Monster & Teeny

For some reason, although I obviously knew it to be the case, it has only really occured to me in the last week or two that Teeny would be about to start school in a couple of weeks time. Teeny has never been going to go to school, we started looking into the idea of Home Education while she was still a small baby and long before she reached 2 it was what we were going to do. With Monster the day that would have been his first day at school passed pretty much without note although I did have some feeling that now we were ‘proper’ ‘official’ home educators .

Teeny’s home education has been a truly autonomous one to date. She learnt how to write her name from me writing it out for her, upper case so she could type it into a barbie.com website to play the games. It was a small step from losing the piece of paper I write it on and her managing to type it without the paper to one day just writing it. She can now do it upper and lower case and knows the names of the letters in her name and what sound they make. She also knows Monster’s initial, M for Mummy, D for Daddy, N for Nic and a couple of others. Bu we’ve never done anything formal, unlike Monster who had a but of 100 easy lessons and sporadic workbooks back in the day when I worried about such things . That sounds flippant and of course a child learning to read is not something to be made light of but I am now firmly of the opinion that like potty training, sleeping through the night, being able to let me out of their sight and various other landmarks of development that some people feel the need to push children into by various means actually reading is yet another skill they will learn when they’re ready - I think it can be learnt, not taught.

All of the things I fretted about as potential issues with Monster have, over the years, shown themselves to be not issues at all. Worries about him struggling to socialise, having people to socialise with at all, talking to people, having interests and passions, wanting to know about stuff, engaging with people, asking questions, being motivated and so on have all proved unfounded. I know at not even seven there is plenty of time for future angst and I am sure it will not all be plain sailing but I regularly stand back and watch Monster from a distance, in various situations and not only feel proud that he is my son I also see him as walking, talking, living proof that Home Education, and specifically the brand of it we follow is utterly right for him. I am frequently complimented on what a lovely boy he is; a polite, happy, interested child. I think he’s a great advertisment for autonomous education.

So in the same way as we don’t have a picture of Monster on his first day at school and I’ve never sewn his name tapes into school uniform we will soon have passed the landmark date that would have marked Teeny heading off into a different world and simply have carried on doing what we already do. We’re hoping to mark the event with a meet up with other Home Educating friends on the actual day but other than that nothing will change here. I won’t feel the need to do anything different now we’re ‘official’ or fret about keeping records of work incase the LEA catch up with us. In short we will continue with our own personal tried and tested method for learning - living life.

So what am I wanting to thank you for? Well, it is mostly through reading blogs of other Home Educators that I gained the confidence to leave things alone. It was reading blogposts of people with 7, 8, 9 year olds who were struggling to read and suddenly it all clicked for them, knowing those children now at 9, 10, 11 and seeing them with their noses stuck in books. Reading stories about teenagers doing inspirational things, reading about how if you can only manage to ‘trust the process’. I have had the luxury of using those going before us as case studies. If someone had told me 3 years ago that my nearly 7 year old wouldnt be ‘reading’ Id be horrified - it would have been enough to send me headed straight for the nearest infant school signing him up straight away. But having read about other people’s children not reading at this age and then knowing that it was a mere matter of weeks from this point to happily reading chapter books when it all suddenly clicked gives me the confidence to remain hands off and let things take their natural course. I distinctly recall reading one of Joyce’s blogposts (on the blog before, the blog before this one!) about her daughter, how she clung to her still at 3 and later, and crying because she could have been describing my 3 year old Monster. I remember celebrating online with Merry when Fran clicked with reading, being thrilled for Jules when Joseph read the word ‘cash’ on an ATM cashpoint and being generally inspired by the older children of Alison, June, Sarah and Gill.

I remember struggling with Monster as a new born when I realised that actually life was never going to ‘get back to normal’, what was going to happen was that we were going to find a whole new normal. A friend told me, in calming, comforting tones that ‘it will get easier, it will get better’ - balm to my troubled, sleep deprived, shell shocked soul. I have since repeated that mantra to countless new mothers myself. I remember someone agreeing that having a toddler and a newborn baby was indeed bloody hard work but that it was for a finite period of time and then it all improved. And that is what the early incarnation of the early years blogring did for me. It gave me the luxury of sitting back and reading about the angst and trials of others, way before I needed to worry about such things myself and it meant that by the time I would have been revving up to start worrying about them I already knew I didn’t have to, because it had all come good already for the children of those people so I was safe in the knowledge that it would indeed come good for me in due course too. And you know what, slowly but surely it is. So forgive me if I don’t give the passing of Teeny’s first day not at school a second thought but thanks to all of those who’ve gone before and come out the other side, it really doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything other than getting on with our lives.