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 Had we known that Home Education was an option we would have withdrawn him from the school midway through Year 1 when his problems there seemed to intensify.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’.