Views on Home Education

Thoughts, after Going back to visit St. Francis After Two Years (Written 2000)

Thoughts, after leaving School, and During First Year-and-a-half (Written 1999)

The First Section, The 1999 one, is going to be published in 'Free-Range Education' written by selected Home-Educators and Published by Hawthorn Press. Coming in Autumn 2000.

When we were living in The UK, me and my brother Daniel went to a wonderful primary school in Bournville, called Saint Francis School. It was beautifully situated, with a nice big playground, big playing fields for in the summer, And just before we left they started building a nursery for younger children. The teachers were all lovely and because it was a small school I knew everybody.

When I first left SFS to move to Cyprus, I thought that home educating would be very lonely, because at school, It all seemed to be planned. I had lots of friends at SFS, I had chatter all around me while I worked, and the school had lots of good teachers. At first I missed choir, recorders, chess club and all the other after school clubs. Now I have joined: a choir (Greek), Cubs (in Greek), I have kept up all my piano playing, and have started learning guitar. At church, I am in a lovely Sunday school, and while all the adults are having their coffee, we all play together. The Sunday school is a good mix of cultures, (Canadian, Greek Cypriot, Russian, American and English.) Every week we have friends round one afternoon, and we play in our wonderful huge wild garden.

One of the things that used to irritate me a lot in school, you've just got started, you're digging in and suddenly, one person says "I don't understand" and the whole class has to go through the whole explanation, and you completely lose the train of thought.

Now we have been Home Educating for 16 months, I am enjoying it a lot, I enjoy having more time for cooking, reading and gardening. One of the main things I enjoy is that there are no time limits, at school we had maybe half an hour per subject. And then we had to stop whether we wanted to or not. But with Home Educating, I can spend all morning writing my story, or if we had a question, like Daniel wanted to know about Newton's Laws, or we wanted to learn about silkworms, then we can spend all morning looking in Encyclopedias, or on the internet. Another thing I like is that you can learn languages much earlier, I'm currently learning Greek and French with linguaphone. Science, we are following a wonderful Biology course, which I totally enjoy, and are using Daniel's Chemistry kit to do some Chemistry Experiments. I think I am learning more than I did in all my years at school.

At first I really wanted to go to school but some of the schools round here are not very good. I wanted to got to secondary school when I'm older but some of the reasons I'm not sure that I want to go to secondary school is that there might be: bullying, teasing, too much homework or the fact I don't like fixed assignments. Like if I'm told to write two-hundred word story by tomorrow, my brain goes blank, I get it, and just as I'm handing it in I think of loads more stuff.

Thoughts, after Going back to visit St. Francis After Two Years (Written 2000)

During the beggining of the Spring Term For a month, I went back to visit St. Francis School.
It was nice to be back, everyone was very friendly and helpful. The Lesson Structure had changed, however.

The Government had put in a system called 'Numeracy hour' and 'Literacy Hour.' This meant concentrating for an hour on Maths and and hour on English every day. I was pleased to find, even though we had done a maximum of one hour a week of maths, I could still keep up, I in fact found it very easy!

Literacy hour was somewhat better, The discussions were enjoyable, although they weren't frequent, and the work was more interesting than the maths. We looked at part of 'The Hobbit' by J.R.R Tolkien, Which I had read several times, and enjoyed every one! Also parts of 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens, both of which were new to me.

But even so, An hour of work, on one subject, every day, is not fun! It means less time for music, art, geography, History, Science. In 4 weeks, we did 2 art sessions!

One of the things I really like about Home-Education is the Ability to choose what to do. Also the ability to spend as long as we like on each subject, not a strict timetable. In fact, some weeks, no timetable at all!

Read about HE on my mother's Site Home Education in the UK