Thursday, December 27, 2007

A Day In The Life Of Our Deschooling

I thought it would be interesting to do a day in the life of our deschooling so that if anyone else is new to this and wants to see what other families are doing whilst deschooling then they can. If anyone reads this and does one of their own on their blog then please could you leave a comment as I would love to read what other families do. This is taken from last Thursday, 20th December.

At 8.50am I got up, showered, dressed and did a quick tidy up and washed the cups from last night.

Josh came down at 9.30am and tidied the dining table for me without me asking. He found a book of Christmas poems and wanted me to read him a couple so we sat down together for 5 minutes and read ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas’ by Clement Clarke Moore to him which he loved and I also read ‘Just Doing My Job’ by Clare Bevan about playing Herod’s Henchmen in a nativity play which he liked too. He then went on the computer for 20 minutes or so playing Commandos 3 PC game.

He went back up to his room to play with his pokemon figures. At 10.10am Ellie woke up and I could hear them playing together in their room.

They both came back downstairs at 10.20am and watched Peppa Pig (Ellie’s favourite programme) and Super Mario and ate their breakfast.

At 11am Ellie went back upstairs to play with her My Little Pony toys. Josh watched Yu-Gi-Oh. When Yu-Gi-Oh had finish at 11.30am Josh went upstairs to play with Ellie.

At 12pm they came downstairs and drew some pictures using some stencils they got free with a KFC kids meal they had a few days ago. They spent ages doing this together and then colouring their pictures in.

At 12.30pm they’d had enough of doing the stencils and Josh did a lovely picture with his favourite pokemon in it. Ellie was pretending to be a waitress and asking what we wanted to eat and wrote it down, asking for help if she wanted to know how to spell something.

At 1pm I made lunch then we put on Christmas songs on my ipod and connected it to the speakers and had fun singing them together. They were so funny as they were singing Jingle Bells really loud (so Santa would hear them!). It’s a good job our house is detached and there is no other houses within 100 feet of us as they were really going for it!

We listened to the ‘Fairytale of New York’ song by the Pogues and we all had fun dancing to that by linking arms and spinning round and then onto the next person. It was really funny.

On Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings Josh usually goes to Drama and then has a singing lesson on a Tuesday afternoon but he didn’t want to go today as he wanted to go to kids club at the hotel where we have our shop. He didn’t go last Saturday or Tuesday either but it is down to him whether he goes or not. He says he does want to carry on with it after christmas but he wanted to go to kids club with Ellie and make some christmas cards.

Kids club runs from 3 – 5pm so I got some time to myself to go to the internet cafe and do some blog reading. We still don’t have the internet at home yet but hopefully we will have it soon. We got home at 5.30pm and Ellie helped me make a mince beef and onion pie for tea whilst Josh played Zoombinis Maths Journey PC game which he loves on the computer. We had a bit of shortcrust pastry left over so Ellie decided she wanted to make mince pies so she rolled it out and got the cutter and cut out 5 circles. I helped her put them into bun cases in the tin and she put a spoonful of mincemeat on each. I placed them in the oven for her and she sat on the breakfast bar and waited for them to be ready. She checked on them with me and helped decide when they were ready. We got them out and left them to cool for a while. She played with her dolls. When they had cooled for about 15 minutes we decided to put icing sugar on them so I got the sieve and she poured some icing sugar in and shook the sieve over each mince pie giving them a nice dusting of ‘snow’ as she said. Then of course she had to test one before dinner. She thought they were ‘the best mince pies ever’ and I asked her if she would like to help me make some on Christmas Eve to leave out for Santa with almond pastry and she said that she’d like to do that.

They both went upstairs to play a game together but after 10 minutes I could hear them arguing so I went upstairs to see what they were arguing about and Josh was accusing Ellie of losing his Pokemon Ranger DS game. Ellie said that she hadn’t had it so we looked around their room and found it in Josh’s toybox. Josh apologized to Ellie for blaming her.

At 6.40pm dinner was ready so I called them down for it. Then we watched ‘Santa Clause 3: The Escape Claus’ movie. They both enjoyed it.

Then it was time to go and fetch daddy from work and when we got back Josh got really interested in a ‘World of Mysteries’ program on Sky Three about the Curse of Tutankhamen. We talked a little about the programme and he was mesmorised by Tutankhamen’s death mask. We are going to London in February to see the Treasures of Tutankhamen Exhibition and he can’t wait.

