When Do You Start Home Educating?

This is a question I have been asked a lot over the last year and a half, as if one day we will sit Daniel at the kitchen table, get out a blackboard on an easel, and start requiring him to ask permission to go to the toilet. For most HEers in the UK, however, this is just not how it works. We are not trying to create school-at-home; the school system is designed to get a pre-set curriculum into a large number of children at a time, in a trackable way. When working with just your own children, with every waking hour at your disposal, it really isn't the most efficient way to be learning. 

Having said that, some families find that a bit of structured learning works for them. Others choose (perfectly legally) to do no formal work at all but instead to learn through life. The important thing is to be flexible, to try out different approaches until you find what works best for your family, and to be open to change as and when needed. 

Last year, when Daniel would have started school, nothing much changed for us. He was happy and learning, so there was no need. As this September approaches, though, I have been very aware that he has now reached CSA ('Compulsory School Age') and I am extremely conscious of our responsibilities to make sure he is receiving a suitable education. Again, that wouldn't necessarily have changed anything in our approach, except that Daniel has suddenly had a massive developmental leap in the last couple of weeks and appears to have grown up hugely. He has also been rather difficult to live with, but that's a separate issue, and may be partly to do with me being 6 months pregnant and all the upheaval that threatens.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons I decided a couple of weeks ago to see how he got on with a trial of Reading Eggs, an online programme used by a lot of HEers. He has had a good grasp of most of the letters and their most common sounds for a long time but seemed to lack the confidence to start putting them together. Well, there is only one problem with Reading Eggs... getting him off it! He blitzed through around 18 lessons in three days and was reading sentences confidently by day 2. A week and a half later and he is still asking to do it every day, so we're carrying on (though not at quite the same breakneck speed as the start). We have also just started the companion programme, Maths Seeds, and we'll see how he gets on with that. The biggest problem I have at the moment is keeping Adam occupied while Daniel and I work on the computer, so I am having to be rather creative with 'work' that Adam can do with us at the table at the same time. Today it was some magnetic shape-matching and scissor practice; tomorrow, who knows? Jigsaws and plasticine, perhaps. 

I'm slightly startled to find us doing something so structured, and it all seems to have happened very suddenly. A few weeks ago I would have sworn that we wouldn't have been doing this kind of thing for a long time yet, if ever, but that's life with children - in the blink of an eye, they grow and change and need something different. And as long as we can adapt and find the new balance, it's all good.