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.