http://www.mrallsophistory.com

Just wanted to share this great website!

Half term is here...yay! A great from studying with CJ but now studying with RJ who is studying for his exams starting next month - A levels.

Speaking to a mum yesterday who home schools her four children the topic of curriculums came up. While we follow www.cie.org.uk for IGCSEs I did discover they cover much younger children in primary from the age of 5. 

However to be honest there are many books and online resources that home schoolers can follow that show what school children are learning nationally for each year group.

In the UK we are teaching children younger and younger and I genuinely feel that we must learn from other countries who start teaching their children from 7 onwards. Academically their results are great - could we learn from them?!

I challenge you to search the internet for famous home schooled adults - you will be surprised!

Had to share this one with you guys out there! Definitely worth a good look.

www.khanacademy.org 

These guys are amazing and this is a free resource but you can donate if you wish. An excellent resource for home schoolers in Math, sciences and slightly more. 

Maths preparation this evening - The Quadratic Equation!

I have been studying ahead of CJ so that I understand everything fully to enable me to help him through the maths curriculum.

Sometimes I just have to search the internet for help and today has been one of those days. 

The Quadratic Equation just wasn't explained clear enough in the text book so I looked to expertmathstutor on youtube - we are so grateful for the teachers who take the time to post their explanations and lessons. They are a great resource for home schoolers.

What I have noticed is that the teachers are catering to GCSE students and often mention that the students don't need to know the equations off by heart as they are given in the exam. Please note that IGCSE students do often need to learn the equations off by heart as they may pick up a mark for knowing such equations as The Quadratic Equation. IGCSEs seem to be more in depth!

Just one more week of home schooling and we have a weeks break. Well that is for CJ as I will help and support our eldest son in his preparation for his A level that start next month.

After months of home schooling I am now very focussed on gaining my degree. Environmental Studies mixed with maths is my chosen route but I do have many options with an open degree. 

Will I teach? I think so but not in local education as there are too many restrictions and I really feel that alot more time could be spent out of the classroom and on more practical lessons.

My own education from the age of 5-11 was amazing and I attended a village school run by a dedicated headmaster who chose his staff wisely. The school was a safe and well run environment and we were very aware that we were cared for very much by the staff. We were well disciplined but had a great sense of community. I will always be grateful for such a great start in life and long to pass that on to others. 

Sunday morning!

Just found the dog in the chicken enclosure again! The commotion outside is always a give away - there is a certain squawking the chickens make when being chased by the dog. I stood guard at the back door trying to yell at the dog in as quiet a way as possible in hope that the neighbours won't be disturbed but I'm guessing if we could hear the noise then they could too. If we disappear in the house to get our shoes the dog just goes back to chasing and rounding them up again and Hugo is a collie so rounding up everyone and everything is just in his genes and is his favourite thing ever along with his favourite toy - a big black bucket. Andi reluctantly got up and went out to retrieve Hugo and forgot to close the porch door so we now have muddy paw prints through the hall and in to the lounge - what a start to Sunday morning.

Home schooling is very much on my mind this morning as we are planning a week of past exam papers. Although we are only 9 months in to the IGCSEs we have covered an awful lot of the course already. You see an hour  home schooling is very much different to an hour in class at school. With no distractions you really do get alot done. CJ knows there will be questions he can't answer but after going through a maths paper recently he found it encouraging to see just how much he could do but also found it helpful to get used to the style of questions he will meet in his exams next year.

RJ has A level exams next month and so revision and study is very much what is going on in our home. Home schooling during the day and revising in the evenings and at weekends. RJ has a great offer at a good university near our home but 2 A's and a B are high grades to get. 

After all of the studying so far I have been inspired to go back to studying myself. I am now registered for my degree that starts in October. Through helping RJ I have come to love Environmental Studies and although the next home schooling year will be the most important one I know I will find time for my own studies too. In just three years CJ could be gone off to uni so it will mean I will be finishing my degree and who knows what I could do after the children have flown the nest. 

Our days don't always go to plan and yesterday was just one of those days. Instead of the usual 4 subjects we only covered 3. However being ahead of our studies means that catching up isn't really necessary but with bank holiday Monday we are already on a shorter week.

This morning Mrs J our English tutor wasn't able to make it but she rang and set this weeks work out of the text book so CJ won't be missing any lessons there. So the English lesson has changed to an Economics lesson.

I just love the flexibility home schooling brings and also the relaxed way in which we school as well. Our home is usually a quite, calm and relaxed placed during the day but there can be exciting times such as last week when the puppy made it in to the chicken enclosure and brought out a chicken in his mouth!!! Thankfully Ermintrude survived her trip around the back garden. 

