Hi. I would like to introduce us as a family of lifelearners.
Our children have a home-based education, and I don't mean homeschool. Homeschool implies that we 'do school at home'; as in the formal institutionalized format. And we don't.We attend as it were the 'school of life'. Our education comes from doing, trying, failing, communicating anywhere and anytime. It's fantastic!
We don't quite remember why we decided to keep the children out of the school system. It just happened. All of a sudden my oldest was 6, then 7, and the thought crossed our mind "hey, what about school?" Plus a few comments from those who love us, of course.As we are a one-income family, I did most of the research. Attending meetings in our area, looking at books from the library. And we continued doing what we were doing - living.
We tried several approaches. It is so confusing at first; you think you have to 'do school' at home. We signed up with several different schools. Enrolled is the correct term. We had BC certified teachers tell us what to learn, when, how and how to present it to the school so that the work was acceptable to the Ministry of Education. Never mind if the children were actually learning. Just make sure you follow the learning outcomes, check all the boxes, fill up the portfolio with samples of work.This did not work so good for us. My son was interested in trucks and heavy equipment from the time he could sit up. He was briefly into dinosaurs but not when it was in the learning outcomes....and now he's 14 and still into building heavy equipment with his Lego. He loved tadpoles and frog collecting when it wasn't in the learning outcomes...we were always a year or 2 ahead or behind the L.O.'s. One of our teachers explained 'just do it again, for the portfolio' when I expressed we already studied tadpoles becoming frogs 2 years in a row, 2 years earlier. We weren't interested in doing it again 'just for the portfolio'. Certain math concepts were difficult to grasp for my daughter, like long division. She's just getting that now that she's 12, as her times tables are getting more strongly fixed in her head.It didn't feel right to push ahead with learning things the children were not interested in or couldn't grasp yet, just for the sake of proving to some higher power that we were learning at home. And ignoring the stuff they were learning because it wasn't in the outcomes for that year/grade.
Now my kids are 14 and 12. We have found a great school, SelfDesign, with a wonderful teacher who we e-mail to every week with things we've done - according to the school's regulations. In return, the school provides us with a Visa pre-loaded with a number of dollars to be spent on Educational Resources, in accordance with a Learning Plan we made up for the year.The beauty is, this teacher has home-educated her daughters as well (they are now out and about in the world) so she understands the concept of life learning, and she interprets this from our weekly reports for the school to the Ministry. It gives us the wonderful freedom to learn things we are interested in, when we want to. When the interest is there or there is a necessity to learn something. Whatever the kids learn, sticks in their heads because they learn it when they have an interest or need to learn it.
