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I’ll be honest as much as I’d researched about Home Ed, I hadn’t really considered how that would look day to day, during the first lockdown back in 2020, we was thrown into the deep end of homeschooling (not the same as Home Ed!) having work thrown at us left, right and centre, fulled my anxiety. So after trying to replicate school at home, which just didn’t work especially having three kids across two year groups, I took a step back and focused on doing a few things a day with the twins, focusing on play based things and finding fun ways to build up their fine motor skills.
De-schooling is something you hear a lot of around the Home Ed community, this doesn’t mean No education is taking place, this means you’re changing your mindset from the school structure and easing yourself into the Home Ed lifestyle. Stepping away from work books and formal learning, and allowing the children and yourselves the space to figure out how education looks to you, work books may well work for your child, but they won’t work for everyone.
During this time of de-schooling, you could bake, go for walks, do some gardening, decorating in the house, organise toys, watch movies, this all constitutes as learning, it’s how you frame it that counts and also this is pretty much what happens during summer holidays.
For instance:
Baking: involves maths (measuring), English (reading a recipe), science (properties of ingredients changing from one form to another), home economics (health and safety in the kitchen), life skills (how to bake) etc.
Gardening: involves science (how plants grow), English (reading about plant care), life skills (maintaining a garden), maths (measuring plants, how much water is needed), health and safety (what plants are poisonous to eat, how to use garden equipment safely etc).
Watching a movie: English language (discussing what happened), English (writing a review), maths (calculating how long the film is on for).
This isn’t an exhaustive list these are just off the top of my head, learning can happen anywhere once you step back from “school thinking” you will see just how much learning happens in every day situations, which once you start breaking each situation down so much happens without you even realising it.
We follow an unschooling and Montessori method mostly, I watch and see what they are interested in on any given day and find the learning within what they are doing, I will direct them at times and nudge them to use apps like Duolingo abc, or BBC bitesize, but mostly I allow them the autonomy over their own learning. By doing this they’ve found a love for the Titanic and watched countless YouTube videos, documentaries, the film itself, looking through books etc and found so many facts out, built it using lego, drawn lots of pictures, built it in Minecraft, written about it, discussed it at length with each other, us and with anyone that will listen.
Nicci x
