Pamela Uckerman On the first day of the school year in 2019, when my boys were entering grades three and two, I dropped them at school, went home and cried. After six blissful weeks of summer, the complaints about school and the horrible mornings were back. They attended a beautiful Montessori school and we had made a lot of sacrifices to keep them there.
Lyndall Thomas So much of our homeschooling journey is about learning. But for me, it’s also about unlearning. Unlearning is an academic concept about undoing the bonds of institutionalised learning. It’s a very close cousin to deschooling. You might have been engaging in unlearning without even knowing it. You might have chosen it with all of your free will behind you. Or, if you’re
Linda Ford On June 12, we were on Day 2 of our 1000km road trip to Armidale in northern NSW. Two of my older children are studying there at the University of New England, and I was taking my five youngest up to visit them. The day started in a caravan park in Forbes. Isabelle announced that it was three weeks until she turned
Catherine Durrant I recently watched a segment on The Project about Unschooling. Overall, it was very positive towards home education and the families in the segment were very articulate and inspiring. However, towards the end an education expert, Adam Voigt, commented that home education is ‘missing the opportunity to learn cooperatively with other people, that in the future people need to work out significant
Mairi Girgis. I was never going to “homeschool” my kids myself. I didn’t research home education before I started. When I started I had a lot of misconceptions, I didn’t think I’d have the patience to teach my children, and I was looking forward to having all my children in school and going back to study and work. I distinctly remember attending a school-parent
Faye C Ahh, those early days of my family’s home education journey! I had our Happy Homeschool House all planned out about ten years ago— something along the lines of perfectly co-operative children who would happily sit down and complete ‘work’ without a problem. My two children were going to be the poster children for home ed and beautiful sibling relationships. Too easy! Of
Belinda Lee When did society start to put family values behind those of progress and being ahead? Increasingly, what we are witnessing in society is a way of life which chases a notion of being better, being smarter, having more and having done more. When we talk about family being central to the happiness of a child, we are suddenly seeing a societal climate that
By Alison Mazza As a homeschooling mum all I seem to do is rush from here to there, With barely any time to even brush my hair. It’s always ‘quick, everyone, shoes on and out the door’, No time now for all those last-minute chores. Then once we’re safely in the car the questions start. ‘Mum, what’s faster, a three- or four-wheel cart?’ And
John Barratt-Peacock This account was told to me when I was interviewing hundreds of home educating families across Australia for my doctoral research. You live in the city? Check! There will be a waterway somewhere and even if it is not as rustic as the one in this story, it will reveal great treasures to those who befriend it! === It was my husband’s idea
Pavlina McMaster A little over a year ago, we moved out of our community of 20 years. I was excited to find a mould-free rental with a back yard, but at the time, there were so many unknowns. How was I going to find friends for my kids? How was I going to find the same support level? Was I going to find adults
Well, we are up for Review! Catherine Durrant Our family has been chosen as one of the families to have a review. Although Paul and I were against the review process and any changes to the regulations, we have no choice but to be open to the reviews and use it to our advantage. We feel the reviews will be a good opportunity to
Cheryl Dedman I am from Tatura in Victoria and I home educate our son Jacob (11). My husband Pete, Jacob and I have just embarked on an eight-week trek through parts of South Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland and NSW. Our adult son is home, caring for our ‘Castle’, whilst we travel in our portable ‘Castle’ which some may call a caravan. This is the second
Jacqui Rickard The Rickard family have shared some amazing home ed adventures on the road by car and bike. See Otherways issues 141 and 143 for details. They are Jacqui, James, Nathanael (13) Ezekiel (12) Levi (11) Joash (8) Elijah (6) and Adeline (3). Here Jacqui talks about their pursuit of home ed friends on the their latest adventures in America. At home in
Jane Sultana I live in Moe, Victoria, and have two sons aged 12 and 10 . Until the beginning of 2016 neither son had been to school. I chose home education primarily because I really enjoyed spending time with my children and did not want to hand them over to others for a large part of each day. Secondly, having worked as a primary
By Belinda Lee Sometimes it’s difficult to write a post on how our days have been. And this isn’t because it’s difficult to write about. Simply, every time I write about how wonderful, amazing and fulfilling a day has been, I realise that it absolutely comes across as arrogant, conceited and, to be honest, showing off. This is never the intention. You see, most
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
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
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
