Homeschooling Discussion & Experiences #1

There's a Mum at Montessori that I just discovered is hoping to home school as well and she has a few books that she says are great for research that she is going to lend me. I think they are Montessori ones, but once I get them and have a look I'll let you know if they are worth a read and what they are :)

Now that I know it's a possibility I've gotten rather excited about it as well. I plan on basically sticking with what I am doing for now also and just revising it over time as I learn more about home schooling. I only recently realised that because DS is born 2 days after the cut off, he isn't due to start school until a year later than I thought. Even with 20 months between DS and DD1, and only 14 months between the two girls, it still works out that they are meant to start a year after each other. That gives me at least a year longer than I thought to make a decision as to whether to continue his schooling myself or if I want to try him at an actual school.

We did a "pre enrolment" for him at a particular private school we were interested in, and I'll keep his details there as well as enrol the girls, but it will be just to keep our options open. DH was never sold on the idea of a private school for primary years anyway, but I was impressed with the year 11-12 results the school gets and concerned that if you didn't have them in primary there, that it wouldn't be easy to get them in at secondary level. If we homeschool and the kids want to do their higher education at the private school (which has an amazing range of subjects available) then my hope is that they will be advanced enough academically that it makes sense for the school to take them to boost their school's year 11-12 results ;)

Thanks! I haven't read any books yet, so will be good! There is some good Montessori blogs I follow too.

Oh that's lucky, you have longer until you have to register or anything then!

If you HS and then sent them to school later chances are they would be advanced! Research says that HS kids do the same or better in all areas than their same aged peers at school (and this is not dependent on level of education of parents, income, or teaching style!) :)

Hi all :) Don't want to hijack, but I thought I would mention my latest discovery - I am sure I am just slow on the uptake, but was I was pretty surpised nonetheless.
I found out that there are a few Steiner High Schools in Melbourne, and several in NSW. I don't know much more than that, haven't looked into it, but thought I would mention it here, as there have been questions in a few of the homeschool/unschool threads lately about what happens WRT the high school years.

Anyway, just thought it may be of interest to some people, as it seems to be the closest thing to natural learning or homeschooling I have found since sending DD to Steiner.

That's great LS. Wish there was one near me! How is your DD liking Steiner??

Does anyone do Waldorf/Steiner Homeschooling?? I read a blog by a Waldorf HSing Mum and I often agree with lots of the things she says and love some of the ideas!! Definitely think I will include some of them, e.g. circle time. And really think having a rhythm is so important too.

Hello to everyone in this group!
I have just spent the entire weekend back reading this thread and now I'm finally ready to post and say hello!
I am mum to three boys: DS1 will be 7 in Feb, DS2 turned 3 in July, and DS3 joined our family in April this year.
I am about to complete my first official (as in registered) year of homeschooling.
I thought I would join this group and would perhaps be able to answer questions some of you with younger children have about registration (we are in NSW), getting started, and homeschooling with a newborn!
I would classify myself as eclectic. I do use some workbooks but also try to follow DS1 interests as well. Certainly with a newborn in the house we had periods of natural learning and periods of directed learning. I relied on workbooks and seated work more than I wanted to or planned to this year and that was mainly due to being heavily pregnant for the first term and then adjusting to life with a newborn and dealing with many house guests (I'm from the US originally so had family visiting) as well.

Some background on me... I am a trained teacher and worked as a casual both in the states and here in Australia. I also worked in a long day care centre for a year here in Australia and these experiences all play a part in why I have chosen to home school. Hubby is Indian so we are a multi-cultural family and our homeschool group that we attend weekly is also very multi-cultural as is our church even though it is very small... on a good day we have less than 30 in attendance yet the following countries are represented: Australia (born here), America, Canada, Indonesia, South Africa, South America, and New Zealand... I'm quite sure there are some I'm missing!

