Monster & Teeny

I’ve been reading back over some of my previous posts on here recently. Around this time last year I did a ’school report’ style round up of what Monster and Teeny had been up to and I have previously talked a fair bit about what we do and how we do it so if you are a new visitor here then please do have a dig through the archives. I have good intentions to fix something in the sidebar to make it easier to find the posts on certain topics but I have quite a long list with the title ‘good intentions’ so it may not happen any time soon!

So, How and Why then? I think I’ll go with ‘why’ first.

I’ve written a bit about how we found out about Home Education here. I think our approach to life has always been try something, see if it works and if it doesn’t try something else. I’ve never wanted to make a choice I can’t later change and I’d always rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. Starting our Home Ed journey was in reaction to knowing pre-school would be the wrong choice for Monster when he was 3, continuing it has been a series of choices at various stages about it remaining the right path for both Monster and Teeny, aswell as my husband and I. I’ve written a bit about choices here so I won’t rehash that either.

I began with fairly clear ideas about how I would Home Educate, but over the last 6 years I’ve come to realise that actually I don’t really Home Educate at all, I’m simply one of the members of a Home Educating family and there is a difference. Our initial why has long since been lost in the passage of time and now our why is far more about this post, along with this one.

Before I ever had children I was always insistent that I would celebrate them as individuals, love them for who they were not who I wanted them to be, help them find out what made them happy. Home Education seems the logical extension of that for us, which leads me rather nicely to How?

Again, I’ve already written essays on this before so I’ll direct you first to learning, learning everywhere which I wrote 18 months ago but is still a fair representation of how our days pan out. Go and teach yourselves is a pretty good account of how a day could go around here and in terms of planning ahead and where my role is in all of this (before you start assuming I simply drink tea, chat to friends or spend all my time on the internet ) is there in Hopes and Dreams which I wrote at the beginning of this year and is as close to orgo-planning as you’ll ever find me being. Unfortunately none of it requires me buying stationery - I feel this could be my greatest failing as a Home Educator .