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
Sue Minto Our second child entered year 7 this year. She’d been home educated from Grades 3 to 6. Prior to that, she was in the school system. Here’s our story of her transition from home education to high school. Her older brother, who was also home educated, is now in year 10, having started high school at Year 7. Both our children decided
Indrani Perera I was chatting to a very good friend the other day about our kids, juggling work, home and all the rest. We are great friends and have very similar ideals and philosophies. The main difference between us is that I educate my girls at home and she sends her two children to school. As I was talking to her, I mentioned that
Cheryl Dedman Home education in the Dedman household can best be described by the title of this magazine – ‘Otherways’. What that means for me is being able to organise our son Jacob’s education for each day in a way that he will benefit from most at that particular time in his life. However, because life has lots of unpredictable moments, this does not
Diane Haynes We are about to start our seventh year of home education. It was certainly never something we planned when we first had kids but, as we progressed through kinder, the discussion of where to go to school became important. We had been exposed to quite a few home education families, but it was still something I didn’t feel capable of. At one
By Sue Wight I delight in the fact that home education has grown so significantly over the last twenty years. The HEN community I joined way back in 2000 was only 86 families whereas we now have over 1000. While small, the early community was very active and characterised by a culture of skill-sharing. Some were good at maths but lost with craft activities,
Kathleen Humble We’re a geeky kind of family. With me being a mathematician and my husband an engineer, it would be hard to not be geeky. We’re also not going to score high on the ‘doing things conventionally’ test, if one of those existed. But sometimes, just sometimes, the paths my kids take to learn are so unconventional that they leave me with
Amy Conley It comes to my mind often these days. The demands of the little ones, the unpainted bedrooms, the list of to do’s longer than both my arms; and so the thoughts of whether to continue to home educate, or send my children to school, come to mind. They come with all the many questions. Am I spending enough time with my
Indrani Perera Beverly Paine’s article, Do you really need that resource?, in the November 2014 issue of Otherways really got me thinking and doing. As a result of reading her article, I have spent the last couple of months de-cluttering and organising our house and it feels like a much better place to spend time. Which is a good thing as we spend
By Heather Haines Recently, when my son Samuel fulfilled a long term ambition by sky diving, it felt to me the culmination of our home education journey. All those years ago, I took a leap of faith in pulling him out of school, and here he is a capable young man confidently pursuing his interests. Sky diving seemed uncannily appropriate. Samuel started school
By Judy Ephraums ‘Once you turn your back on the school system, everything’s up for grabs.’ So said one of the first home educating mums I met, at one of the first home education gatherings my young daughter and I attended. She was an experienced home educator, and a friendly and welcoming face at the gathering; we went on to become firm friends. More
By Sue Wight Like Fanny Price, I have to admit to being an unabashed novel reader. A good novel is a type of madness for me, and I sometimes become so emotionally involved that wrenching myself away can be devastating. I was once on a plane which had the temerity to land when Jane Eyre had just left Thornfield. How could I abandon her
By Marnie Black We withdrew our eldest two sons, Anthony and Mitchell, from school back in 2000. What a leap of faith that was! We had to get out of the system after the havoc it had wreaked on our boys. Even our pre-schooler, Jeff, had been negatively affected as most of his life had been lived in a family under stress. We agonised
By Wendy Morriss I spent 30 years home educating my three children who are now 32, 29 and 19 years of age. It was an amazing experience; one that I will always remember and would recommend to anyone. I liked going to school myself because I was raised in a violent household, so school was an escape. My husband, however, constantly talked about his
By Marshall C When my wife Brooke and I first met she was raising her four children as a solo Mum and had been homeschooling for the better part of a decade. My first impression of Brooke’s children was of confident, well spoken kids (on their best behaviour to be sure after Mum made it clear that this one was a “keeper”). As I
By Brooke C. When I started home education (fifteen years ago) I used to dread being asked the *S Question*. You know, “How will your kids learn to socialise if they don’t get to go to school?” I dreaded it because I found that if I had time (and the inclination) I used to launch into a positively soap-box worthy rant explaining that the
By Cynthia McStephen “Hello there from Radio Home Ed Land, where there are a million different reasons and styles for every million home-edders. Today the topic is ‘Why we do what we do’ and sitting opposite me in the studio today is … hmmm. Actually that person looks remarkably like ME.” It can be a strange experience to want to interview yourself, to have
By Jackie Crosby Permaculture is about design, observing nature and working with nature. When we built our home, we faced it north (southern hemisphere), learnt about various building mediums and settled on recycled double brick for the heat transfer. We looked at our energy flows, and decided to have the vegetables growing near the kitchen and where the children play, as that’s where I travel
