Back from a brilliant weekend away · Tuesday January 9, 2007 by Ann
Back from a brilliant weekend away, to a busy start to a busy week.
I took David into college this morning, where he is doing the second year of his A levels. When David left school six years ago aged thirteen , we recently had been told that because of the degree of his dyslexia and in particular his short term memory problems, if he worked really hard, he may achieve grade D at GCSE. Since then we have enjoyed an autonomously educating lifestyle. Following David’s interests he has looked at several history projects and done science experiments and watched interesting television programmes, discussing them endlessly. Purposeful conversation on a one to one basis has been a large part of David’s education as well as lots of fantasy role play, Warhammer, ‘Magic the Gathering’ games, computer and PlayStation games. We have had such a good time since he left school but we have done no formal school work at all. We were thrilled when, on returning to the state system at FE college he managed to achieve grade B’s at As level. He has done so well socially and academically. When he returned home he went off to his bedroom to get his head back into one of the six books in a fantasy series that he had for Christmas. What a major difference to the days in school where he hated any sort of reading!
Alice has spent the day doing last minute studying for her first As level exam tomorrow. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the promised lap top computer is in place for the exam. It was not supplied for her mock exam before Christmas sigh
She chose to cook for us all this evening, as a distraction. Alice is a vegan and has become very interested in food and nutrition. This has made life so much easier when dh had to go on a low fat diet for health reasons-I have had a very good teacher at home!
On the way home from dropping off David this morning, I picked up Lucy, from an overnight stay with her friend Penny. Lucy goes to ‘Explorers Scouts’ on a Monday night and generally stays over with her friend Penny, who is also home educated, afterwards.
Lucy spent a lot of time on her lap top again today, showing me some of the websites she is interested in and the things she has written there. She was trying to persuade me to start a ‘MySpace’ of my own after giving me a virtual tour of sites of mutual friends. It is impressive how keen she is to read and write on these sites. This appears to be a medium that she is most enthusiastic about. with her reading and spelling improving dramatically along the way as I said before.
She spent some time then writing in her diary, which is a major achievement for her, given her level of dyslexia and then went onto developing some songs she is writing.
Lucy sings all of the time and she was also practising some songs she intends to perform at an up and coming audition.
We also spent a fair amount of time, getting the house back to rights after the Christmas festivities and the weekend away, before Lucy went off to Choir. Choir had a social evening this week-they will return to proper rehearsals next week, but tonight was about planning concerts for the coming year, making a new CD and the residential schools at Easter and in the summer. Lucy is keen to be involved in all of the events, she went to Easter School last year and really had a good time.
The rest of the week we’ll be busy every day with various activities, some home ed group based and some not. It always makes me smile if someone says that “Socialisation must be a problem for home educators” This week socialisation is a problem-there is so much of it!!
An exceptional family who have embraced home education with passion and their extended family with warmth. However, the word ‘exceptional’ implies ‘out of the ordinary, exclusive and difficult to attain’, whereas this family’s key to success seems to rest on the simple ingedients of warmth, passion and an openess to experiential learning – take insiration all other home educated children and parents as these are all ingredients that can build life-long success and do not require membership to the preparatory schools of elitism.
— Nottinghamshire Jan 10, 11:24 am #