My Home Ed – Home Education Network

March 14, 2022

Home ed done properly: what does that mean?

You might have had someone say to you that home education can be okay, as long as it’s done ‘properly’. But who defines what ‘properly’ means? Who gets to determine what a ‘proper’ education looks like for individual children? Why is one person’s ‘proper’ better than another, when children are unique? Home ed advocates will likely say that an ideal education is tailored […]

December 7, 2020

Planning and organisation in home education

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 […]

October 4, 2020

Home Ed Our Way – ‘Otherways’

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 […]

September 7, 2020

Gameschooling – or how to include games in your education

Gameschooling – or how to include games in your education Faye C When I was a shiny new home educator, I read an article by a teacher who had home educated her children and devised programs for others. She said that with a carefully curated collection of board, table and card games, you can pretty much take care of a child’s primary school curriculum. […]

June 4, 2019

Dinner Conversation

By Sue Wight If there’s one aspect of informal learning in home education that stands out above all others, in common with infant and adult informal learning, it’s conversation. On the face of it much of this is social, everyday talk of the kind that normally goes unnoticed. But it’s surprising how much of this kind of talk contains opportunities for learning, especially as […]

May 20, 2019

A Permaculture Education

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 […]

March 5, 2019

Chemistry @ Home

By Kathleen Humble There is quite a difference between the way I thought I would teach chemistry and the way my son, Canary, prefers to learn. Canary is very visual-spatial in his thinking. He absorbs knowledge when he can see it and touch it. He doesn’t mind listening, but he can’t just listen – there has to be a visual component, or lots of […]

July 25, 2016

Learning Maths Naturally

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 […]

December 4, 2015

Learning in a Warming World

By Susan Wight We are living in a warming world. Climate change is observable pretty much everywhere: air temperature is rising over every continent, the oceans are heating up and expanding, and ice is melting on land and at sea. The climate has already warmed by 0.8 degrees. This may not sound dramatic, but in the delicate balance of life, it is. Humanity depends […]

October 31, 2015

Multi-aged Learning at Home

One of the hardest things I find about home educating is juggling the differing needs of my four children. The challenge is to be able to engage children of very different ages. I have found that the older they get, the easier it is. It is the toddler I find the most challenging! To make my life easier, I have tailored the different curricula […]

August 28, 2015

Natural Learning in Action

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’ […]

August 28, 2015

Head, Heart and Hands

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” […]

August 26, 2015

Special Needs or Just Special

It was going to be his first day on the mountain and my old anxieties were creeping in. With his brand new snowboard tucked under his arm and his first-ever season lift ticket hanging from his neck, my 12 year old son, Conor, was off on an adventure of his own choosing. He seemed to be ready to tackle it all, but I wasn’t […]

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