Questions Questions: What about socialising?

Inspired by two ladies that I met this week, both with babies, and considering home ed, and also by the influx of new home edders into our little community, I have decided to answer here some of the most common questions that we get asked regarding home education. Lots of home ed blogs have done this before but you can never have too much of a good thing!

Let's start with the most pressing of them all...

What about socialising? I hope anyone who regularly reads our posts recognises that we are a very social bunch. There is regularly meeting with other home ed families and spending time with our family and friends, along with entering the world on a daily basis, saying 'hi' to our neighbours, the postman and the guy in the local (craft) shop, in addition to visiting museums and chewing the ear off the expert- asking question after question, or requesting a book from the librarian. Seriously, i hope you get the picture, for us being sociable and socialising encompass so much more than spending six hours a day with a group of our peers that we happened to be thrown in with. 
The major difference, from my point of view, is not about how or even if we socialise but who we socialise with. We seem to be a society insistent on separating our children from their parents from as young as possible, instead of nuturing the most basic of our human relationships and making these secure and building our circle of emotional attachments with others from inside the family to outside. Family is important and building those relationships firmly is important and then our smalls begin to explore relationships with others around them that they meet on a regular basis, our community. For my smalls they do this at their own pace, they choose who they reach out to, and they choose when to recline and relax in the familiar. 
Let's not forget that we get to spend more of our time in the real world which reflects...the real world! We talk to our peers, we play with children from 0-99, we discuss castles and engineering and pets and lego with those who are interested in castles and engineering and pets and lego and it doesn't matter if they are 3 or 93.
And lastly, we observe others social skills, not from our peers (who are at a similar social, or unsocial, stage as us) but from those who have gone before us and have learnt social formalities and socialisation. This is not to say that the smalls are perfect, for they are just small, but i'm convinced that their ability to operate in the real world will be greatly improved by the fact that they were never removed from the real world.

Do you follow a curriculum? No.
By law you are required to provide an education, how you do this is entirely up to you. It is possible to follow a curriculum if that is the path you choose but we choose not to. We are autonomous in our approach to learning. The smalls choose what they learn, how they learn and when they learn. We flow seamlessly from comic strips to angry birds to board games to quick fire math to hide and seek. Life flows. Learning flows. And mostly with me just joining in or seeking an answer to a question or a place we can find out more about it.  My role is not to teach them directly but to facilitate their learning. We encourage, support, discuss, discover and play together. And, in truth, they are learning all the time. Learning cannot be confined to six hours a day within the same four walls for three terms a year. Children are not lazy and will not spend hours a day doing nothing, they are natural learners and the world is their oyster. Learning is not separated from the rest of our life or timetabled. It is life. 

But what about reading and writing and maths? Reading, writing and maths are part of our everyday lives. If this wasn't true then they wouldn't be so important in our educational system. I once saw a poster that gave ten pointers on how to help your child become a reader. All ten points said 'read together.' And that is what we do. Everyday we read books and signs and letters and messages and magazines and food labels and packaging and instructions. I answer questions about rhyming words and letters and words and logos and we play games and tell jokes and sing songs and read to each other. We support them on their reading journey. 
The same path is taken with writing (and maths.) The smalls type and doodle and write. They play with combinations of letters that they have put together and ask us to read them to them, they write cards and letters to friends, dictate emails to various people and companies to ask them questions, we leave messages on the fridge to each other and make posters to put on the walls, they tell stories into the voice recorder and we type it out and turn it into a book. But it is always important to remember that this is not a path set by me or a curriculum, it is always the smalls that zre doing these things as part of their play, as part of their everyday doingness, we are just there to help when they need it and there to demonstrate writing in our own lives. 
Maths has been an eye-opener for me. Truely, how do you learn maths without sitting down and teaching it? It's that statement they make, 'mummy, if i get one more for Pumpkin then I will have six.' or, 'Can i have half of that cake?' 'What time are we going to the park?' And then the response, 'And what if we needed one for Plum and daddy too, how many would we have then?' 'Come and show me where to cut the cake,' 'How long have we got before we leave?' The opportunities are endless. We play board games and minecraft and rearrange our furniture, we race each other and count our pennies and measure our height, we cook together and pour our own drinks and count how many sausages we need to cook for dinner, and sometimes, just for fun, we count the peas on our plate!

Do you have to take tests and exams? No
It can be quite shocking to hear that answer. How can you possibly know that they are learning? Mostly people are concerned with, is my child working at a similar level to their peers?, when they ask this question. The truth is that it really doesn't matter. The things that the smalls are interested in and are happy doing now are the things that we will investigate further together. We love space and robots and castles and feathers and butterflies and a whole range of other topics that aren't on any test. 
It's not always about the facts learned and the information gained. We seek mostly to encourage their naturally inquisitive nature and utilise resources to find out more about their interests. That's hard to find on a test paper. We place before them things that are interesting and fascinating and unusual, we indulge together in the everyday and we observe what makes the smalls tick, the things that interest them and the things they return to again and again and we do more of those things in different forms - books, making, clubs, museums, experts. The main thing is, that when you spend your days, each day every day, you see the learning taking place, the excitement, the questions, the retelling, the processing, the play, and there are days or even strings of days where it looks like maybe nothing has been learnt but then we take off again. (Actually, realistically, they are always learning but sometimes we just don't see what it is.)
We don't even test them in small ways, we don't ask them to put numbers in order with the fridge magnets to see if they can, we don't ask them to read it when they have asked us to because we think they should or they can, I don't ask them to tell me all the things that they have learnt from a session or a book today. But these things do happen, in there own time, the smalls do tell daddy about their day when they arrive home, one of them will order fridge magnets for fun and they read stories to each other. The evidence is there, there is no need for testing, just living, learning, play and observing.

What about GCSE's? Not even GCSEs if you don't want to. It is possible but not necessary or compulsory. People think it's impossible to get work without qualifications or just plain risky and it is true that some professions require certain qualifications for you to be able to do them (a friend once asked me, 'what if he wants to become a brain surgeon?' a little puzzled I answered, 'then he'll become a brain surgeon', As if home educated children wouldn't possibly have the same opportunities as schooled children.) 


There are many more questions that we are asked, some serious considerations, some quite ridiculous, as with all things in life. There are people with views and opinions and general curiosity and interest. i might find time another day to write down some more, i might not. Time is precious and my time mostly belongs to being with Bean, Pumpkin, Plum and Pippin.