Home Education – what do you do all day?

Note: This is actually post two of three. To read the first post, see here.

How do you educate him? What do you do all day? Do you have lessons? There are many different educational philosophies when it comes to home education, from unschooling as mentioned above, to buying pre-written curriculum and having lessons every day. I don’t like labels, partly because they are so constricting, and partly because not everyone agrees on what they mean. I would like to call what we are doing an eclectic approach, but that term is starting to get a ‘formal’ meaning, at least in some circles. So I will try to specifically explain where we are coming from.

Four afternoons a week, we are doing ‘formal’ lessons. I am very, very, very roughly following a Charlotte Mason type curriculum. Bascially, every one of those four days we cover

• Maths
• Handwriting
• Typing
• German

I don’t bother with reading lessons, as Willem is already a fluent reader. Typing was learning touch typing with the fantastic BBC Dance Mat Typing, and now that is finished Willem either types some work out or plays one of the many touch typing games available on the internet. We are learning German because we are moving to Germany next year – if we weren’t we would be learning Latin together, but I thought two foreign languages at this stage was just a bit much. Two afternoons a week we ‘do’ Science. This comprises of a range of things: experiments, research and writing little reports, watching clips on the internet or relevant DVDs.  We also do a lot of art projects, as well as picture study where we look at the work of specific artists, and when we are at home I am trying to make sure we have an ‘excursion day’ once a week, many of which will be to galleries and museums in London. Once a week he has a music lesson where he learns piano and a bit of music theory; we study the work and life of one composer each month,  and once a week a  tutor comes to our house to run Willem through his paces with German. And starting this weekend Willem will be going to Stagecoach where he will have an hour each of singing, dancing and drama lessons.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say we are also ‘unschooling’ but as much as we have ‘formal’ lessons, Willem is learning all the time. And much of it is ‘child-led’, in that he is developing interests and following them, learning along the way. He is constantly talking to me about radio waves, and trying to figure out new ways they could be used (supposedly, according to Willem at least, we could use them to move aeroplanes about). While there is some formal study of history and geography in what we do – the period for this year is the Middle Ages and early Renaissance – Willem is a history nut, loves reading about it, whether it is a Horrible Historiesbook or one of the many books about particular periods history he owns or borrows from the library. He listens to podcasts of Japanese myths and then today he related what he had listened to over breakfast to something he was reading about Beowulf. We were reading about Charlemagne, and Willem was excited to see they used an illustration of the statue outside Notre Dame we had discussed when we were there the other week.

He is constantly using maths in his day to day life – not just obvious things such as adding up or measuring when helping me bake, but also pointing out triangles everywhere and commenting on how they make structures strong. He reads everything he can get his hands on. He will head out into the backyard and collect bugs, or rocks, or leaves, then come inside to talk to me about them and hypothesise about why they are the way they are, or how they are similar to something else. Willem has piano lessons each week, but also likes to listen to music, improvise on the piano and make up songs. He sometimes asks me about a piece of music he has heard, and then looks up something about the composer, or the instruments used. Or perhaps links it to something he has heard before. Learning is not a static thing you can only do in a formal ‘lesson’ – for most children it is just something they do instinctively, without even knowing they are doing it. When his father is home he shares his interest and knowledge in all sorts of areas – yesterday the two of them got out a range of maps and Willem learned how to read grid references up to eight figures long, and how to read a key/legend. While this will sometimes lead to Willem writing up his findings, or researching further information on the topic, much of the learning is imparted through sharing time and a conversation with his Dad, talking about stuff that interests them rather than a purely didactic ‘formal lesson’.

Some of our ‘formal’ learning is done through workbooks and sheets, though much of it is either developed by me (or recently Willem’s grandmother, a former primary school teacher and university lecturer in primary school mathematics education) on the day.  I have listed below some of the books we are using for our lessons, but we also use the books from our home library, or borrowed from our local library as the fancy takes us.