I promised a few more Home Ed updates at the beginning of the year and yesterday, I had a moment of clarity which I thought I’d share. I’d just got back from a disastrous run (I was feeling pretty sorry for myself to be fair) and enquired where the kids were. Given that it was 8am I assumed that S would be in bed still and the boys might be mooching around in PJS or eating breakfast. But no, everyone was up, dressed and had eaten. S was busily meticulously decorating cupcakes to take to a group we were going to later that day, Is was writing a book he’s been working on on the laptop and E was practising drum rhythms that my Dad taught him at the weekend.
This cheered me up after my crappy run immensely and I reflected, once more, on the effectiveness of child-led learning if you give them the time, space and trust to make their own way, follow their own interest and figure things out for themselves. Of course, it’s not all roses…there are plenty of days where I’m asked about video games approximately 11 seconds after my eyes have opened, days where we argue for 45 minutes about doing 10 minutes of maths, days when I would quite happily deposit them on the doorstep of the nearest school and scarper.
But (and it’s a big but!), with patience (which I have in varying amounts depending on the day, week, month, phase of the moon…etc) autonomous learning absolutely does work. What it means for you as an adult is a readjustment of what you think learning looks like and what you think they need to know. But what it also means is children and young people who are enthusiastically following their passions (and actually have the time to do so), kids who know an awful lot about the things they’re interested in, children that learn because they want to, of their own accord.
Interestingly, part of this learning is cyclical according to where we are in the year and finally after 8 years I can relax into each phase of it. We start in September (or more realistically by the time we’ve got ourselves back into gear after the summer, in October) with a fair amount of structured (sometimes child-led, sometimes parent-forced) work and project based learning before having an extra long Christmas break to rest our brains. We restart in January and keep going until Easter at which point we’ve basically run out of steam. As the weather gets nicer, we spend more and more time outdoors, exploring the natural playgrounds Devon has to offer, and less time inside working. Eventually I abandon all pretences in early July and we start a long summer of swimming, playing and mooching outside. Then September rocks around, the guilt used to kick in before I acknowledged the cycle, and we start again.
I reckon we do a little bit too much in the winter and a little bit too little in the summer but it basically evens out, we get to spend lots of time outside when it’s gorgeous, the kids are learning and making progress and so actually, I’m happy with that.
Right now, as the weather is improving, I’m reminding myself that it’s ok to loosen up a bit on the structure we’ve been following over the last few months and I thought that possibly, some other people needed to be reminded of that too!
At the end of the day, my kids probably won’t end up with 11 GCSE’s each but actually, from everything I’ve researched and all the people in education I’ve spoken to…that doesn’t really matter. We’ll do five to get them into college and from there, the world is their oyster. If sacrificing those 7 GCSEs means they’ve had a childhood for longer, if it means they’ve had more freedom to play, if it means that they’ve learnt to love learning and aren’t just being cajoled into it, if it means they’ve had more quality time making memories (cheesy I know – sorry!) with each other, with their friends, with their family…then I’m counting that as an absolute win.
the starlings gather here 