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!