homeschooling

dianna8106

a friend of mine homeschools
i was wondering if anyoe else did it
i imagine u wont get any extra money as u dont haveas many related costs
but wat about buying the learning materials?
anywy wat are ure thoughts

Rachel021967

There are many sites that provide simple worksheets and information for topics. There are 2 national organisations for homeschooling: Education Otherwise and Home Education Advisory Service. They have a library of books that people can borrow and also provide a list of people also home schooling in your local area. There are also local groups that provide opportunities to socialise and learn.
I would advise anybody to do your research, think long and hard about it and if you still want to go ahead with it then go for it.

bonnie_2

I homeschool my dd, it needn't cost you any money as the majority of it you can get free of the internet. You don't have to follow the national curriculum, so it is up to you what and how much you do.

kippers

Sorry to be thick, but i'm really interested...when you are home schooling at secondary school age, how do you know what to teach? and how do you work towards their GCSE's? Also, do you have to be really intelligent to teach your children..how do you get help with this?

Gingernutmeg

Sorry to write such a brief answer, but I'll expand later if I get a chance. At secondary level, curricula/exam syllabi are easily available now, although not all home schooling parents follow them. Not all parents follow curricula, and not all work towards exams. However, if you choose to do that it's becoming much easier to take GCSEs as an external candidate - you can either try to organise it yorself, or you can go through one of the organisations which can do it for you, although this generally costs a lot more. There are online schools, like Interhigh, and correspondence schools, like Oxford Home Learning (there are others too, but I can't recall them off the top of my head). You can also sometimes go through local colleges, who will support external candidates, although this varies from place to place (and head to head lol!)

You don't have to be really intelligent to home school - lots of parents find that they're learning as much as the children! It's amazing how a child can learn when s/he is motivated and supported to do so, and is doing so at their own rate.

You don't however get any financial help should you decide to homeschool, although there are lots of organisations that offer support, local meetings and activities etc, the two I can think of right now being Education Otherwise and HEAS (Home Education Advisory Service). There's a book by Terri Dowty which you might find helpful (Amazon have it) which discusses home ed and gives the views of families who all choose to home school in different ways. The Educational Heretics Press is another thing to google, they have a massive selection of books and cover most of the well knowm HE authors.

Hope this helps!

kippers

Very interesting, thanks again.

shezzy

sorry if this is a bit late, hope people are still looking at this! I'm very interested in home learning as my son suffers with his nerves and hates school, just wondering how you go about teaching at home, where do i start and don't the schools need proof of what you are teaching them and such?

shezzy

Gingernutmeg

Shezzy, I'd suggest looking at Education Otherwise for a start, and HEAS. They have great websites and you should be able to find answers to your questions. There are also lots of books that offer more detailled information about home schooling methods etc - some people use curricula, some don't. I'd recommend having a look at Free Range Education by Terri Dowty, and a book called School is not compulsory, which is published by Education Otherwise. You can get these quite cheaply secondhand, but look for a recent edition of the second book just so that it's up to date with the legal information.

You do have to withdraw your child from school 'officially' - you can't just stop going lol - but the websites offer advice on how to go about that legally. Once your child is withdrawn from school, you no longer have to provide any proof of what you're doing to their old school. However, you *may* have to provide some evidence to your LEA, this tends to vary from area to area, some LEAs are supportive of HE, others are less so. EO and HEAS have details of local groups and if there's one in your area, it'd be well worth joining.

shezzy

Great....thankyou so much for you reply, i will do as you suggested and have a good read about it.

thanx again
shezzy:money: