Home Schooling/Home Education #LOU

Home Ed aka Home Schooling

I am a mother of 1 and have been a stay at home mom for about 12 years now (only working part-time on occasion) as well as supporting my husband who has some disabilities. My son will be 13 at the end of July 2012 and he has been both home schooled and attended mainstream schools. When he was young I knew a couple of families personally who had educated their children at home and had grown up well rounded and happy. I had also heard of others through friends/relatives who had been taught at home so was quite open-minded about the options available.

My son started part-time at nursery when he just turned 3 as his birthday is at the end of July. Legally children don't have to start school until the age of 5 in the UK but the norm is to start year 1 at the age of 4. Anyway, as he was an only child, I wanted him to be prepared for when he started full-time with his peers. So he attended mainstream school from the age of 3 up to the

age of 3 up to the age of 8 ½. We then took the plunge and home schooled for about 18 months (age 8 ½ to 10). One of the reasons that we decided to send him back to mainstream was so he could bond with friends before starting high school. (At the time children in the UK attended high school from age 11-16 but it has now changed to 18.) So he went back to school for his last year at primary school. Now approaching 12 we have been home schooling since last summer 2011 basically and he more than happy to continue with Home Ed. Every couple of months we sit down and chat about HE and going back to school as he then has a choice and we will support whatever he decides.

The first time we home schooled we stuck to the basics of the curriculum and were 'fairly' structured even though he was your typical boy and complained all the time! He’s a well behaved boy really and I must admit that we are very, very easy going but we were happy and enjoyed it. I have had concerns from time to time as to whether or not he will be

prepared for the ’real world’ but as he is growing up my concerns are less and less. In the last year I have let him lead the way and I just encourage his interests and strengths and it is working very well. Most of his work is computer based and he types faster than I do! One of our main concerns was that his handwriting was messy but no matter what I did or the school did it never changed; he wasn’t going to change his style any time soon. But get him typing and he excels, perfect punctuation and well structured sentences and he even chats on-line with fully structured sentences. He hasn’t gotten lazy at all, I am glad to say.

I foresee him following a career in technology so maybe that has made things easier for us, I’m not sure but we are having a great time. Obviously we have good and bad days and grumpy days but he is growing up in many ways, he is smarter than I thought and his reasoning skills are amazing. He is also now becoming a lot more responsible and his life skills and personal development are both developing as expected for a boy his age.

There are pros and cons in every situation and we didn't have any major issues with him attending mainstream but I really don't see how he is missing out on anything in life compared to his peers.

Sonya