Responsible Homeschooling

I had an unsettling conversation this week with a young woman, a survivor of fundamentalist evangelical religion, who was homeschooled in the US, against her will, in such a way as to severely hamper her life chances due both to the paucity of the education, and the fact that - as anti-government fundamentalists - her …

Happy new year!

Welcome to September! Another month, another term, another year! Somehow I seem to be starting my 18th year of home education!  This year I'm teaching (or is it facilitating? I still haven't worked that out!) Baba Zonee (B.Z.) who is now 13 and Pony-rider who is now 16. Pony-rider wasn't expecting to be at home …

Phonics Fun

Dragon-tamer caught the reading bug early. After learning the alphabet with a little help from the Alphabats books, all I had to do really was read a lot to him, help him learn a few sight words with Ladybird Key Words, and by book 4a he was off into the brave new world of easy-readers. …

Balancing Curriculum with Interests

In our more than 15 years of home education, we have moved through various seasons of more and less formal learning. We never quite qualified as bona fide unschoolers (although I was quite attracted to radical unschooling as a philosophy) but nor did we fully qualify as traditional homeschoolers, since we often had very relaxed …

Change of Seasons

After muddling through for just over a year with most of our books still in storage and without any significant social contact, Motor-biker decided at the beginning of April to try school. It took a while for the bureaucratic wheels to turn, but once the ball was rolling everything seemed to happen very fast. We …

The Very Hungry Princess

Birthday week We made the fatal error of saying to Pony-rider “what would you like to do for your birthday – you can do anything you like!” Now that I think about it, I realise that we got off lightly. She could have asked for a trip in the Virgin Space Shuttle! Instead, she asked …

High Culture: Closed for the Winter

We started the day with Latin: Dragon-tamer orally going through the noun tables and verb paradigms we have learnt so far, and reviewing vocabulary, and finally doing a simple translation exercise that involved placing the correct words in sentences. He did quite well considering we only do it occasionally. Pony-rider listens in too. As we …

2015 in review

Thank-you to all my readers and followers for staying with us in 2015. I know I haven't been terribly consistent, and it probably doesn't look very professional because I rarely manage to include photos, but in my defence, we have had a very disrupted year and, really, this blog has never been some kind of …

A Man Alone

An old enemy of Odo's, Ibudan - a notorious smuggler with a mercenary attitude, no friend of the Cardassians, but no true friend of his fellow Bajorans either - appears to have been murdered, and everything seems to point to Odo as the murderer. Only Odo, misunderstood and standing alone as a Shapeshifter, different from …

Homeschooling in New Sweden

I discovered recently that my home town is twinned with - amongst other towns - Wilmington, Delaware in the USA. My immediate thought was to wonder whether it would be possible to get into contact with homeschoolers there (everybody homeschools in America, right?) Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered this week that the town …