After the programme he went upstairs and played with Ellie nicely and they went to sleep at about 12.15am. They are night birds like me and Vic.

That was the end of a lovely deschooling day.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Making the decision to unschool

One of the things that finally helped make the decision to unschool easier was at the beginning of November Josh was doing his maths workbook and I was sat helping them whenever they needed help and some of the pages he was working on were about shapes - edges and vertices, right angles, lines of symmetry and I just thought ‘hang on a minute, what am I doing making him sit there and do this when it really is so unimportant.’ I had to look up the answers as I had no clue whatsoever to the answers and I thought ‘does he really need to learn this?’ The answer, of course, is no. He doesn’t need to learn anything. He will learn what he wants to learn, when he wants to learn it, how he wants to learn it. I can’t remember hardly anything that I learnt in a school environment that I have used since leaving school. I didn’t learn anything useful about managing a home and have taught myself to do the laundry and chores and to use the internet.

Josh and Ellie have taught themselves how to use our home pc and the internet. Ellie has great mouse control and loves looking up Dora the Explorer on the internet. She knows how to click onto google and type in what she wants to look at and search and she is only 5 and a half. She knows more about the internet than Vic because she wanted to learn about it and Vic hasn’t really had a need to use the internet but he says he wants us to show him to use it to find pictures for our business. Josh uses the internet to look at pokemon and play games online.

Showing Affection

Me and my parents have always had a funny relationship. I was the 3rd child of 4 and always felt that they loved my younger brother Robert more than me and still do. When I was 13 I rebelled and was always in trouble with them. I occasionally bunked off school and stayed out much later than I was supposed to. Robert got away with murder but I was always punished.

My parents have never said I love you to me or given me a hug or been affectionate with me for as long as I can remember. Even now that we live in Cyprus and speak almost everyday on the phone they never ever say they love me. They come and stay with us for a month at a time and will show lots of love and affection to Josh and Ellie and say they love them to them but even then will never ever say it to me. I always get upset about it when I have dropped them at the airport and they give the kids a hug and tell them that they will miss them. My husband will give them a hug and kiss my mum on each cheek but they never come near me.

My dad had a heart attack in September 2005 and I told him that I loved him but he never responded to it.

When me and Vic got together I was 18 and he was 39 and I didn’t tell my parents as I knew what their reaction would be and when they found out it was exactly the reaction I expected from them and I ended up leaving home and moving in with Vic. I could understand their reaction to a point because they were concerned about the 21 year age gap but they went about it all the wrong way. Instead of wanting to get to know Vic they judged him purely on the age gap and thought that he could after me when in fact I was the one who asked him out. I could never talk to my parents about anything and I want our kids to be able to tell me anything and know that I love them no matter what and that I will never judge them and will always support them even if I don’t agree with what they are doing I will love them.

Me and Vic have been together for 10 years now and married for 6 and they have been the happiest years of my life. My parents accepted him after a couple of months and I was so proud when my dad stood up on our wedding day and gave his speech and said that he couldn’t have chosen a better husband for me than what I choose for myself.

In Cyprus it is traditionally that you greet someone with a hug and a kiss on each cheek and I never instigate this. I wait for the other person to hug me and feel false doing it. I don’t know why, perhaps it has to do with my parents not showing me any affection.

I don’t want my kids to grow up feeling unloved like I did. I want them to know how much I love them and I tell them and my husband every single day and mean it. Me and Vic are very cuddly with each other and with the kids and give lots of kisses. It is very important to me that they can show emotion. We love our family hugs and cuddles together.

Some thoughts on my own schooling

I had a ‘traditional’ schooling. I went all the way through primary school then onto a private secondary school. All I can remember about primary school was the bullying and the teasing. I did ‘well’ at primary school and I took the entrance exam for a private secondary school and passed with flying colours and got a scholarship to cover the fees so my parents didn’t have to pay. I remember crying when I found out that I had got into the school as I didn’t want to go there and I had only done the exam to prove that I could do it. All my friends were going to the local state secondary school. I had wanted to go to either the same school as my friends or a private school that was just round the corner from where we lived at the time which I passed the exam for but didn’t get a scholarship and my parents couldn’t afford the fees.

Secondary school was worse than primary school. The school was 15 miles from our house so I had to leave the house at 7.45am to get the school bus and then we didn’t finish school til 4pm and by the time I got home it would be 5pm. I made a few friends but ended up having just one for the last couple of years I was there as each one either moved away or their families couldn’t afford the fees anymore.

