4pm when school stops for others.

Travel

We have travelled regularly to family in USA since my son was small. He is now a confident traveller. Travel provides endless opportunity for learning outside the home. We have just taken our first foreign trip without visiting family. We went to Paris. From researching the city ahead of time, learning some French, planning the travel connections, to my son navigating the Metro system, ordering food for himself, and reaching the top of the Eiffel Tower, the trip was a learning success.

How you phrase things

I've written before about not being able to even use the word school while we were working to help my son get back to school. Phrasing is important. I talk about life skills. I talk about feeling good about your body, and feeling strong from physical fitness. I don't say I am teaching you or we are learning, or now is time for x or y. Instead, I stress that school is not important anymore, but education is. That school is one way to learn, but not the only way.  That learning is for life.