There are many reasons to start homeschooling.
Our homeschool journey began on a whim. The idea occurred to me when I was up a ladder, hanging some curtains. My five children and I had just moved from England to Botswana, and they were not happy at their new school. Homeschool was intended to be a one-term stopgap until I sought a permanent solution. If anyone had told me they would graduate to excellent colleges in America and the UK from our kitchen table under a tree in the Okavango Delta I would have rolled about laughing. Impossible. Me? You must be joking. I wouldn't know where to start. I'm not a teacher. It's not uncommon for the first steps into homeschool to be driven by circumstances beyond our control. Whatever your reason for trying homeschool there are two qualities that are essential for success. Curiosity and patience.
Being the font of all wisdom is not a requirement but being a lifelong learner is essential. My power as a teacher is my curiosity. I have a rag-bag mind full of colours and valuable snippets. Building a programme for a child is like creating a patchwork formed by individual stories and patterns. From primary age seven to seventeen our learning was always project-based. Whatever the topic I had to make sure I had the connecting threads in my hand: in maths, history, literature and science. The hard part of homeschooling is outside of class. Of course, the children would find their own paths, but a good guide must have a route mapped out.
Good preparation enables flexibility for mixed-age classes I don’t want to present a rose-tinted story. Working with mixed ages has benefits, but younger members of the team can feel either left behind or pressured to keep up at a rate that is not in line with their developmental stage. I made mistakes and there were hiccups. Three of the four children were close in age and thus grouped together. For the youngest in the trio this was not always helpful and my inexperience as a teacher concerned me. I sought advice from primary school teachers in our local town who offered me excellent guidance. Guidance and inspiration from other teachers remain indispensable for my development as a teacher.
We began and ended every day as a team. Our first class was always ‘new words’ and we wrote sentences and read out sentences using our vocabulary. It was a joy and there was huge competition for the funniest or most inventive use of language. It was as much a part of the DNA of our day as the end of the morning shared book. I read aloud a shared book or play to my children until they left for college. It was comforting, relaxing and unifying. Books were read for pleasure and not analysed with a fine-tooth comb. They developed as analytical thinkers under their own steam and as a result of family discussion or contemplation rather than a formulaic dissection of text.
When they were younger they were asked to write imaginatively or to write in the style of an author of their choice or to translate a poem into colloquial English. They explored different rhetorical styles for fun and gradually found their voice. As they got older I set formal essays, and by then they were writing fluidly and painlessly.
The youngest member of the tribe didn’t officially ‘come to the table’ until he was seven. Before that, he joined hands-on science classes, end of the day storytime, and he was always welcome to join classes if they interested him, but he received no formal schooling until he was seven. By then he was keen to become part of the gang and he learned to read in a week. His writing took a bit longer but starting later by UK standards did not impede his progress. His general knowledge was outstanding and his work ethic was excellent. He wanted to do well and he was mature enough to cope with the discipline of a school morning.
Timetable and structure. My children were homeschooled and not unschooled for several reasons: If a child doesn’t know about something how can they ask questions? We were living in our lion research camp in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or access to the internet; they needed support because our resources were limited to our ever-expanding library, the wilderness and our many visitors. I was teaching children of different ages and having a structure was helpful when devising classes. We were working ( the children participated in the research by choice). Our camp was tented and we lived an outdoor life. In the cold winter mornings, we worked from 8.30 am t 1.00 pm. In the boiling summer, we worked from 7.00 - 11.30 am. Short school days, rich in content were productive. On the rare days when the kids were not able to focus we dropped tools and I let them run free. This happened on average once a term and never created any problems.
The children played fair. They could see I worked hard to prepare for classes. I always marked their work on time and made sure lessons were interesting or fun. In return, they committed to school and dug in. I loved teaching them. If teaching is not fun for you then please don’t do it. Homeschool is not for everyone and if there is conflict it simply won’t work.
We had three golden rules.
No homework until they were fourteen. Afternoons were free time. They could play, explore, chill out, come and find the lions with me, do chores in camp or feed their curiosity with self-study.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. If they were being plonkers at breakfast and I was cross that was never carried into school time. Equally a bad day at school (of course that happened) never continued into home life.
I would try my hardest to make classes, fun, interesting and surprising. They would be present ( mindful) and engaged.
Those rules were sacrosanct. Of course, we had good days and bad days that’s just life, but we never had any major issues. If someone was stroppy it was usually because they hadn’t understood something, or I had done a bad job at planning.
To follow and curriculum or not to follow a curriculum? The whole point of home school is to be free from the constraints of a syllabus. Having said that it is very helpful to use various curricula when devising programmes. When I was teaching my children I found what I needed from South African, Uk, Australian and USA curricula. To this day I use resources from multiple countries, in particular from the USA and Australia. For guidance, I looked at GCSE courses, but I never followed them by the letter. None of my children took GCSE’s. They were constraining: reading the same books and poems for two years was ludicrous. Equally uninspiring was covering a few isolated periods in history with no sense of context. I used the excellent USA SAT world history curriculum as a guide. It offers a global perspective, a glorious flow and a powerful sense of chronology. I never patronised my children, and I used primary and secondary school texts across the board. Young children are able to grasp tough concepts and older children benefit from the clarity of primary texts. I mixed and matched all the time and I still do. The rule I set myself was connection, connection, connection!
Enjoy the adventure. We are happy to answer any queries and we will do our best to offer support.