The uniform was the most disgusting thing in the world. We had to wear bright orange jumpers, cream blouse, brown skirt, fawn over the knee socks that would fall down and hang around your ankles and either a brown blazer or a fawn duffle coat. I think I wore the duffle coat for the 1st year I was there after that I refused to wear it and even on the coldest days would only wear my blazer which was only slightly better than the duffle coat.

I hated it there and 12 years after leaving I can’t really remember anything I was taught there even though I left with 10 good GCSE’s. I just remember being bored stiff most of the time.

I remember in the 3rd year I got 2 Saturday Detentions for failing to do my Art homework. I was absolutely rubbish at Art and so are all my side of the family so I couldn’t even get them to help. I had already chosen my GCSE subjects and was dropping Art so I could not see the point in doing an Art project that would take up weeks of my time at home when I was not going to be continuing with it after the summer anyway. So I was punished by being made to give up my Saturday mornings to go and scrub chewing gum off the desks.

Also we were made to do Design & Technology which I was absolutely rubbish at (I wasn’t very good at anything creative) and we had to design and make something (I can’t remember exactly what we were supposed to be making) but I spent the whole term (12 weeks) just sanding down pieces of wood and hacking them to bits with a junior hacksaw so that it looked as if I was doing something when in fact I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. At the end of term when we supposed to show off our finished products I hid in the toilets during the lesson so that I didn’t have to go.

I also remember the peer pressure. I tried smoking due to peer pressure (I never inhaled and just used to put a lit cigarette in my mouth and pretend to smoke it) and when I got my first boyfriend at 15 I slept with him due to peer pressure. I really regret that now and wished that I had waited for someone special. I don’t want my kids to go through that and feel forced to do stuff because of peer pressure.

I then went to a college and did my NVQ in Business Administration and I enjoyed that as I had chosen to do the course. I learned to touch type quickly and have kept that up to this day and can still type with all my fingers fairly fast and without looking at the keyboard and I learnt how to use spreadsheets and databases.

Then I started to feel the pressure to go to university so I decided to do ‘A’ levels at a 6th form college. I was a year older than everyone else there and whilst they were used to being told exactly what to do my year at college had been very relaxed and it was up to you whether you attended or not and you were responsible for yourself and it was more about what you wanted whilst the 6th form college was like being back at school. They had parent’s evenings and termly reports that they sent to your parents. I hated this. I met my husband Vic through a friend I made at this college and moved in with him. I was 18 then and if I missed a day at college they would phone my parents and tell them even though I had told the college that I was not living at home anymore and at the time I wasn’t even speaking to my parents. I quit college not long after as I couldn’t stand it that they refused to treat me like an adult even though I was 18.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The Freedom of unschooling

I love the freedom we have now that we are ‘unschooling’.

I love it that the kids can go to bed when they want without worrying about getting up in time for school the next day.

They can wake when they want – when they were in school here we used to have to wake them at 6.30 am to get ready and start school at 7.50 am (yes they really do start school that early here!) Also, we save a load of time now that they are at home as we live over 20 miles from the English school they went to so it would take an hour for the round trip at that time of the morning and then another hour going to pick them up so it was a waste of 2 hours of my day just taking them to school and picking them up not to mention the cost of petrol.

They can go to the toilet when they want. This one is especially good for Ellie who has Selective Mutism (a fear of speaking in public) and was too scared of speaking to her teacher to ask to go to the toilet so would either avoid going to the toilet and holding it all through school or would wet herself.

They have the freedom to speak when they want and not have to sit there and raise their hands in order to say something and it is something that neither of my kids had the confidence to do. Josh says that he was too worried about getting the answer wrong and Ellie was too shy to talk to anyone at school even though she probably knew the answer.

I love watching Josh & Ellie play together. They play so lovely together and invent all sorts of great imaginative games. Lots of learning occurs through play.

I love that they have developed such a close bond with one another. Joshua is very protective of Ellie and really looks after her. On Friday they were in the Lion King show at the hotel where we have our business and Ellie hurt her knee backstage and Josh looked after her and made sure that she was ok.

I love that Josh, my previous book hating boy, who when at school would run a mile rather than read a book, loves sitting and reading either on his own or to me and Ellie.

I love that Ellie has pretty much taught herself to read with no formal teaching from me. Ellie has always loved looking at books and when she was at school she would bring home reading books and read perfectly to me but because of her Selective Mutism was unable to talk to her teacher so it felt as though she was being held back with her reading at school as the teacher said that she was unable to assess her even though I was telling her how good Ellie’s reading was and Ellie was consistently getting full marks in her spelling tests at school. I’m glad that she never went to school in England as she would have been labelled as ‘Special Needs’ because she wouldn’t talk. She loves reading and wants so much to be like Josh and read what he reads to the extent that she really surprised me last week by coming and sitting down and reading Tut’s Mummy Lost and Found - a US grade 2 – 3 book (UK Year 3 – 4) and she is only 5 and a half and would have been in Year 1 in the UK and Kindergarten in the US. She continues to amaze me with her reading and I have never had to say do you want to read to me.

I love having the time to play with my kids and read aloud to them. When they were in school Josh would often have 2 hours of homework a night which at age 7 I thought was ridiculous so by the time we got home he would have to be coaxed to do his homework and read his reading book and by the time he had done that and had his tea it would be time for bed as they had to get up so early for school. It left hardly any time to play together as even at weekends he would have a project to do that would take up lots of time too. It was ridiculous. Now I love snuggling with them on the settee and reading great books to them.

They can watch TV or play computer games or DS games when they want and since we began deschooling in November they have gone through playing on the computer all day, playing their DS all day, watching TV all day to spending most of their time playing nicely together.

The start of our journey into unschooling

Our journey into unschooling began properly in November when me & the kids went back to England for a couple of weeks to sort out our house in England as we wanted to change letting agents and rent it out. This was the unconscious start of our deschooling journey. When we returned to Cyprus we had my parents staying with us and we never do any ‘schoolwork’ when we have family here as it was too much of a distraction for the kids and I didn’t want my mother interfering with our homeschool which she did anyway by setting the kids maths questions when I go out take Vic to work despite me telling her not to!

I have read lots of unschooling blogs and articles on unschooling and lurked on a few forums but had previously not had the courage to bite the bullet and go for it. Now I have finally settled into deschooling albeit not meaning to at first but now I can see that this is working for us and I feel much more relaxed about it.

At the moment I am just letting the kids, myself and Vic deschool and we are enjoying being together as a family. We are looking forward to Christmas and I am expecting there to be lots of video game playing on the computer and DS’s but I trust that it will settle back down again once they have had their fill of their new games.

A long introduction

Hi I’m Emma married to Vic and we have 2 gorgeous children, Joshua age 8 & Ellie age 5. We are originally from the UK but we moved to Cyprus, a lovely island in the Mediterranean Sea, on 1st January 2006. I had a blog previously at www.homeeducationcyprus.blogspot.com but I gave the web address to my family and didn’t feel fully able to honestly vent my feelings as they are not very supportive of us homeschooling and I want to keep a totally honest view of our unschooling journey where I can talk about the highs and lows of our life without feeling that I can only put the highs for fear of being criticized if I talk about the lows.

When we lived in England Joshua was at Primary school and Ellie was at nursery full time. Joshua struggled at school with his reading and hated reading to us at home. Reflecting back now I think that he just wasn’t ready to learn to read at that time. The first year of school (Reception Class) he did ok as it was lots of learning through play. He struggled with his reading even then though and was sent home every week with a list of words to learn to sight read (they didn’t use phonics) that he struggled with and we struggled to help him learn them. I think that in the end he would memorize them as if you pointed to a word out of order it would completely throw him. At the time we weren’t really aware of home education and we mistakenly thought that you had to send your kids to school. Had we known that Home Education was an option we would have withdrawn him from the school midway through Year 1 when his problems there seemed to intensify. We struggled on at the school until the end of 2005 when he left there so we could move to Cyprus.

He started at the local Greek primary school and was put back a year (he was in Year 2 when we left England but was put back into Year 1 here) but he hated it. He tried it for 3 weeks and everyday it would break my heart to leave him there. It came to a head there when he actually screamed at the top of his voice in front of his new class and teacher as I had tried to take him. We bought him home and made some enquiries at a Private English School here in Paphos.

We decided that he would start there in the March and I had discovered home education but at the time we were setting up our business here in Cyprus and he had liked the English school when we looked around so we decided that I would homeschool him during February and concentrate on reading and see if we could improve his reading. We read The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss and at first he really struggled with it. So I wrote a list of all the words that he couldn’t read and worked on them and teaching him to sound the words out phonetically. By the end of our month together his reading had improved so much. Then he started at the English School and his first term there was fine but when he went back after the summer holidays he was getting 2 hours homework to do each night plus projects to do every weekend. Also every night he would get his homework out and not have a clue what it was he had to do. We were paying nearly £4000 a year for him and Ellie to go to this school and we were starting to feel very disappointed with the school.

