Homeschooling Our Way

We choose to educate our wonderful boys at home.

They are 5 and almost 10 at the moment, and although they both had some time at pre school they have never attended school.

Our boys have enquiring minds and are active in their own education, they often choose what we will be studying, how we will learn about it and how we will record and present their work.

Our big boy is passionate about science and history, I only need to bring a new book into the house or find a good website to send him off on a journey of learning and inspiring him to follow the leads he finds to learn even more about whatever has sparked his interest. He reads endless books on all sorts of subjects and is so very interested in everything that happens around him. His best mate is his little brother and he reads to him every day as well, they play and share all the adventures we go on in our school journey. Dress ups are very popular here and they both have costumes from many different times throughout history as well as different types of people. They might be pirates or ancient Egyptians, Greek Philosophers or a character out of a favourite myth or legend. They might build a fort or a ship, or set up a teepee. He had a little business selling excess duck eggs to friends and fellow homeschoolers this year, he sent out email flyer's to promote them, collected and cleaned the eggs, packed them into the cartons and presented them wrapped in a ribbon with a beautifully printed copy of one of his favourite recipes. He also saved a lot of that money and is wealthier than he has ever been at the moment, and eager to spend it on something special on our upcoming trip to the city.


One really obvious difference between our boy and his school attending peers is his love and pride in what he is learning about, when they come over to visit, our boy wants to show them his latest work, be it a poster he has made, or his lapbook or a story he is working on. Without fail they are uninterested and tell him so, our boy can not understand how they could possibly not be as keen and interested as he is. I hope he can hold onto that spark of passion for a long time and it saddens me that these other young boys see school as such a bad thing to be endured.


Our little fellow is just starting out with real school work, although he already has 5 years of learning under his belt. So his interests are not as obvious as his big brothers. He loves to do whatever we are doing and joins in enthusiastically. He is a natural performer and picks up lyrics and rhythms easily. He loves animals and dancing. He is active and loud and needs lots of outside time to climb trees and ride his bike, catch bugs and play in the sand pit. But start to read a story or put on an audio book for him and he will sit quietly for hours, and narrate the story back to you without missing any of the main points.


We cover all the key learning areas most days. We start with a set routine on school days where the boys work independently- they might do maths, spelling, vocab, touch typing,handwriting, Latin and grammar for the big boy and puzzles, letter recognition, number recognition, craft and looking at books for our little one, while I do the morning jobs. Then we have a little break for morning tea and all come together for our main lesson.


For the last few years we have been doing one main theme per term and putting the bulk of their work into big lapbooks. We have covered topics like Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome, Plants, Insects, Animation, Mapping, Explorers and Australia. We tend to do 3 or 4 days with bookwork and research and working on various projects and 1 or 2 days for outings, field trips, excursions, home school group get togethers etc. Our boys are early risers and we are often doing school by 6 am and finished by lunch time, but some days when we are all caught up in the journey we might keep going through the afternoon and even into the evening.


Together we read endless books aloud, we do science experiments and nature studies, we visit museums and art galleries, we do art and cooking and sewing, pottery and carving, we grow vegies, flowers and fruit and raise chooks and ducks, collect eggs and delight in newly hatched chickens and ducklings. We build bird feeders to encourage our native birds to visit, and frog ponds and lizard gardens. We have fun and are all very happy with this phase of our lives.