We have a yearly pass to Taronga zoo as well as Museum Victoria which gives us access to the Powerhouse Museum and Australian Museum in Sydney, Wollongong Science Centre and Questacon in Canberra.

We are certainly not a middle class or high income family as I stay home full-time and hubby runs his own computer business. The amount of work my husband has at any given time ebbs and flows and is not necessarily predictable so we do make sacrifices to keep me home full time and therefore we home school as inexpensively as possible.

One of the biggest things I've seen come out of this year is that DS1 (6yo) and DS2 (3yo) have become great play mates as well as friends and spend hours each day making up stories and playing together and I'm just not sure that would have happened if my eldest had been away at school 6 hours a day 5 days a week! But that is just my thought and opinion!

I'm looking forward to this thread and hope to enjoy getting to know you all a bit better!

Nice to see you join us here too Mylitta :)
I LOVE the fact that there is no pressure or time restraints on the time that I get to spend with my babies & that we can choose IF and WHEN they go to school. But we are going to home educate one year at a time.

We are already in touch with families near us & will be joining them next year on excursions, events etc, park meet ups etc. very exciting :)

Thanks for posting lilprecious!! Sounds like your first year went well. Will be great to continue to read about your experiences!!

I just finished this book that has just come out called 'Love Learn Live' by Csilla Tottszer, and thought I'd come in here and recommend it! It was great! Great to see how simple homeschooling can be and how well it can work and have a look into her family and see how well her kids turned out :)

Here's a review:

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Love Learn Live
by Csilla Tottszer
Csilla dismantles the myth that you have to be exceptional to educate your child: loving, learning and living together really works.
reviewed by Beverley Paine

As a poor migrant child from a restrictive communist eastern European country Csilla's early education in Australia was not without problems. Plagued by misguided prejudice, Csilla made the best of school, seeking out and enjoying different experiences where she could before meeting and marrying the man of her dreams and starting a planned family of four children. Home educating their children was her husband's idea: the idea was alien and unworkable to her and she worried that her children would experience the difference she had felt keenly as a child. Like most of us, she also lacked the confidence and did not see herself as a teacher.
Csilla dived into the deep end, homeschooling one of her stepsons, who, at the time was 11 years old and considered himself an average student. Back then, the Queensland home education registration process was onerous and aimed at putting families off from choosing this option. Distance education through the state system but charged at private schooling rates was offered by the Department of Education, or families needed their homeschooling programs overseen by a qualified teacher.
Self-doubt plagued Csilla's early homeschooling life with her children, as it does most of us! She relates how having children “triggers the huge process of knowing self more deeply.. [and] that homeschooling takes this process from being a trickle to a waterfall”! Not convinced it would work, and without the internet to reassure and guide her, and unable to find the support she needed from other homeschoolers nearby, she availed herself of support provided by a pioneering Australian homeschooling family who were providing curriculum resources. Csilla had to accept herself in order to see the potential within her to successfully homeschool her children: she consciously worked to develop the confidence she needed. I loved her statement in Chapter 2: “But I wouldn't be as brave as to even hint at absolutes because the variables are endless.” This is so true and an excellent piece of advice to anyone just starting out on the home educating journey. She also alerts the reader that this is what makes home education both scary and challenging, the fact that there are no boundaries or limits to what you and your children can learn from home!
There is considerable research amassed on the reasons and characteristics of home educators, including quality research by Australian academics. In her own way, Csilla gives a potted introduction to why families find themselves home educating their children. Her examination of the practical aspects derived from different homeschooling situations draws on her acute observations, experiences as a parent and support person to other homeschooling parents.
Throughout Csilla's book there is a continuing theme: that home education builds a sense of community, first within the family, that broadens and builds better relationships between people in general. This is a theme I've often written about myself, a totally unexpected bonus from home educating my children, but which, upon examination should have been expected because it simply makes sense. Of course children who are given the time and attention needed to thrive will respond in a similar fashion, extending that courtesy and respect to others. Her chapter on socialisation, although included later in the book, is excellent and adequately addresses these concerns.
And her practical approach to home education continues. Her advice to “do less, but cover it more thoroughly” regarding curriculum is spot on! She urges readers to “keep each child's individual learning style and interest front and centre and finally try hard to stop yourself obsessing about getting measured outcomes - timing is vital.” Csilla favours a back to basics concentrated maths and English focused curriculum with personal and family interests, life skills and experiences filling in the complexity of learning across subjects covered by state and national curricula.
Csilla's book is a wonderful description of how homeschooling unfolded for her family and was successful. It pin points the differences between learning at home and learning at school and she offers these as compelling reasons for the success of home education in her situation. What I take most from Csilla is her ability to bring it back to reality, what works on a practical level for busy families: how learning really happens at home. It will defuse the traditional ‘school-at-home' ideas parents new to the concept have and which get in the way of building early home education confidence. This ‘nuts and bolts' of how learning occurs at home is reassuring and human: homeschooling parents arent super-parents with extraordinary abilities and don't need to be.
Readers will enjoy the addition of comments from each of Csilla's and Tim's home educated children, and wonderfully welcome, honest and frank account from the perspective of Tim the dad, a voice often missing in books on home education!

