Into Home Education
As we have reached a point of change with regards to family life in our household, I’ve decided to write a few posts about our process over the past three and a half years … so here goes.
2000 – 2002
I had always known home education was an option open to us, I suppose that must have been through growing up in church circles knowing christians who had done it for faith reasons. In fact I had always held home education as a philosophical and educational ideal, but chickened out at the point of making a choice for Anna. If you’d asked me when she was a baby, that’s what I would have said I wanted to do. I’d even got in touch with the local EO contact when Abigail was a baby! But life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect it to.
We’d spent a year away from home, 1999 – 2000, during which I had been running a pre-school for 8 children. Anna had been quite hard work during that year, and I’d lost a baby half way through pregnancy as well, so was pretty stressed out by the time we got home! It was a great year in many ways, looking back, but lots of things were difficult processes as well. At the time of having to decide, we didn’t know where we would be living, and we weren’t sure about any of the state schools that we could have considered, so we made the decision to send Anna to a small private school which we thought would be the best thing for all of us at that time.
Actually, it *was* good. While Anna was there we settled back at home, I went through what was, for me, a very hard pregnancy, and had Josiah. I think we moved house twice in that two year period as well! Oh, and started a business, and Steve left his full time employment and went fully self employed. Hmm, not too many changes in a short space of time there then! Anna enjoyed school (well, all of it apart from the work!) and by the end of her time there was reading fluently, and was happy and confident.
Autumn Term 2002
Anna was in full time school and had been for a year, having done a year of part time school prior to that. Abigail had just started school and was doing mornings only. Josiah was about 18 months old. We’d finally settled in our own house, and our business was in its first year.
We began to find that school commitments were cutting across things we needed to do at work. Anna was beginning to struggle with the particular curriculum that the school was using. Also, Abbie seemed to be really tired after school, and I felt as though I was getting the dregs of my children by sending them off first thing and getting home tired, grumpy kids at the end of the day. What was the point, when I was at home with a toddler anyway, and I knew I could teach them what they needed to know in ten minutes flat every day?!
We were also thinking on a philosophical/spiritual level about breaking down the divisions between all the different areas of our lives, and wanting to integrate things – this might sound queer to some, but for us the process of beginning to home educate was a picture for us spiritually about our faith as well.
So I began to look into home education, first port of call being the internet (where would we be without it?!!). First I found the forum on UKParents, and there met some lovely people who directed me to Muddle Puddle, and the associated Early Years Home Education Yahoo group, and that was by far the most invaluable source of information, support and friendship (found my first ever message to the group here, rofl!).
To be honest we didn’t need much convincing, and de-registered the children at Christmas. I think the overriding reason was in order to give us more flexibility with regard to work and home. at the time Steve was working all the hours God sent, and then some – including weekends, and we just felt that our family time was being compromised by school, whereas if we took school out of the equation, we could prioritise the time together when it was possible, as opposed to missing it because the children were in school.
The rest, as they say, is history …