The Responsibility of Home Educating

Many parents feel that they couldn't cope with the responsibility of educating their children themselves and are grateful for the school system. Parents are usually their children's most significant and influential teachers, regardless of whether or where their children attend school. But I understand that the idea of shouldering that responsibility solely seems overwhelming. I also understand that to the untrained eye it may seem that homeschoolers do shoulder this overwhelming responsibility. But let me tell you a little known secret: homeschoolers are not alone on a desert island.

We are not alone in carrying the responsibility for our children's education, we share it! We have family members who favour certain subjects over others, we have extended family members and friends we outsource to, on occasion. Many of us have tutors we regularly employ to share their knowledge and skills. We have a metric shitload of activities paid and unpaid that our children are involved in that are facilitated by others, or we free range it.

For example, on Mondays we have a nature walk group we spend the day with. During this time there's a hike most families go on together, and the kids run ahead. Then we have picnic lunch and the kids are left to their own devices, playing and learning together in which ever corner of the outdoors we've set ourselves up in, while the parents talk, eat, some of us crochet and we all parent, often kid swapping as the need arises, or simply because we were closer to the child than her parents at that moment. This is an example of free ranging their education.

Then there are the community activities our children participate in with their schooled peers. In our family these include basketball training, workshops and games, dance class, childcare/playgroup at community centres, swimming lessons, lego club and little athletics. Those are just the weekly group activities, there are also annual festivals we attend and random events (especially during school holidays, during the school holiday's councils go crazy putting on activities to entertain and educate children).

In our local homeschool community we have a few paid group activities such as weekly "sports", similar to school phys ed classes, but with more emphasis on fun than competition. We have sewing circle  where one mum and her daughters help the group to learn how to sew and complete a project each week and music class where a music teacher plays musical themed games, sings to the children and provides them with a variety of instruments to try. There are so many more activities we could take up, but we're very busy with what we do already.

Our family hires private tutors for violin lessons and in the past for learning a second language, though at the moment we're using a Youtube channel and online worksheets to teach ourselves Australian sign language. We also have "Molly Day", once a week when the girls babysitter spends half a day with them so that I can get some work done, or go to uni. She takes them to the museum, library, playground, or they play at home.

For all these scheduled activities there are ten sporadic playdates and catch-ups with other homeschool families where the kids learn from each other. They have different interests and participate in different activities and then bring all that experience to one another's lounge rooms and backyards. The kids also bombard their friend's parents with questions or simply soak up new information from being engaged in conversation with their friend's parents. One of the things I love most about our home ed community is that the other parents are genuinely interested in my children's lives and enjoy talking to my children, learning about their interests and sharing their own with the kids. I love the lack of age segregation in the homeschooling community. My children are used to socialising with people of all different ages. The other day there was a group of fifteen or so kids all playing together, some were as young as three and others were sixteen, and everyone was having fun. I would not have believed such a thing were possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. It is so great for the little kids to have that attention from older kids which makes them feel special, and for the older kids to get to feel the honour of nurturing young children and imparting their wisdom. All of the children get some context and perspective from being exposed to people of many different ages. These sorts of interactions make me think: if school is preparing children for the real world, homeschool is the real world.

When it comes down to it, I don't feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of teaching my children. Education can't help but happen when you lead a life as rich as ours. I feel that the burden of exposing my kids to new perspectives, information, opportunities etc is shared between the many adults in our community, as well as the other homeschooled children (and some of those children are starting to get a bit adulty with their aging and what not). I am constantly inspired by my friends who try new things, share their photos online or tell us what they've been up to lately. I steal from them (because "that's what creativity is!" one of them likes to tell me) and likewise share my ideas with them. Every now and again one parent will say "everyone come to our place and learn X!" Most often it is our children driving the curriculum, they inspire one another. Even if I were determined to stop my children from learning anything, I'd fail.

Homeschooling is an entirely different culture from living with school. While many of my friends can't imagine spending all day with their children, or being responsible for their education, the flip side is me: completely awestruck that anyone has the power to get a houseful of people out of bed, dressed, fed, groomed, out the door and to a school gate with lunch already packed by 9AM every week day.

a few of our home ed kids at weekly sport event

First Day (Not) Back

Today was our first day (not) back to school. Gaia would be entering grade 2 & Yemaya a second year of kindergarten. 

We spent the first day of the 2016 school year crafting with friends at their place, in the morning. Gaia created a cardboard land for the my little ponies (they are all obsessed with MLP right now) & the afternoon was spent playing with these. 

Gaia also invented a board game involving the land and ponies (it involved dynamite and a lot of death too #girlswillbegirls). Then Yemaya, Frida, Lenus and I read stories at the library while Gaia had her first dance class for the year. A rather fruitful not-first day back.

 

One of the many reasons homeschooling was the choice for us was a desire for our children to grow up grade-free. It's not reasonable to expect children to be capable of certain feats simply because of their age. It also isn't ideal to segregate children based on age. So it is amusing that every year we do the math and determine what grade they would be in if they were attending one of the local schools. For all my talk, I am a sucker for certain schooly traditions like the first day back snapshot (don't get me started, I've tried talking Eale into speech nights and an unschool Christmas play ;-D). This silly math game we play led to an interesting discussion about individuality in our family.

Life would be very different if we were in the system with Yemaya.  At her age Gaia could have started school, but Yemaya is not school ready, Realising this has made us grateful, once again, to be able to give our children this alternative start to life (it's also made us realise we need to find new ways to support Yemaya's learning that work for her, which will most likely require more involvement from adults outside the family, and stop coasting along expecting she will respond to activities and develop skills the same way her older sister did). If we had been planning to send Yemaya to school, last year would have been very stressful as we tried to get her school ready and find out why she's "behind" her peers. But there's no ticking timebomb, and whether she's "starting school" or "repeating kindergarten" is meaningless, because yesterday is no different from today in our learn-through-living style.