By Sue Wight Our family follow a natural learning style of home education and feel quite comfortable that the children are learning all the time but, like many home educators, we have the occasional doubts about maths. Recently these doubts led me to persuade one of my sons, Matthew, to do some maths on paper. As a small child he loved maths, in fact
By Susan Wight Play is children’s work and yet it is curiously undervalued in our society. Many adults fervently believe that there can be no ‘educational value’ in something that children choose to do. Their concern about home educating without a curriculum is that children might ‘just play’. Adults are sceptical that play, which looks to them like merely a pleasant pastime, can really
by Alan Thomas Infants start learning informally from (or before?) birth, mainly through interaction with the mother or other caregivers. Part of this is learning how to behave in culturally appropriate ways, e.g., how to deal with emotions, how to interact with others in the family and wider community, and the acquisition of cultural values and attitudes. This alone requires a vast amount of
By Susan Wight Natural Learning is not ‘Doing Nothing’ Confession time: Sometimes I get ‘the guilts’ and think I’m not really educating my children at all. This feeling usually creeps in following someone’s wide-eyed response when I tell them that I home educate. “Wow, I could never do that! You must be so organised!” The overawed responses vary but the words ‘busy’, ‘dedicated’ ‘organised’
by Dr John Peacock Jean Lave had a problem. She knew that the best scholarship said that schools were better than other places of learning because in schools skilled professionals taught general principles that were objective and unbiased because they were not dependent upon particular contexts or situations. That same scholarship said that other sorts of learning, such as go on in the home
By Lisa Donnelly I read with great interest the article in a recent home education magazine defending unschooling to structured schoolers. In my neck of the woods, the shoe seems to be permanently on the other foot. I can’t count the times I’ve heard my fellow homeschoolers, most of whom unschool, utter conventional proverbs such as, “when you’ve homeschooled long enough, you’ll unschool.” Statements
Weaving Waldorf Education into Home Learning By Brenda J. Armstrong Receive the children in reverence, Educate them with love, Send them forth in freedom – Rudolph Steiner I watch our nine-year-old daughter as she eyes the many baskets of wool yarn in the small store near our home. The rainbow of naturally dyed colored skeins is plentiful as we search for the “right yarn”
This was aired in 2014 and republished as part of the 60 Minutes archive in 2020. Also available ‘Extra minutes’ are on YouTube Channel 9 Mornings with Sandra Dodd The Clark family were interviewed with The Chronicle and the website contains a video with them as well Issue 140 of Otherways magazine carries stories from both Carleen Sing and Rachel Clark and their 60
