Issue 12 Autumn 2014
Education Outside School Home Education In Action!
To School or Not To School Is That The Question? by Jai Daniels-Freestone
Tips for Starting Home Education
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by Ross Mountney
Your Must Have Your Hands Full! Home educating a large family, by Paula Cleary
Minecraft by Abby Davis
Who Was John Holt? Plus Activities, Reviews and more!
Home Education & EOS Magazine Education is compulsory in the UK for children but school is not. Many families choose to home educate instead, enjoying the freedom to create a personalised education experience, with no constraints of time, place or curriculum. Education Outside School Magazine is here to support those families, celebrating the myriad wonderful methods they use and providing a window into this community that chooses an Education Outside School.
Who We Are EOS was founded by Lorena and Jane, two home educating mothers from the East of England, to be the kind of magazine they would have loved to read when they first started home educating.
There is no one way to home educate, no ‘set of instructions’. Families forge their own paths, using different approaches and resources as they go along. Their greatest resource is often the home educating community - questions are asked and ideas shared daily. This magazine comes from the community, being run by home educators with contributions from the community.
Lorena is home educating a son aged 10 and a daughter aged 4.
If you are a home educator, or thinking about it, you’ll find among these pages encouragement, support and ideas. If you don’t home educate, perhaps by reading EOS you’ll enjoy a glimpse into a different way of living and learning, leaving with a better understanding of what home education is and how it works.
Jane is home educating a daughter aged 13 and a son aged 15; she also has a 20 year old son and 18 year old daughter who were home educated.
We hope you enjoy it!
Education Outside School C.I.C. Education Outside School is a Community Interest Company (CIC). A CIC is a special type of limited company which exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders. We work for the benefit of the home educating community in the UK; supporting, encouraging and providing resources. Any surplus generated will be invested back into the company to further support the home educating community in whatever ways are viable and practical. For more information, please see our website.
Lorena and Jane run EOS together, with the help of the many wonderful contributors who write for them - see more about this issue’s writers on page 6.
Get In Touch Content Editor Lorena Hodgson lorena@educationoutsideschool.co.uk Managing Editor Jane Levicki jane@educationoutsideschool.co.uk Advertising advertising@educationoutsideschool.co.uk
Education Outside School is an independent organisation, not allied with any other home education group or organisation. We do not purport to represent home educators in the UK or elsewhere. Any opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the editors. Registered in England, No. 08824730. Registered Office: 26 Priestgate, Peterborough, PE1 1WG (not to be used for correspondence) www.educationoutsideschool.co.uk
@EOSMagazine EducationOutsideSchool www.pinterest.com/eoscic 3
Submissions We are delighted to receive original articles about all aspects of home education. Under normal circumstances we will only publish articles that have not previously been published elsewhere. If you have an idea for an article, please check with us first regarding its suitability - email Content Editor Lorena: lorena@educationoutsideschool.co.uk The editors have the final say in deciding if contributions are printed and in which issue. There will sometimes be a need for editing contributions, for reasons of space, clarity, brevity, tone or otherwise.
Photos We use genuine home ed photos when possible, ie ones displaying home educating families in action! Sometimes, though, we don’t have one that’s appropriate in which case we’ll find a photo available on a Creative Commons licence which allows us free use and we’ll credit the photographer.
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If you are sending in an article or an activity and would like to include photos they’ll need to be at least 300dpi Please only submit photos you have taken yourself, or those which you have permission to use. By submitting a photo you are guaranteeing that you have obtained the permission of any persons portrayed in the photo, or in the case of children, the permission of their parent/ guardian, for the photo to be featured in the magazine. If you have any questions regarding photos please email jane@educationoutsideschool.co.uk
Advertising We are delighted to feature adverts for products and services relevant to UK home educators. In the first instance, please see our website to download our Media Pack. www.educationoutsideschool.co.uk
Download Previous Issues Issues 1-10 available to download free of charge at www.educationoutsideschool.co.uk 4
Please direct any advertising queries to: advertising@educationoutsideschool.co.uk The appearance of an advert does not imply endorsement by EOS Magazine. As with anything, please make your own checks to ensure suitability for your own family COPYRIGHT All attempts have been made to find copyright owners and are acknowledged if found; if you think yours has been breached please email us.
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This Issue’s Contributors Ross Mountney Ross home educated her two daughters, both now grown. She is the author of: ‘Learning Without School: Home Education’, ‘A Funny Kind of Education’ and ‘Mumhood’, all of which are available via her website www.rossmountney.wordpress.com You can also find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RossMountneyAuthor
Jai Daniels-Freestone Jai was home educated herself and now home educates her own children. She also runs the Facebook group The Freedom Journey, which is for “Home Educators, Parents, Teachers and Others who in general are interested in the Care and Freedom of children and alternative ways of Parenting and Educating.”
