I am going to start dealing with some of the misconceptions or questions in more depth - if you are wanting a brief answer have a look through my FAQs blog post as it may be in there.
So: "what do you do all day?"
Well for goodness sake don't ask my Son. So far he's given the answers "eat cake", "play on the wii" and "slept all day" none of which are actually true, though frankly, I fancy a few days EXACTLY like that!!
People are under the assumption home education means sitting next to your child at the dining room table and teaching them their lessons. I'd say, after all my researching and talking to other families, the majority do not do this at all. It is not a school at home. It's learning or education. And more often than not (a whole 2 weeks in!), for me, it's not at home either.
We've chosen to make the big wide world our 'classroom' if that's the way you want to think of it. We have libraries, internet, and neighbours, and communities. There are businesses and organisations. There are family and friends. Every place and every person contain a learning opportunity.
So why, that being the case, would we sit in our kitchen and confine ourselves to 4 walls? If the Internet is so freely available why not go and work elsewhere where the view is pretty?
Why not sit on a beach researching the artwork of Vincent Van Gogh, or sit in (my favourite place) Gloucester Cathedral Cloisters and read Harry Potter? (we did this last year, then went for a look round the grounds to see where Chamber of Secrets was filmed. It was perfect for my imaginative HP obsessive!)
I was happy to discover that Gloucestershire has a good solid home ed base and when I was accepted into the Yahoo and Facebook group a whole new world opened up right there.
Let me tell you that in the last 3 weeks these are the opportunities offered (that I can remember, there will be more!)
- Yoga
- Drumming Lessons
- Sports club (twice a week)
- Home ed groups in Cheltenham, Gloucester and Stroud, weekly.
- Computer programming lessons
- Tree planting and biodiversity
- Street/Modern/Ballet dancing
- Forest school
- Park meets (every Thursday at a different park)
- French lessons
- Singing
- Recorders
- Brass band
- Art class
- Trampolining
- Climbing group
- Learning to speak Chinese
- Knitting and crocheting
- 3D CGI film making lessons
- Trip to Wick Farm
- Trip to All Things Wild
- Offer to help on a farm (lambing)
- Horse riding lessons
- Requests for home ed learners who want experience in various organisations to gain work experience and/or apprentice schemes.
This is on top of other bits and pieces people do individually which is thrown open to other home edders. You'll quite often see a post that says 'we are off to [wherever], anyone fancy it?'.
That list is just what I got from talking to a few people or checking on the facebook page.
And this is why I have to reign myself in from saying 'yes' to everything! We'd never be home, ever, and we would wear ourselves out in no time!
So that is pretty much what we do all day. Embrace our freedom!
No comments:
Post a Comment