September 2020 Officially Home Educating

February 09, 2023

When we started our official journey in Home educating our children after the summer in 2020. We started off with working to an outdoors national curriculum, These are wonderful curriculum but it just wasn't right for our family.

I think we did a week’s worth before we decided it wasn't for us.

We took our first holiday once everyone was back at school after the summer holiday. Our eldest wanted to go to the Jurassic Coast, so we booked a camping trip in Weymouth. It was beautiful, we went fossil hunting, walked around local museums, explored Weymouth, and surrounding areas.

The children started a holiday journal, and we started a tradition of our holiday bear (our version of the school weekend bear)

We still made time for some book work.

Our son went back to his English tutor who he used to see whilst he was in school. He really enjoyed going for his 1 to 1 session’s and came on leaps and bounds.

Over the course of the 4 months to the end of 2020, home Ed went well. I thought we had found our groove and put myself in a false sense of security.

My children were co-operative on the most part to do work I asked them to do, but there were signs that things would change.

By the beginning of 2021 our son had become resistant to 'school' work, he couldn't understand the difference between being at school doing curriculum based learning and the learning I was doing them with. We did bits of English and Maths here and there, but it was such a battle that we decided he needed a reset, we decided to de-school him. He enjoyed cooking, working on his Beavers/Cubs badges, (this is something we do a lot with our children through our home Ed) playing with his Lego, drawing and writing a few of his own stories when he was in the mood.

For his birthday we bought him a Lego Boost kit to start his new love of coding along with his favourite hobby. (there is a link to the kit at the bottom of the page)

During this period I spent a lot of time with our middle child as she wanted to sit down and learn English but she didn't enjoy maths, so we focused on what she enjoy.

From then on I found we struggled to find our feet with home Ed. I frequently questioned if I was doing the right thing for my children. I often felt that I had failed them. But I knew they were a lot happier than they had been at school, they had the freedom to learn what they wanted to learn and focus on their skills and build from there. Looking back, now 2 years on we have come so far and those early, teething days were to be expected. I still question myself on a regular basis but I can't see them going back to school anytime soon, if ever.

Things I found helpful during those first few months were research, being out in nature, we went for a lot of walks through the country side and woods where we lived, we often took scavenger hunts to see what we could find. My children spent so much time outside in 2020 it was so nice seeing them reconnect with the world around them. We used our national trust card a lot and visited the local house ground (the houses weren't open). The weather didn't stop us going out, be it rain, snow or sun we went out to explore.