Take Heart – Home Education Network

August 5, 2020

From Little Things

I’m a HEN volunteer, so I have the chance to speak to lots of new home educators, and see a variety of learning plans. So many parents doubt their abilities, worry that they will not ‘cover everything’, that they are ‘not doing enough’ or that they won’t pass a review. I’m a worrier too, so I know where they are coming from, but I’m […]

June 2, 2020

All You Need is Love

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 […]

March 17, 2020

DIY Education

By Susan Wight You’ve made the decision not to send the children to school this year and the relatives are recovering from the shock…Now, where to start? Having made the decision to leave the school system, you now have the freedom to choose your own education. Spend some time thinking about what education is. What would the ideal education look like? What would you […]

March 10, 2020

Everything’s Up for Grabs

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 […]

August 3, 2018

The Greatest Gift

By Pavlina McMaster We came to home education like many others, carrying scars from a school system that was eroding my child’s self-esteem, and our sanity. School, though short-lived, had been a time fraught with stress, anxiety, and the regression of everyone’s skills, not least of which were mine. As an autistic adult, I had come to learn so many things that many neurotypical […]

July 3, 2018

Home Education Beyond Week Two

By Sue Wight Rachel Brady gave up on home education after two weeks and sent her children back to school. Her home education experience is not representational. Around 20,000 Australian kids are currently being home educated, thousands more already have been. For some families, home education provides a valuable short-term solution to an immediate problem, but many educate for a substantial time. The average […]

May 28, 2018

Home educating your teenager – you can do it!

Can it be done? Yes! Parents often feel pressure from those around them to put their children into school for the high school years. ‘What about university?’ is one of the most frequently asked questions of home educators. ‘What about VCE?’ is another. Home educating your teenager isn’t as big and scary an undertaking as some may have you believe. While it is understandable […]

May 6, 2018

Do Your Own Thing

By Sue Wight As you move into the home education world, you’ll have people ask what type of home educator you are. There will be those who make the question sound like some kind of test. Feel free to ignore any such pressure. There are many different ways to home educate but none is the ‘one true way’. You may not be familiar with […]

January 10, 2018

Dear New Home Educator

Dear New Home Educator, Congratulations on your decision to educate your children from home. You’ve borrowed a pile of books from the library and scoured the internet for advice; you may have bought some supplies already. Great…except that every ‘expert’ seems to recommend different things and now you feel overwhelmed by the choices. Right? Relax, you’ll be home educating YOUR children YOUR way and […]

November 13, 2017

Should you look at the Victorian Curriculum?

By Bekah Carman In Victoria we are required to provide “regular and efficient instruction that taken as a whole, substantially addresses the [8 key] learning areas”. These learning areas, which we call the KLAs, are English, Maths, Science, Technology, Languages (other than English), Arts, Health and PE, and Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS). The problem with the requirement to instruct in the 8 KLAs […]

November 6, 2017

Unschooling is not Unparenting

By Sue Wight Something odd is happening in the world of unschooling. Sarah has heard that if her children want chocolate biscuits for breakfast, they will eat a balanced diet over time without well-meaning interference from her. Meanwhile, she’s struggling to buy enough chocolate biscuits to keep up with them and is torn between her concerns about nutrition and a reluctance to impose restrictions […]

December 12, 2016

Missing the Milestones

By Susan Wight Towards the end of the year, I often catch up with old friends. Getting together always emphasises just how different our lives now are. They talk of meetings, workloads, changing policies, best-practice and so on. Their end-of-year display of cards and gifts from appreciative clients or students always takes me by surprise. Jealous? No, I’m happy with my life and don’t […]

July 14, 2016

Are you qualified?

By Susan Wight Somehow this question puts us on the back foot and we ﬁnd ourselves mumbling, “Umm, well no I’m not a teacher…” Why? Why do we give in to the assumption that we need some kind of certiﬁcate to ‘teach’ our own children? I don’t believe we should, but somehow many parents suddenly feel unable to defend home education when this question […]

May 10, 2016

Just Playing

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 […]

April 4, 2016

Soul Schooling

By Carolyn Franzke (Otherways Magazine, issue 140) I used to be a teacher. I taught maths and science, and sometimes other subjects too. I was on the curriculum committee, attended lots of conferences and ran staff meetings about the value of a quality curriculum. I studied for my Masters in Education and wrote a thesis about the value of digital portfolios in improving the […]

March 7, 2016

Home educating teenagers is not that hard

By Sue Wight Home educating primary-aged children was easy as far as I was concerned. I spent time with them, read to them, played games with them, talked lots, encouraged their interests, took them to interesting places, and stood back and watched the learning happen. But home educating teenagers? I knew nothing about that! That would be hard – what about the Maths, what […]

March 3, 2016

Advice for newbies

By Jess Pritchard “What advice do you have for those just starting out?” It is the inevitable question, asked again and again. I clearly remember asking it (in some form or another) myself, many times, of many different people. And now I am being asked it. So here is my advice. In dot point: 1) Don’t be afraid of mess. It goes without saying […]

January 13, 2016

But What About My Life…

By Lyn Saint On making the decision to home educate their children many women often bring up the question – but what about my life, should I devote the next 10-15 years solely to bringing up my children – what about me…? As we all know, society today does not appreciate, acknowledge and respect women who are fulltime mothers – quite the opposite in […]

November 23, 2015

Home Education: A Choice for Life

By Lyn Saint There has always been a lot of confusion with the public’s perception of what homeschooling is. As the name implies, people expect to do schooling in the home and therefore expect to be able to purchase homeschooling as a package for their children. Many are often quite confused and even alarmed when they find out that homeschooling is in fact all […]

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 […]