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.
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