USA Homeschooling Infograph

This is an interesting infograph that I have been asked to share. It looks at the history of American homeschoolers from 1977 and shows how the number of homeschooled children in America has doubled since 1999.


Source: Early-Childhood-Education-Degrees.com

I'd love to see something similar for UK home educators, statistics and history-wise. I wonder what reasons UK parents would give for their choice to home educate?

I'm not so sure about the last three tips for homeschooling though.

Establish Expectations? Maybe that's got something to do with American home education laws. I don't really go in for evaluation by subject. I take a much more holistic approach to learning within our routines and loose structure. I know that learning happens all the time and often the outcome can not be foreseen at the outset. We often digress and what they actually learn can look very different from what I thought they would learn. The important thing is that they DO learn and that they ENJOY the process :)

Set a Space? Again, I view learning as part of life. I WANT the task of learning to be perfectly intermingled and integrated into the household.

Don't Forget Friends? Goes without saying, doesn't it? And as for children being at home with parents all day every day, that's very far from the truth in this family and other home educating families I know.

And just to add, if you do want to know the law in regard home educating in the UK, useful websites include:
Education Otherwise
Schoolhouse
Home Education UK
Home Education Advisory Service
Ed Yourself
Educational Freedom
HedNI
Elective Home Education Wales

Gods Group

No, there's no missing apostrophe.
Today was our local themed group session. The children chose the theme themselves a few months ago and the theme was Gods.

It was a fairly quiet session (August usually is) with just 6 families with 12 children in all, age range 1 to 14.

It was beautiful day for a change, so the kids all spent a lot of time outdoors playing a very complicated role play game that involved super powers. It's great to hear a wide age range of children negotiating and building characters and plot together, loudly and happily I might add. No arguments or tears. Bliss!

There were Spirit cards to look at, colouring pages of Egyptian gods, a couple of Roman Gods minibooks left over from a previous session and a story about the Hindu gods.

They also looked at the names of the days of the week...

...fictional gods, the focus being on Arnold Bros (est 1905) from  Truckers: The First Book of the Nomes by Terry Pratchett...

  ...ancient local gods and making your own god statue...

...and Green man mask making.