Paula CLeary Paula lives in Cambridgeshire where she and her husband home educate their four sons and baby daughter. She happily admits she is making it up as she goes along, and is deeply committed to freedom in education. Paula has also written for Juno magazine.
Abby Davis Originally from the Midlands, I now live in sunny Horsham, W.Sussex, where I can be found reading, writing, gardening, flying kites, watching comedy and generally having a good time. I have a son aged 6 who has always been home educated.
Alison Botting Alison lives in East Anglia where she home educates her children and plays a very active part in the local home educating community.
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Contents A Few Words from... Jai Daniels-Freestone
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Keeping Your HE Fresh by Ross Mountney
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Tips for Starting Home Education by Ross Mountney
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Keeping On Top Of Things Can you Home Ed, keep a tidy house AND keep your sanity?
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To School Or Not To School – is that the question? by Jai Daniels-Freestone
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Old Time Cooking as History Lesson!
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Minecraft by Abby Davis
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Four Ways to Recycle a Plastic Bottle into Something Useful! by Ali Botting
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Who Was John Holt?
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“You must have your hands full!” by Paula Cleary
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Researching your family history by Ken Abbott
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Reviews
Websites and Groups
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Tips for Starting Home Education! by Ross Mountney Autu mn is often a time when parents begin their home education journey. So this article offers some starter’s tips, although others further into their journey might find some helpful ideas too! At the start After that first flush of excitement blows over you have to face the reality of what to do each day. This can flow naturally from normal daily life and activities, engaging your children with what you’re doing, or making, creating and playing, using opportunities to extend their knowledge and skills as you go. But if you’re returning to home based learning after using school you may need some time for readjustment because it will be a massive change, both to personal routines and to the way you approach learning. It helps to understand that: • There’s no rush! • Your family will need to adjust emotionally, dynamically, and require a period to settle into new routines. It takes time.
• Children learn happily from whatever they are doing, from things they enjoy, from things they choose to do, from play, from cooking, from creating and inventing, from gaming, from being outside, from swimming etc • All these other activities and different approaches successfully educate whether that’s interactive learning online by themselves, socialising with others, conversations, visits and field trips, YouTube, etc • Contact with others and reading some of the great HE blogs will help you understand varied approaches. There was an article in the Spring 2013 issue of EOS about Structured and Autonomous approaches and one in the following issue on How Children Learn which might help. • Being relaxed about education and learning is far more effective than being intense about it.
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Children learn happily from whatever they are doing Resources You might think that resources for home learning are going to be expensive, or you need a store of costly books. However, there are many free ‘lessons’, activities, printables and clips online. A good place to start is on the BBC Learning website and Channel 4 Learning. Click round the site, both by subjects and Year, and follow the links. Some of the adult learner sites are useful too – with home educating, you don’t have to stick to age limits! There are interactive activities, games, and clips to explore. These activities are all valuable. The traditional idea that formal academic exercises in workbooks or on sheets are the only ‘proper’ ways to learn is outdated. The most effective learning is when children are engaged. If that engagement is physical – like with field trips or workshops for example - even better. Get out in the environment and see what there is; as well as libraries, many nature reserves, museums, exhibitions, or historical sites are free. Another valuable resource is YouTube – where most youngsters go to find anything out these days. Type in ‘long division’ and you’ll get a selection of demonstrations to see what I mean. Historical films or natural history programmes or documentaries are also a rich learning source. They 14
© Jeffrey www.flickr.com/photos/jb912
can be a great starting point for discussion and further research or in support of a topic. Other places to find resources are social media groups and forums like Facebook and Yahoo. Some share lists of free printables or other resources they’ve found useful. You need to be selective; there are a variety of different needs catered for and it’s fine to be discerning about which suits you best. Check out blogs too. Many home educating families are so generous in sharing activities, craft work, experiments, their ideas or curriculum and their educational philosophies they provide a wealth of ideas. I’ve collated a few here on my blog: http://rossmountney.wordpress.com/links/
Educational Philosophy Don’t get too hung up about this - it sounds much grander than you think and you will have one. It’s just you probably haven’t formalised it yet. Your educational philosophy is what you think about education, what you think it should be, what you want it to be for your children and how you envisage providing it. Those parents who’ve been considering home education right from early on have probably already formulated some ideas. But many see education like schools do; as
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“You must have your hands full!” by Paula Cleary 26
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Home educating one or two children is a full-time job, so how do you cope when there are three or four children at home? Or, in my case, five?
