If you deregister your child from school, rather than home educating from the start, it is a very big change of lifestyle. Like any change if lifestyle it will take some time to adjust, for both you and your child or children.
A note on language: In my posts, I refer to “homeschooling”. In the UK, the correct term for educating your child at home is “home Educating”, with homeschooling referring to a child doing work at home that has been set by school. I use the the term homeschooling in my posts because many people who are new to home educating will use the term homeschooling when searching online and I want to make sure they can find the information.
When we first started home education I very much had “school at home” in mind. This was partly because I thought home education would temporary but it was also because I didn’t really know any other way. While school at home might suit some children, it certainly didn’t suit mine. Despite that being clear from pretty early on, it took me some time to change my approach.
It’s really hard to let go of the idea that our children must be siting at a desk working in order to be learning. It’s even harder to let go of the idea that they should be learning all of the subjects on the curriculum. Hardest of all is letting go of the idea that if we don’t force them to “do learning” they will never want to learn again.
Luckily for my son, I am a researcher, whatever I do in life, I tend to research it thoroughly and that meant I was exposed to lots of different ideas about how home education can look. If it is still the early days for you, in fact even if it isn’t, I recommend spending some time finding out about different approaches.
You can do your research pretty easily by spending some time in the many home education Facebook groups that exist. We’ve explored various approaches in our time home educating and as such, are members of Facebook groups about the full spectrum of approaches, from highly structured to completely unschooling. Just search Facebook for “Home Education” and you’ll find plenty of groups. If you want an even wider selection, you can search homeschooling which will give you lots of American groups too.
If you prefer books, then I recommend Radical Home Education by Susan J Walklate or Free Range Education by Terri Dowty. These both include stories from different home educators about how they do things. I would also recommend Changing Our Minds by Naomi Fisher to help you think more about learning beyond school.
It’s really important that your child is onboard with whatever approach you want to try. I say try because you will need to try different things in order to find out what works for you. Home education doesn’t work the same way as school, in school there are systems in place to essentially force most young people to comply with what is required. Those systems don’t exist on your home and if you try to bring them about you are likely to end up with a miserable child who resents you.
While they need to be onboard, just asking your child how they want to do things doesn’t usually work. Asking them what they want learn will probably be met with a shrug of the shoulders. Children who have been in school for any length of time are used to being told what to do and usually have no idea how to take charge of their own learning. They will likely need some guidance from you.
In our case, if I asked my son if he wanted to do anything, the response was always “I don’t know”. I got thoroughly sick of those words, I can promise you. I changed my approach to “we’re going to try this” and unless he actually objected, we gave it a go. If he didn’t like it, that was fine, we didn’t do it again. While lots of things were tried once and never done again, we did find things that worked.
Eventually we found a rhythm that worked for us both with a mixture of activities that he was interested in. It took time, probably a year, to really settle into home education but we learnt a lot in that time. From both the things that we tried, and about ourselves and what worked for us.
When we first started experimenting with different approaches, I had to have faith that he was still learning and that if he decided he needed qualifications in the future, he would be able to pick up formal learning again. If he was in school he would now be in year 10. He is currently working towards a couple of GCSEs and a BTEC in ICT.
The break from formal learning has helped him let go of the negativity he felt about it at education. When he was in school, he couldn’t understand why he was learning how rivers were formed or what the causes of World War 2 were and as such, had no motivation to learn. Now that he is studying towards qualifications he is either interested in, or will help him in the future, he is motivated to learn.
I guess what I’m really trying to say in this post is, don’t be afraid to drop the formal stuff if it isn’t working for your child and there’s every chance they’ll pick it up again when it becomes meaningful to them. Experiment, and keep experimenting, until you find what works for you.