This is our home education blog, started March 2013. Initially home education was meant to be temporary until September 2013, but home education has been so fun it now seems to be a permanent way forward.
My name is Dominique I home educate my daughters Christina, 12 and Storm, 3. I have two other children who are educated at main stream school Giselle, 10 and Drew, 8.
My husband, Ryan and I ended up deciding with Christina to look at home education as we weren't happy with solution's offered for the bullying Christina was experiencing. She had previously loved school and been happy and outgoing she ended up too afraid to go to school, miserable and crying all the time. Initially home education was going to be temporary until she could go to a different secondary school further away when her sister giselle went up in sept 2013.
However Christina's loved home education so much we've decided to permanently carry on with it and home school her younger sister, storm right from the start.
Initially we used the time table for the school she would go up to and taught those topics: Maths, english, science, history, geography, design and technology, PE, ICT, art, french and german.
Christina approached us and asked if she could stay permanently home educated after only a few weeks as she loved it so much and she also asked if we'd be very upset if maybe she looked into other qualifications as well as igcse's as she really wants to work in textiles possibly as a seamstress/ dressmaker.
So taking this into account we've tried out a different time table taking into account her interests but we still have a fairly structured format and work using the national curriculum.
Our current timetable April 2013-July 2014 is:
Mon: GCSE Textiles Theory work (edexcel)
Tues: Maths. English.
Wed: Practical sewing machine skills day.
(in Sept this will be a lesson at a controlled assessment centre for her controlled unit of her gcse textiles 2hrs 20 weeks, 40 hours total for the unit)
Professional sewing lesson.
Thur: Practical sewing day.
Fri: Science. ICT.
We have joined lots of home education support groups the last few weeks and we're even going on a 2 day trip. In the last few weeks Christina has gone from having 2 friends to about 15.
And we are continuing to meet new people.
We've learnt lots about qualifications and home education and found that many people were starting qualifications at my daughters age of 12 after many hours of research we found most people who decide on their children doing qualifications opt for igcse's as they have no coursework or controlled units. But Textiles doesn't have an option to do igcse so we spoke to edexcel and tracked down our nearest centres where she could take the controlled unit so she could do her gcse textiles.
She's also going to be working on igcse computer studies (http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/middlesec/igcse/subject?assdef_id=844) as we discovered the ICT igcse has a practical part where as computer studies is all exam based.
We've reccently started using conquer maths (http://www.conquermaths.com/) for our maths lessons instead of our maths textbooks and TES resources (We use TES for a lot of lesson resources in all topics: http://www.tes.co.uk/secondary-teaching-resources/).
Christina has decided some topics that she'd be interested in doing qualifications in:
1.gcse textiles (edexcel- http://www.edexcel.com/quals/gcse/gcse09/dt/Textiles/Pages/default.aspx).
2.igcse computer studies (http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/middlesec/igcse/subject?assdef_id=844).
We will use edexcel for most of Christina's exam's as their exam centre for private candidates is nearer to us than cambridge's however edexcel don't offer computer studies so this is why we're using cambridge for computer studies.
After these two she's interested in:
For these we will most likely also use edexcel (http://www.edexcel.com/i-am-a/student/qualifications/Pages/International-GCSE-specifications.aspx)
3.igcse biology.
4.human biology.
5.igcse chemistry.
6.igcse physics.
7.igcse business studies.
8.igcse french.
9.igcse german.
10.igcse english.
11.igcse maths.
12. City and guilds in dress making and sewing machine.
Although we've set out quite a formal, curriculum based approach and been quite methodical, within that we have flexibility in every topic and only go at her pace and remember to have fun. If a trip out or meeting other home schoolers comes up we can be flexible and look at our detailed weekly timetable planned ahead for the next year and rearrange what we're doing.
So onwards and upwards we are stepping forward on our home education adventure.
Storm is likely to have a less formal style of home education following a more interest led approach at least until she's 7.
I will be posting up blogs and so will Christina she will be posting up blogs on her home education, hopefully she can share all her likes and dislikes, interests and progress as well this hopefully blogging will improve her spelling for english :)
From
Dominique.
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