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You can read the first chapter online on the website which it the book name dot com dot au :)

bumpity bump.

Would love to hear everyone's plans for the new year!

We won't be starting anything 'formal' (i.e. reading, writing) until DD1 is 6, unless she shows interest sooner. Just continuing with normal life which includes lots of learning opportunities anyway!! I am just constantly amazed at how much kids learn all on their own! DD1 got a flower press for Christmas and we had to leave the flowers in there for 4 days to dry. She asked me every day if we could check yet and I reminded her we had to wait 4 days. On the second day she said to me 'We've already waited 2 days, so that means we have to wait 2 more days'. I was a little shocked, that's some very early maths! LOL. We are starting up a veggie garden soon so I am imagining all the wonderful natural learning that will be going on!

I'm finding that DS and DD1 are most interested in nature science stuff at the moment. They still talk about the butterflies we had all the time. I'd love to tadpoles/frogs next and I think I found somewhere I can catch some tadpoles, but I need to see if I can find a tank to borrow from someone :) We have a bunch of frog stuff ready to use, like a gorgeous wooden puzzle that has layers that show the frog lifecycle. We also had one for butterflies, and I can't wait to use our chicken/egg one too :D

Kyson has started counting all on his own which has amazed me. I thought that his addition was impressive, but when we were changing the number on our advent calender he would hold up his fingers and count them, then put one down, count them again and tell me how many days until Christmas. I was shocked! It's amazing how much they can learn from observation and just everyday activities :D

How is everyone going?

We have now told most of our family we will be homeschooling and I have only had positive reactions!!!! I was really shocked. My family especially can be a little...no, a lot...judgemental! Although we haven't told the ones who I think will react worst yet, LOL. We have told our parents and siblings and some friends. Everyone has been supportive! Nothing negative! DH's family especially thought it was a logical step and said they think we are doing a great job and we would do a better job than school anyway. So that was really nice to hear from them. Some of them are keen to be involved as well, like I had hoped. I think they can bring so much experience and the girls have so much to learn from them, it will be great!! I also see closer relationships with extended family than what may have been if we'd gone with school.

Overall, I'm really excited now! I think this is going to be great. So looking forward to our life of living and learning together and all of the experiences they will have. The support from everyone just tops it off nicely :)

Didn't realise there was a thread here about this! Amazing to see so many people on the same path as we are. We have actually just confirmed in ourselves that we will be homeschooling. We have two daughters who are almost four and one. DD1 currently attends a play based community kindy 2-3 days a week which we will be continuing for the remainder of the year as long as she is happy there as we are very comfortable with their ideals. We are not sure if we will send our youngest to kindy too when the time comes, guess we will see how it feels closer to then as it is years away still. If school was more like kindy - hands on and child directed, less formal and structured, more play focused then we might not have decided to forgo it and whilst there are schools more inline with those thoughts, nothing feels quite as right as injecting learning directly into our life organically.