We have also the option the travel and still home school. Making a 350 mile journey last month to be with my sister when she gave birth to her first baby meant CJ was able to come and still study. Not only did CJ get to meet his new cousin but day after day it snowed and so he got to go sledging - something really exciting for us as we rarely see snow where we live!

Home schooling is a commitment for any family. For us it was a change of life - my full time job turned in to part time house worked around home schooling and family life - I wouldn't change it for anything now.

If a child cannot learn in the way which we teach.........we must teach in a way the child can learn.

Such truth in those words!

A new trend in stating that 'Every child matters' on a school's website does not impress me at all and neither do a school's exam results. 

As parents we simply want the best for our children and we always celebrate their achievements. If they get a D in an exam after trying their best then that  is something to be proud of.

How can a teacher in a class of 30 mixed ability children meet the needs of every child? 

Please know that I am not against schools as you can see we stumbled in to home schooling through the school closure last year. We had placed our children in local education and then private education at senior level.

It is just that I now realise that we are able to teach our son in a way that is best suited to the way that he learns - if this makes sense?

Our son is relaxed and confident in his studies. He has lots of relationships through his sports and friends he meets with a few times a week. He has grown confident and to some degree more adventurous in his plans for his future. Peer pressure is not a problem and our son is able to be who he truly is.

Home schooling for us is such a blessing.

Now we have been asked the same questions over and over again. Here are some of the questions we are asked and the answers we give.

Does our son watch TV during the day? This one always makes me smile as people tend to thing that home schooled children are allowed to sit and watch daytime TV. No our son is not allowed to watch TV except for the news while he is on his lunch break as we feel the news can be educational. There are DVD's online through websites such as the BBC that are educational and support the work he is studying such as History documentaries about World War II.

Does our son see other children? Our son sees plenty of other people both adults and children. His twin best friends live just half a mile away and they meet up a few times a week - they have been best friends since they were 4. Then there is rugby training twice a week and he sees many other people during the week such as at swimming or at the gym and also the staff who work for us when we call in to the factory.

We are asked about our son having a lie in bed in the mornings. Home schooling starts at 9 every morning and if CJ studies 3 subjects during the morning he tends to finish his studies by 2pm. But a few times a week he will go for a swim at lunchtime and so the day might be slightly later. 

What is the cost of tutors and the books we buy? The cost of our tutor is £100 per month - £22 for the hour and we also pay our tutor £3 towards her fuel to drive to our home. As for the text books well we bought most of them from Amazon - a good percentage of them were second hand but they did look fairly unused when they arrived. The total cost of the text books so far has been approximately £120. The local libraries are really rubbish when it comes to stocking educational book for teenagers. I plan to simply pass on our books to other home schoolers when we are finished.

Our advice to new home schoolers is that when we started home schooling we didn't jump in to 7 subjects per week straight away. We started with maths, English and Biology and then a few weeks in we began to add another subject and it wasn't until a few months in did we add the 7th and final subject. So for a while we simply home schooled during a morning and our son would find projects to do such as model building or he would find other practical things to do.

As mentioned earlier our son as two best friends and we follow their school term times but we do find that we cover more work in an hour than you would in a class at school - I'm guessing that alot of time is wasted in a school lesson due to bad behaviour and settling the class in at the start of a lesson. Holidays are a great break for me too but also a time to plan lessons for the coming term as well. 

At the very start of home schooling we had to inform the local education department. I was surprised at the lack of information and advice they provide and just how easy it is to remove your child from school. My husband called the department and they were going to send someone to give us a form to fill in so he requested it be sent by post. The form gave us three options to choose from 

1. We choose to have someone visit our home with or without our son present to provide them with evidence of how we were home schooling.

2. We choose to meet someone from the department at a location away from our home with or with out our son present to provide evidence.

3. We provide the department with evidence of our son's education at home and also our philosophy of education.

We chose option three and simply provided them with random photocopies of our son's work and as for the philosophy of education we simply wrote a letter providing details of our son's chosen subjects, the exam board, details of our tutor and details of sports he was taking.

Other home schooling families with younger children only school in the mornings. They say that they cover so much in such a short space of time there is no need to continue in to the afternoon. So they use the afternoons for meeting up with others or practical projects and visits to museums etc.

We also do have visits and I am getting good at emailing and asking what discount there is for home schoolers. Alot of museums here are free!

In the county where we live there is a teenage home schooling group and we did visit just the once. Most of the young people there were not following a more formal approach to studying as we were and they were involved in circus skill workshops once or twice a week as well as a music group working towards producing a cd. Their twice monthly group seemed to involved the young people sitting and playing cards and so CJ decided not to meet up with them. It really does seem that home schoolers are great at meeting up together during the daytime when their children are young but there are few groups who meet up with 12+ children and there seems little sharing of resources too here in our county which I feel is a shame. 

