Take Heart - Home Education Network

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 […]

September 3, 2015

Dealing with Opposition

This is never easy. As soon as you pull your children out of school, it seems as though your parents, your friends, your neighbours, even the local check-out operator suddenly have an opinion on how children should be educated and most of them won’t match with your concept of home education. Take a deep breath. There will be opposition; it is just a question […]

September 2, 2015

Beginning Home Education

By Lyn Saint When the notion of home educating our children first enters our thoughts, most of us instantly dismiss the idea that we could ever do such a thing. After all, there is this huge infrastructure in place costing millions of dollars per year, employing thousands of highly-qualified people, using curricula designed by trained minds using the latest researched and up-to-date techniques. We […]

September 2, 2015

Home ed on a budget

By Sue Wight It doesn’t have to cost an arm and leg So you’ve decided to home educate, but now you are worried about how you will ever afford all of those flashy curriculum resources, especially if home education means living on one income as it does for most families. The good news is that home education does not have to be expensive. You […]

September 2, 2015

Life’s Greatest Adventure

By Lyn Saint ‘How can I give my child a high level of education when I didn’t do very well at school myself?” is not only one of the most asked questions, but many adults today assume that, just because they failed or dropped out of school themselves, that they are uneducated. As a notorious school failure and drop-out, these were also my thoughts […]

September 2, 2015

Socialisation

By Sue Wight By far the most frequent question about home education is: But what about socialisation? In order to answer this question, it is important to look at what people mean when they ask about socialisation as the question can be taken in more than one way. Will the children have friends? Home educating families go out of their way to ensure their […]

September 2, 2015

When Home Ed Kids Grow Up

By Katharina Russell-Head For those of us who went to school it is almost impossible to imagine what it must be like to grow up outside the system. The closest most of us get is to remember, or to observe, the experience of early childhood. Babies and small children do not take lessons in asking for food, or observe timetables in learning how to […]