How We Started Our Home Ed Journey
Hi, we're the Stories and we have
been home educating our children officially since September 2020.
Thank you for taking your time to read. I hope you enjoy following our home Ed 'Storie'.
Back in 2020 when the world was
turned upside down by Covid, I jumped in headfirst with teaching my children.
Along with every family across the world, our children were now to suddenly
learn from home. We hadn't had any communication from the school on how this
was going to happen or what work they were meant to be doing. So instead, I
made my own work for them. Spent hours searching online for worksheets and fun
educational activities for them to do at home. We didn't have ink for our
printer at the time (ink was out of stock everywhere!) so I ended up spending
hours every evening drawing out the worksheets I found or making up my own.
This worked well and my children loved it. Over the course of the lockdown our
learning evolved and took on more than just worksheets for the basics. We
started doing science experiments (there is a link at the end of the page to
the science book we use)
lots of cooking (my children made
some amazing recipes.) one of their favourite things they learnt, and we still
do now occasionally now is making our own butter.
We dove into history, one day
that stands out for me was the 75th VE day. My Nana phoned my children a week
before VE Day and told them her story, we made notes and then they wrote about
her story, then on VE day the children made the food she ate and organised a
party of our own like she had with her street. Unfortunately, we couldn't share
this with anyone, but we all had a lot of fun celebrating and learning.
I remember only a couple of weeks into lockdown, I knew my children wouldn't be returning to school once it was all open again. They were so much happier and progressing better than they had been at school. I had wanted to home Ed my then 7-year-old since he started school in 2017 but due to my pregnancy with our youngest we decided school was the best option at the time.
During lockdown: -
My eldest child's confidence grew
loads; his last teacher had knocked him completely. We are still working on his
confidence today, but he has now found a love of learning 3 years on.
My middle child had special
educational needs, hearing loss due to glue ear in both ears and severe speech
delay. She wore hearing aids from December 2019 after her grommets fell out 3
months after being put in. 6 months at school (she was in reception when covid
hit) and her speech hadn't improved, and she was struggling to make friends
because her peers couldn't understand her. The school hadn't been helping her
with her speech therapy as promised during her time there. 6 months at home she
was discharged from speech and language therapy because she could pronounce all
her sounds clearly and form comprehensive sentences. This was a significant
point in our final decision to home Ed our children. I definitely couldn't have
sent them back to the school they were at before.
Our youngest was just about to turn 2 and loved being at home with her siblings, she got involved with everything they did. When she was able to return to nursery and her child minder, we decided for our eldest children's learning need our youngest should continue with the childminder, but we stopped sending her go nursery as we felt it didn't fit with our home Ed journey in the long run.
And so, our home Ed journey started and we deregistered our children in July 2020 for a fresh start in September 2020. That's when the fun began.
This is the Usborne 365 Science
book that we use for a lot of our experiments. I love that it talks you through
every step and explains why and how the experiments work.
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