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f you are wondering if it can be done, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’ In this article, I’m going to show you a glimpse of our life, and share some of the tips I have found over the last decade of home educating my growing clan! I believe learning should be fun, so I suggest creating a home that enables you all to have as much fun as possible. Be flexible about your home and how you use the rooms, so that they can be enjoyed in different ways, at different times of the year to suit the children’s current needs and interests. If it’s been raining all week and one child is ill for example, the others can get bored. It’s times like this that jigging the house around has been most useful. Pushing furniture aside and creating an impromptu bowling alley or rollerskating rink can transform the mood of everyone and be lots of fun! Similarly, if everyone suddenly gets the bug to build train tracks, or goes mad for painting, or some other thing that sweeps the mood, make room for it if you can. Our living room was an art room for three months that was completely taken over with painting, then turned back into a cosy living space in time for entertaining 14 people at Christmas! Being playful with your space and rearranging it to suit a current hobby or project will make for happy kids. Take a similar approach to the garden. Providing an open ended play space will keep multiple children of different ages entertained. Planks of wood, rubber tyres, pallets or crates – all things that can be arranged and rearranged and used in different ways by different children. One child might build a den and another a skate park. You get the idea. Nature is also a wonderful balancer for kids. Each child can gain from time spent in a forest or in a meadow or at the beach, and each will learn something different, according to their age, interests and skills. Simple den building can evolve over the years into bushcraft skills of a more complicated nature for older children. Our
oldest three boys have just come back from a bushcraft camp where they learnt penknife skills, how to put up a tepee, make themselves ‘invisible’ to animals, make Atlatl spears etc. Children of all ages love being outside, and our trips to the woods will often involve one child on their bike, another climbing trees, another taking pictures, another simply happy to chat or walk along in a daydream. Sometimes when we all feel a bit like we’re getting on top of each other too much, nature just smoothes it all away and children forget their squabbles. I am amazed by what the children learn through play. Take building for example. Our guys have progressed in their understanding of engineering by the evolution of construction toys we have provided for them. When the boys were babies they played with wooden cubes and rough wooden blocks in smoothed, curvy, organic shapes. Then we progressed to plain wooden blocks, in a variety of shapes, and a pack of large Jenga blocks. The open ended construction possibilities meant that each child’s imagination would lead them to play in completely different ways, to construct different things with them. Somewhere along the line I bought a huge sack of second-hand Duplo and then one day I was in a shop that sold a boxed Duplo engineering kit with cogs and pulleys and simple instructions for 8 or so moving models. Before long, the boys moved onto Lego and they were hooked. Soon the house was taken over with endless constructions that have become more mature and complex over the years. Seven years on and the Lego obsession is still going strong. Our eldest now replicates things he has seen out and about – recently he made a fully working two penny shove machine! The five year old skipped through the Duplo phase much more quickly, because he wants to do what his big brothers are doing, his Lego interest is also driven by what they like. If he were an only child or an only boy, I’m sure he’d probably still be more interested in 5 year old type play. The baby is not yet at the crawling stage, but about 18 months ago, I had had enough Lego underfoot and now it is all in their bedrooms! This will help when the baby is mobile and so less likely to pick up those small pieces. So what else do we do to make home ed work with a large family? We work as a team and have regular family discussions on everyone’s happiness and needs and wants. We try to work out reasonable solutions to make everyone happy, because if everyone is happy, they the house runs smoothly and everyone learns more easily too. We give hugs freely and say sorry when we need to say sorry. When the children get upset, we work hard to create peace as soon as possible. We do regular evaluations of what our goals and needs are. We ask ourselves if changes need to be made. We ask for help if
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Four Ways to Recycle a Plastic Bottle into Something Useful! Most of us tend to collect a few of these, whether they’ve been bought for the fizzy drinks or the water. Ali Botting shows us how to use them in amazing ways
Ali says: Tip for cutting the plastic bottles: a lot of people use craft knives which can be hard to control on the slippery plastic and can easily slice a finger or hand. I have found the easiest and safest way is to first pierce the bottle with a skewer making a small hole and insert the tip of a pair of scissors into this hole and then cut out the shape you require.
Bird Scarer/Wind Sock You will need: • A large plastic bottle • Coloured plastic carrier bags • Staples • String or twine • A stick or cane. One bottle will give you several bird scarers.
Cut the base and neck off the bottle so you are left with a tube. From this cut round the tube to give you circular bands like bangles approximately 5cm wide. Using a mixture of different coloured plastic carrier bags cut them into strips. There are two ways of attaching the strips onto the plastic band, you can either staple each one on or if they are long enough tie them round the band securely. Once you have covered the band, take three pieces of string of the same length and again either staple or tie them at equal distances apart round the band. With the loose ends of the string tie together and around a stick or cane which can then be pushed into the ground. We found it worked best when the cane was pushed in at an angle.
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“When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” Jean Piaget
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