“An unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates
Children are born curious and my passion is to keep that ignited. Building confidence and inspiring learning through play, exploration and discovery are core principles in primary school but this becomes marginalised at secondary school where logistical timetabling issues and exam driven curricula generate ever-narrowing pathways.
Planning the day
Homeschool gives you and your children the creative freedom to sculpt academic pathways, but it is not an easy option. It requires dedication, discipline, and a great deal of thinking time. Children need regular breaks: every forty minutes is ideal. Read the room. If they are restless give them a break and let them run around. Class time can be honed to suit your needs: I found the mornings best, and soon learned that four hours with good breaks between sessions was ideal for my children. I worked in the afternoons. However, preparation time consumed my evenings, and I burned many midnight candles. A well-prepared class inspires confidence in the children and gives you the wriggle room to be responsive to their needs.
Teaching is learning, guiding and shining light into dark corners. I’m not a fan of child-led learning for a very simple reason. Questions arise from observation, from answers and from previous knowledge. If we don’t have previous knowledge questions lie dormant.
From observation, a child will ask why is the sky blue?
Here’s a helpful answer from NASA
The answer will bud new questions, and happily, this website has preempted many, but a child will need to be guided to find the connections between Prisms, Newton, the Great Plague, Rainbows, Keats, Dawkins, Bar Codes in the Stars, the Big Bang…!
If you are teaching children of different ages it is helpful to unite the team at the beginning and end of the day with common activities. It’s a good idea to cover harder topics early in the day when everyone is fresh and break up the morning with activities, experiments and if possible fieldwork.
Children learn when they are on the move! Fiddling and doodling are thinking tools. Where possible shift location during the morning. Perhaps have formal classes around the kitchen table, science experiments in the kitchen and storytime somewhere else. Pop quizzes on walks are a fantastically useful way for children to build mind palaces. See Thinking Walks.
From the first day of home school to graduation, we ended every day with ‘story time’. Sharing books as a family is one of life’s joys, and over the years we shared for pleasure novels, memoirs, short stories, philosophy, popular science and plays. This generated a natural bridge from schooltime to hometime.
To test or not to test
That’s a personal choice. To my surprise, my children wanted quizzes and tests. I created end of the week quizzes: crosswords, treasure hunts, acrostics or multiple-choice tests. They were fun to do and the results were very helpful for me and showed me what they had or had not taken in.
I created end of term exams based on all the topics we had covered. To ensure fairness each question carried marks and I had to stick to the format when marking. It was painful marking my children’s work and sometimes I cried. Top marks did not necessarily go to the most hard-working member of the tribe. In the long run, I was grateful I had kept records of their progress and this proved invaluable when applying to University.
Practical stuff
Files and plastic sheets. Sounds dull but your children will thank you if you help them to preserve their precious work. And keeping their work in mint condition is record keeping! Monitoring their progress is not only essential it is also miraculous. Children take quantum leaps…one minute they are plodding and stumbling and frustrated and then suddenly boom…they pop up somewhere unexpected bright-eyed and brilliant!
Planning a term.
Choose a theme, link it to all subjects, and find the stories. This will be challenging and that is half the fun. Over the years I was tempted to veer off track, but I found sticking to the chosen path was fruitful. The essence of Entangled Learning is to follow a route, explore where it branches, and remember that behind every ‘fact’ there is a person with a story. I have set out some themes that I hope will be helpful.
Top Tips
No homework. There is growing evidence it neither enhances learning nor improves grades. It can be stressful and disruptive to family time and children need to play, rest, ponder and yes… be bored. As nature abhors a vacuum so children abhor boredom: nothing focuses creativity better than a dollop of boredom.
What happens in Hometime and Classtime stays in Hometime and Classtime. There will be good days and bad days. When class is over take off your teacher hat!