Ellie started at Greek Kindergarten in January 2006 and seemed to do ok. She made friends with the one other English girl there and they stuck together like glue. Then in September 2006 we started her at the English school with Josh in the Reception Class. She had always been very shy at her nursery even in England but she would not talk to her teacher or her classmates. After a week the teacher was quite concerned about it so we did a bit of research on the internet and discovered that she has a condition called Selective Mutism which is a fear of speaking in public. With us and close family she is like any other little girl chattering away non stop but as soon as we got in the school playground she wouldn’t say a word and also when we were at our hotel shop she wouldn’t speak to anyone there either. We found out that Selective Mutism is made worse by putting pressure on the child to speak and that you need to remove all pressure and expectation to speak. We were unfortunately guilty of trying to bribe her to speak, something I am not proud of but at the time we did not realize how it must feel for her. Apparently people who have suffered with Selective Mutism describe it as being like ‘stage fright’ and that it is like your throat swells up and you cannot physically speak.

We gave all the information we had about Selective Mutism to her teacher and I agreed to work with the school to try and help Ellie overcome her fear of speaking in public. After a few weeks Ellie began to communicate non verbally which I thought was a huge step for her but her teacher wanted her to talk and we told her that this would take time and that she would have to be patient. Eventually it all came to a head in February 2007 when we were called into to see the Headmistress and told that if Ellie wouldn’t talk then they were unable to teach her. I couldn’t believe how ridiculous they were being. Ellie was probably the model pupil sitting quietly in class and following the teacher’s instructions, getting full marks every week in spelling tests. So we decided that we would homeschool her.

We had decided to leave Josh in the school until the Summer to give me a chance to get Ellie settled into homeschooling. We did School-at-home with Phonics, Maths, Copywriting, Science, Language Arts and everything.

Then in April 2007 Josh was losing weight and not eating in school and he was ‘losing’ his dinner money. We found out that Josh was having his dinner money and some little toys pinched from his back and Josh saw the boy go in his bag and take them but was too scared to do anything about it and when we picked him up from school he was really upset and crying about it. His teacher came over and said that she would sort it out the next day but Josh was inconsolable and we had had enough. Josh pointed out the boy that had stolen from him and Vic confronted him in front of the boy’s grandma and he even admitted that it was him and handed over Josh’s toys.

The next day Josh was still too scared to go to school so we let him have the day off and phoned the school to tell them that he was too scared and the headmistress wanted to speak to Vic about confronting this boy and that the boy’s mother was threatening to remove him and her 3 other children from the school and her exact words were, “We can’t afford to lose them!” In other words we are quite happy for you to take Joshua out of school as you have paid a year’s fees for him and Ellie up front and we don’t do refunds but they were quite happy to have a thief in their school as his family hadn’t already paid in advance and they wanted their money. We were fuming!

Anyway, we took Josh out of school and began doing school-at-home with him too. We would work for around 3 hours a day but I found that I was getting really stressed if they didn’t finish their work and I was starting to feel exhausted by it all. I developed my own reading curriculum which made things a bit easier as they would do some Maths and English workbooks and then we would sit down and I would read to them stories of Greek Mythology and Our Island Story about British History and Aesop's Fables and they enjoyed our reading together.

Then in September we decided to try a child-led unit study approach and at the time I thought that this was what child-led learning was about and I asked what they wanted to learn about and they both wanted to learn about Whales after watching The Blue Planet documentary and becoming fascinated by them. They also wanted to look at our globe and find out about different countries so we started by learning about the Continents and the Oceans. They enjoyed that and we then moved onto our Whale project. They did enjoy learning about Whales followed by a project on Ancient Egypt. After we had finished our Whale project we slipped back into doing workbooks and they were doing these for an hour a day before doing project work.

Looking back now I don’t think they enjoyed all the writing I made them do as paper proof that they were learning during our projects. I know now that I do not need proof that they are learning. Just by talking to them I discover that they have learnt so much. I have to trust that they will learn and become their facilitator and guide to resources and let them learn for themselves and maybe if necessary ‘strew their path with interesting things’.