Otherways is Australia’s longest running alternative education magazine, produced quarterly by a team of HEN volunteers. Otherways supports you by bringing together an amazing collection of stories and advice from home educating families willing to share their experiences with others. This makes Otherways truly a community effort! Putting together a 50 page+ magazine is no small feat and takes at least two months to
This week is National Volunteer Week. Without volunteers from our community working together to oppose overreaching regulation on two occasions, home education would look very different in Victoria. Without volunteers, few groups or excursions would be available. Without volunteers there would be no websites or Facebook pages to help us network and answer our questions. As home educators we are immersed in the volunteer culture, with
Annie Regan I’m often asked if I give my kids time off during the school holidays. Depending on who is asking and how much time I’ve got, I sometimes answer ‘Yes’, or ‘No’, or ‘Well they’re learning all the time, so if something interesting comes up during school holidays then we go with it, I don’t stop them!’ The truth is that the kids do
Yasmine Davy Watts We live in an age of increasingly flexible working options, coupled with ever-growing connectedness through the internet. As a result, families are taking charge of their lives in a way that hasn’t been possible before. No longer shackled to rigid 9 to 5 hours at a desk in an office, more and more families are taking up long-term travel as a
Sara G. Each January I take some time out to sit down and do some thinking and planning for the year ahead; I always check with the kids whether there’s any new activity they’d like to try, or what they did and did not enjoy from the previous year. When we started home educating three years ago, we had a look around to see
Content warning: this article talks about children in severe states of mental distress and issues related to that. People choose home education for many different reasons. For some, home education is the only option when a child is in crisis, and where continuing in the school setting poses a grave risk to that child. If this applies to you, and your child is struggling
Kathleen Humble Every now and then, usually when news is a little slow, prominent papers like to do little fluff pieces on the edges of the educational world. One week might be about lambasting ‘pushy parents,’ another week an angry remonstrance on the horrors of alternative education. Personally, I find it deeply amusing that, depending on the flavour of the month, our little family
You may have come to home education happily and willingly, or it may be that home ed is your last resort after persevering with mainstream school before realising it just won’t work for your child. Regardless of the reasons why you are home educating, you would hope that your friends and family support your decision and encourage you. Or, at the very least, if
“What’s the difference between homeschooling and unschooling?” and “What is deschooling?’ are among the most commonly asked questions in Facebook groups. Homeschooling is generally used to mean home education. HEN (and many individuals) prefer this latter term as it is a more accurate description of what families do: educate their children at home. However, the VRQA uses the term homeschooling, as do most
Indrani Perera I can’t believe that I have been writing articles for Otherways all this time without talking about books and reading. I’ve been a bookworm ever since I was a kid. I still try to read whenever I have a spare five minutes, and I love reading to Airlie (9) and Phoebe (5). Airlie is now old enough to read for herself and
Kirsty James Grade based curriculum packages offer a level of security which feels reassuring, but they have some significant drawbacks.The majority of these products are either books designed for schools, or programs for home educators which follow the Australian Curriculum. In some states, HE (home education) families have to follow this curriculum, and as HE numbers have grown, companies have seen a market opportunity.
By Kirsty James One common concern for new home educators in Victoria is how to keep records. This tends to stem from the question how will learning outcomes be recorded on the VRQA paperwork when applying for home ed registration, and it’s common for people to list multiple methods of record keeping there. The main purpose of records is to provide a framework
James Rickard We do not know what we are doing. Jacquelyn and I have never bicycle-toured before, alone or together. Our children (aged 12, 11, 10, 7, 5 and 2) enjoy riding but have never had to do it for anything more than local-based transportation. We have never been to Tasmania together (Jacqui lived in Tassie with her family for a year when she
By Kirsty James At the start of each year, many families are thinking about how to support new interests, help their child with areas where they struggle, or looking for groups/connections. The HE community is supportive, and usually happy to provide advice. However, over the last few years I’ve seen a change in the kind of products and services which are available, and it
If your teen is interested in legal studies, why not start your own law club? Parents, or teens themselves, can organise groups, or even single activities, where the focus is on legal studies. Activities can include anything from an excursion to an activity held in a hired space weekly or fortnightly or monthly– the choice is yours. You may wish to hire a venue,
Andrea Baird One of the reasons I felt so strongly about home educating my children was that I didn’t want them spending so much of their childhood indoors and sitting at desks. I wanted them to grow up in a world of trees and grass, sky and clouds, creeks and oceans. Even though we lived in the city, a lot of our early home
Kirsty James We all know that home educating parents are so organised. It’s right up there with patience as the quality most mentioned when I tell people my kids don’t go to school: ‘oh you must be sooo …’. I’m sure there are some paragons out there, but the image of the perfect home educator is as damaging as the idea of the perfect
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