I was looking on one of my home ed groups tonight and there was a lady just starting out on the HE journey. She asked a very good question. She asked those of us who have been HE for a while, if there was anything we would have done differently.
This was my reply:
I wish I had known I didn't have to turn our home into a
miniature school. I tried to create "school at home" even though my
daughter had never been to school! It was for me; I was "schooled"
:-(
I didn't know that
children can learn everything they need to know without being
"taught" or having a lesson or sitting at the table with a workbook. This was 5/6 yrs ago, and nobody knew about
"de-schooling" then, but boy did I need it!
It's taken me a while
to get my head around it all, to get the school way out of my system and allow
my child to find her own way of learning. It was scary to ditch the workbooks,
scrap my lovely lesson plans and just allow her to play and read and discover
what is important to her.
It would have been so
much easier for me if my daughter had taken to structure and lesson plans,
because I love plans! I saw myself as her "teacher". I needed to see
"progress". I like to see results, and files of work and to tick the
boxes off. But that was me.
My daughter doesn't learn in that way, so now we follow her
lead. She directs her own learning , and it's amazing, because it is such an
efficient way of learning! But it requires trust and it took me a long time to
trust that my child would learn just by playing and doing the things she
loves! Six years on and it's been the
most amazing journey.
So, if I could go back 5 years and give the old me advice, it
would be to forget everything I knew about school, to just chill, slow down and
listen to my child. She will tell me what she needs, all I need to do is hear
her.
