Special guest edition: How we homeschooled today by Mary-Ann Horley
Home educating at home and on holiday
Many of you will know Mary-Ann from the extremely useful Home Ed Resources Newsletter. She kindly took the time to tell me about home educating her son, followed by what home ed can look like on holiday. She writes that they didn’t do any formal learning that week but I think you will agree they still packed a lot in! I also love that their holiday activities tied in with what Cian had been learning about at home. I don’t know if this was intentional or just part of the magic of homeschool.
I asked Mary-Ann to tell me a bit more about their life and their route to home ed, particularly what it’s like homeschooling in a village (I’m in London so always keen to find out what it’s like elsewhere). She sent this:
I think we decided about preschool because several of our family thought home ed was a great idea but did say “you will send him to preschool won’t you?” and generally thought Early Years was important socially. We had a nice preschool in our village where the kids were mostly autonomous.
I don’t know anyone else who has done preschool with no intention of going to school but it has worked out well for us, and Cian still plays with the kids he got to know. If we had moved in when he was a bit older then I think Beavers/football/cricket/tennis would have fulfilled the same function.
We’re halfway between two cities so go to groups in both places and various days out, I think we had 12-15 kids in the library yesterday and Cian’s got four boys he’s particularly close to, aged 9 to 12. We do semi-regular trips to London or Birmingham.
At home…
We have one son, ten-year-old Cian and we live in a village in the East Midlands of the UK. He’s never been to school apart from a couple of years in preschool to get to know other kids in the village. Both us parents work part time from home.
We allow screens because they are getting used wisely at the moment—if it degenerates into watching/playing nonsense or causes a bad attitude they go away for a bit! I don’t give him his PC until he’s done what I’ve (loosely!) planned for the day.
Cian woke up fairly late, had breakfast in bed and researched ocean liners on his phone until about lunchtime. I got some work done—I do freelance social media for a motorsport agency, and admin and social media for our Parish Council.
We then went to the local cafe because I thought we needed a change of scene after festering around the house all morning and had bagels for lunch with the aim of doing some geometry and history/geography.
We use Numerise for maths along with any interesting investigations and ideas I find, it starts from Year 6 and goes to GCSE. Cian is working through Year 6 in the order he feels like, basically devising his own spiral curriculum. We did a couple of sets of questions on lines and angles.
Then we started work on a project on Ironbridge, chosen because he likes industrial history. To kick things off I made a worksheet of sorts in Notion which included some embedded videos from English Heritage and the page to look at in his textbook (Geog.1, aimed at Year 7) and some questions to check he was paying attention. Next step with that is to edit for grammar etc as we find it more effective to do that than have dedicated English language sessions. We’re planning a visit to Ironbridge in a few weeks after our camping holiday to the New Forest next week.
He scooted home from the cafe himself and did about an hour’s drumming with his dad. His assignment from his teacher was to pick a song, learn to play the groove and write it down, so he’s doing At The River by Groove Armada. He had specifically been asked not to do rock as he’ll play Nirvana or Foo Fighters at any opportunity! Both Cian and his dad are at about the same level so they often work together. I left them in peace to get on with it.
Then Cian headed to the park when the local school finished for scooting and to meet some friends before heading back to get ready for his kickboxing class. I went out to help with some public area gardening with someone on the Parish Council.
After kickboxing and dinner Cian built some ocean liners and tiny tenders for them out of Lego. My mother messaged us to let him know about an ancestor from the early 20th century who emigrated to America on the liner Oceanic, so he told me what he knew about the ship and its sisters and I told him about emigration in the early 20th century and Ellis Island. He’s planning to build a harbour with a wreck in it next, or possibly Oceanic aground on Foula in Shetland which he knew was its final resting place.
He didn’t ask for the PC so he didn’t have it, but he would often incorporate things he’s learned that day or in the past into his group Minecraft world.
A reminder that I would love to hear your reasons for homeschooling, to share in an upcoming post. Whether you always knew you wanted to, or were pushed into it because of school issues, or something else entirely.
All stories welcome, and it can be as long or as short as you like. Responses so far have ranged from a couple of sentences to several paragraphs.
The more diverse stories we get the more interesting it will be for us all to read, so please get in touch! You can be anonymous or not, as you wish.
Deadline this Sunday evening, subscribers can simply reply to this e-mail, or message waddingtonc [at] gmail dot com
And away…
Not long after this daily snapshot we went on holiday camping by the sea near the New Forest! We didn’t do any formal learning for the week, just saw things and chatted lots.
We went to the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, Buckler’s Hard Maritime Museum and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, plus much noodling about on the beach and watching ships of all sizes come out of Southampton harbour. We found them on the MarineTraffic app and followed them to their next port.
Near where we stayed there were remains of infrastructure for the D-Day landings so we read up about Operation Overlord. Whole floating harbours were built and taken over to Normandy!
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard was amazing. We explored HMS Warrior, HMS Victory and the Mary Rose, plus we went on a harbour boat tour where we saw several Royal Navy frigates. Cian loved HMS Warrior the best—it is a steam-powered armoured frigate from 1860 and we chatted to a staff member in character as a stoker and got a good look at the engine as well as exploring the gun decks and cabins.
Buckler’s Hard has got to be one of the best small museums we’ve been to—several ships from Nelson’s Navy were built there and there were many models of ships and items from them. Down the preserved street was a house arranged how a ship worker would have lived, and you could see the slipways where the ships were built.
Storms at the end of the week though so we came home a day early, missing out on a kayak trip on the Lymington river, but we’ll make up for it with a local expedition!
Thank you so much to Mary-Ann for sharing her days. Don’t forget to have a look at Home Ed Resources Newsletter if you’re not already a subscriber.
If you’re new here, you might have missed previous guest posts:
Allyse Hopkins’ very relatable day with her family of four in New Zealand
Susie Wales’ life with her three boys in Florida.
Rachael Ringenberg’s thoughtful glimpse into her life with four girls in Vermont.
Joel Bowman’s ‘away schooling’, travelling around the classical world with an eight year old.
And if you’re not subscribed to How We Homeschool, sign up now and never miss a post.
Let me know if you’re interested in a historical perspective. Much of what I have been reading about contemporary homeschooling is similar to what I did. There are differences however. I am on a “break” right now, but will be back soon!
Thank you for writing this, Mary-Ann. I appreciate learning how other parents find and experience museums and other attractions - I'm often intimidated by them. The more I read about others who explore museums, galleries, etc. with their kids, the more I feel inspired to do more stepping out with my children.