Our Home Educating Lives
Milly's Family
​We are fairly new to home education. We started in September 2024. After countless meetings, the support our daughter was given from school was being removed in Year 9 as it was deemed a Year 9 pupil should not need supporting as she was. Being home educated will not restrict our daughter receiving the qualifications she needs for the Post 16 Course that she is hopeful to do. Due to this our home education style follows a semi structured format.
How our home education style supports our child to thrive.
Home educating has so far been the best thing our family has ever done. Our daughter has found a confidence she never had before. After 18 months of therapy, our daughters amazing therapist has said she is in such a good place right now that therapy is no longer needed. The changes she has seen have astounded her and us.
Our daughter thrives from learning without classroom distractions and without the pressure of changing classrooms, bells ringing etc. We have found that she's got her own learning mode, it is hard to get her to focus on anything else. She will research everything she can and educates us at the same time. Our Sunday night meltdowns are now filled with happiness planning the week ahead. She has found a new passion in cooking and completed two cooking courses. Her love for animals is evident to everyone and she attends a ranch twice a month to help muck out the animals, feed them, groom them, move them paddocks and genuinely just work really hard. Our daughter has also found a new passion in climbing, something she had tried before but hated.
As a family we are all benefitting from home education, we were under constant stress from school of meetings, phone calls and emails. We feel our evenings are family time now and we can enjoy watching our daughter grow into a confident teenager.
A glimpse into our home educating lives...
Our week is structured so that our daughter concentrates on Maths, English and Science work (ready for beginning EHE GCSE college in September) in the morning and then project work in the afternoon. This week she has completed three Open University Open Learn courses, each one being 5 hours long, she has attended her ranch placement on Wednesday morning and next week she has a 2 hour climbing session.
We don't follow term times so we take advantage of visiting museums when it is quiet, last month we went to the zoological museum in Cambridge (her choice of animal museums) which was fascinating, we also visited the Fitz William museum where she found the Egyptian display interesting and thought provoking. Her recent project on the 2nd World War incorporated watching the boy in striped pyjamas and learning about Auschwitz.
From September she has been enrolled into a local college provider for EHE students to work towards their GCSEs. Our daughter has chosen to do maths, English and science for the first year in hope to do animal studies post 16. In her 2nd year she is undecided what she wants to do as yet but loves history and we will follow her lead. I can honestly say we are all enjoying this new lease of life, our daughter has her sparkle back