One of our main concerns is finances as we never planned for me to be out of the workforce so long and we will want to supplement with extra curricular activities like music and dance and team sport and art and language where appropriate and be able to access materials and events and such without worrying about cost but it is something that is important to us so we will make it work, always have lol.

We also haven't yet told people our decision so that will be interesting. I'm psyching myself up to tell my parents this weekend haha figure I will start with something like "I'm sure you're used to being surprised and confronted by our parenting choices by now but this is a big one - we are homeschooling"...

Came across a great little blog today from a Montessori homeschooling mama - lots of great ideas! Just google The natural child learning community.

Hi all!

So, I finally talked to DH (briefly, but it's a start) about homeschooling. Basically, he, like me, is undecided. We both seem to be on the fence as to if we want to send DS to school or homeschool. So, seeing as DS wouldn't be starting school until next year, we're going to use this year to research both avenues as best we can to make a decision. I'll take DS along to pre-kinder, but also start reading up on homeschooling and look into the local homeschooling groups in our area.

For those that have done a lot of reading up on homeschooling, what books/websites/resources would you recommend as a starting point? TIA :)

JF- Yay! So exited you're doing it too! We will be able to have excursions and things together!

Tanstar- Thanks, that's great.

Sterla- I have lots of things. On my phone at the moment but when we're home from holidays I'll give you some links :)

Just came across this and had to share: Why I Hate School But Love Education||Spoken Word - YouTube

Wow, I really liked that. He described how I was feeling when I was at uni actually...

That was neat. I've been thinking about this a lot and writing about it a lot too. Some people here might have read my blog, link in my sig. I'm currently working on another piece; the why I didn't want to homeschool lol.

Testing makes no sense to me at all and it is such a cornerstone of schooling. How often do you ever need to know something without being able to ask a peer or research? What is the actual point of testing? Because all it is really teaching and practicing is your short term memory, it literally does not matter what is on those tests because that becomes so irrelevant 5 minutes after you walk out the test room. This isn't how you remember things, this isn't how you learn things. Memory is built off of connections, millions of different ways in which you file the same information so that you can find it again in millions of different ways -- the more connections, the stronger and quicker the ability to remember -- studying forces temporary connections, testing tests those temporary connections, not the knowledge you know just those soon to become irrelevant connections you've made. To learn, to really learn you need to have that information built off of many different channels.

What I am currently doing at this age is have a general idea that I just keep in mind to inject into play so for example last week was 'balance' so we did work balancing as people which led to learning about our muscles and bones, building things that balanced (or didn't) so learning about structural needs, balancing see-saw like contraptions which led to learning about the importance of not only weight but the distribution of weight (triangles were great for this) and things like balancing the number of items between two or three piles which morphed into multiplying - 3 piles of 3 equals and such. So casual sort of stuff as she is only 4 and so isn't yet school aged but trying to have a theme/concept reinforced by a lot of different activities.

The main thing I want to do at this age is build confidence in experimenting and interest in doing so, so it is more about the feelings driving the learning than what she is learning although she seems to be learning a lot too. I guess I place a lot of value in nurturing personal motivation because I think that is the key to success and something that I felt was undermined by my schooling experience.

What is the point of testing, I don't understand it, it just blows my mind that it is such a focal point of "education". I can see DD1 learning things, applying them to different things - what would testing her actually tell me that just paying attention wouldn't? It is an artificial environment that places so much unnecessary stress and pressure.

Not knowing the answer is irrelevant when you know ways to find one. The first quote of my lifetime lol heard it here first. To me, it is the whole why give them a pile of fish when you could give them a fishing pole and show them how to fish.