May 2013 - 8 months in to home schooling and we are loving it!

Home schooling has totally changed the way I look at education and we are so  pleased that we made the choice now.

I'm not against formal education -  my children were in local education during their primary school years and we placed them in a private school for senior until is shut so we really do feel we have experienced different types of education. I am not the biggest fan of local education for so many reasons and saw too much time wasted preparing for SATs exams - I never saw any benefits from these exams. 

I also felt that children spend too much time at desks in stuffy classrooms. We live in a village and in a very rural part of the UK and so felt that the teachers could have taught alot more outside the classroom.

We find our are relaxed and with the warmer weather we are studying in the garden enjoying the sunshine and fresh air - we even plan to go to the beach every now and then for a change.

Other home schoolers are studying in very different ways to us but just because they are different doesn't mean they are wrong - IGCSEs just suit us.

To be honest I enjoy the freedom home schooling brings to our lives. We are more disciplined in our studies and more organised than ever before. 

Our studies start at 9ish every morning. We study 7 subjects over the five days with one tutor in English who visits every week and sets homework.

We study maths every day and the other 6 subjects for 3 hours each - so about 22 hours in total. It may sound a lot but CJ studies 4 hours a day and he has 2 hours of homework per week making up the 22 hours. But we have found that studying this much has got us ahead but CJ decided to continue to leave lots of time towards the exams for revision.

We decided to allow CJ to create his own timetable following the rules that we study 4 lessons per day. My thoughts were that CJ would set his timetable for the year but he finds it much more interesting deciding each morning what to study and has a notebook that he ticks off the subjects each day so that he makes sure he covers everything each week. At times if CJ has found the lesson easy he will finish in less than an hour and that is fine as other times he can be found to continue reading or researching his lesson for longer especially History. He often reads around the subjects he enjoys the most and for those he doesn't enjoy too much he simply covers what he has to.

It really has been a learning process as we have gone along. One lesson learnt for CJ was not to leave all of his science to the end of the week - science is his least favourite subjects - so initially Fridays were really hard going for both of us. Infact he started studying Chemistry but found it so dull that he very quickly dropped it and took up Economics instead!

I personally feel that 7 subjects for home schoolers is more than enough over a two year period. Other home schoolers who take exams take 2 or 3 over a 3-4 year period. CJ already 2 GCSEs that he took at 14 so in all he should come out with 9 GCSEs/IGCSEs.

Home schooling for me personally was a life changing choice. I had planned to work full time last September for my husband's business but now fit work in part time around home schooling. I have very understanding friends who no longer phone during the daytime or pop in to say hi. My only regret is that we didn't home school from the very start! 

How and why we home school

Welcome to our home school blog!

We hope that our blog will provide an insight in to how we home school and we hope that it will help others who are considering or who have already taken the step to home school.

Please do ask us questions if we have missed anything out!

Home schooling was not an easy decision for us. Our son's school suddenly closed mid August leaving us with just two weeks to find another school before the Autumn term. When our son asked to home school we were initially very wary but after hours of research, advice taken from friends who home schooled abroad and in the UK and speaking to various teachers this really was essential in our preparation to home school.

Finding a suitable curriculum was surprisingly easier than we thought. GCSEs were not really suitable for us as there was teacher assessments and course work involved. Practicals would have been difficult as we had none of the required equipment and purchasing such things was very costly. We researched and considered some Christian courses and other courses offered to home schoolers through distant learning. There was even an online school! We will try and include some of the websites we discovered later.

We chose International GCSEs. IGCSEs are a recognisable qualification both in the UK and in many other countries - friends of ours teach IGCSEs in Africa! Many private schools in the UK teach IGCSEs. 

The examination board we chose is www.cie.org.uk We have been impressed with Cambridge International Examinations as have some friends of our who teach IGCSEs in an African school.

For each subject we have the syllabus, past papers and a resource list with books, DVDs etc

We use BBC Bitesize (www.bbc..co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/) as GCSEs as very much in line with IGCSEs. There are revision sections on this website as well as puzzles, videos, audio etc.

Some amazing teachers have placed lessons and revision lessons on youtube (www.youtube.com) and we have found these really good and a great change to simply using a text book.

I have given up trying to find IGCSE books in the county libraries. They did exist but most were borrowed and never returned! 

Our text books were purchased mainly through Amazon. Most were second hand so saved a great deal of money. Most students at school work from handed down text books! I have also found some new revision books in WHSmith last week.

Nearly 8 months in to home schooling and we find ourselves on track, if not ahead of our schedule. The weeks fly by and we have no regrets in our decision to home school - we just wish we had done this sooner. Our days are relaxed and flexible. 

We will share how more next time on how we timetable our week and on the out of home schooling activities our son is involved in - including the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.