Welcome!
This site is primarily aimed at Catholic home-educators in the UK who are looking for support, suggestions and materials to help them educate their children from the early years through GCSE level.
Why another Catholic home-education website?
There are already many excellent sites out there which offer support for Catholic parents, and over the twenty years of our own home-education adventure we have benefited enormously from their wisdom. What we've also found, however, is that the majority of such sites are aimed primarily at American home-schoolers and while (particularly in terms of our Catholic faith) there is a great deal of overlap, there are also some very important areas in which UK families have different requirements. This is true not just in terms of subject specific requirements such as history, geography, grammar, maths and so on, but also in terms of the kind of state-education system in which we are raising our children: most obviously, at secondary school age the American resources cannot help us very much if we wish to prepare our children for the UK standard qualifications, GCSEs.
Is it really a 'curriculum'?
Yes and no. I've always been wary of off-the-peg curricula which tell the teacher/parent exactly what to do. Perhaps that's because I'm old enough to have attended school in the days when teachers were given a great deal of freedom to indulge in their own teaching styles. In the days before the National Curriculum, so long as a child could read, write and cipher to a reasonable degree by the end of primary school, the teacher's job was considered done: but there was a great deal of leeway given with regard to the means by which the child was brought to this point! As home-educators we are not (yet) obliged to follow the National Curriculum or take SATS (nor even to take GCSEs), which means we have the freedom to tailor our own curriculum to the needs and preferences of ourselves and our children. My own approach to school curricula reflects the fact that I'm very much a practitioner of home-education (which has little to do with replicating school-based education), as opposed to 'home-schooling' (which is often an attempt to recreate school-style education in the home).
How am I supposed to do ALL this?!
What is offered here is not meant to be a prescriptive or exhaustive list of what must be taught: it is meant, rather, to be a guide to help you teach whatever it is you want to teach. The extent to which you follow the proposed schedules is entirely up to you: you can follow the whole thing, or just dip in, taking as much or as little as you find useful. In other words, depending on your own requirements you can view what's offered here as a curriculum guide or simply as a series of suggested - and often meandering - paths through the adventure of home-education, with plenty of (hopefully useful) tips and signposts along the way. I hope you will be able to use the outlines here as a base on which to build your own unique, tailored approach.
I have to stress right here at the outset that I have not covered everything on this site with any one of my children: I'm not sure any ordinary parent could. What you see here has been built up over several years of trial and error. The idea is to cover as broad a spectrum of ages and subjects as possible not because every child needs to do everything, but because that is the only way to make sure everything is covered (one parent might be looking for ideas for history and never look at the science pages; another might do the opposite). So, whatever you do, please don't read this site and feel discouraged as to how much needs to be done or how 'little' you yourself do in comparison!
What's the 'shoestring' part all about?
Well, there are a lot of wonderful materials available to home-educators. If you want to, you can buy a whole curriculum pack for a child of any age - you can even have all your child's work marked and assessed by a tutor. But all this costs money - often a lot of money - and there are many parents out there who genuinely feel called to home-educate their children but just as genuinely worry that they will not be able to afford it. As a family of ten with not much money to throw around, we've spent years building up a collection of resources (some bought, some created) to help us educate our children, and we've tried to do this on as low a budget as possible. My aim here is to share with you what has worked for us, to recommend and source inexpensive materials and textbooks, and, where possible, to offer for free the materials we have created for various subjects at various levels.
Finally, if you are unhappy with any of the ideas and/or materials offered here, or if you have used materials which you think are better, please contact me and let me know your thoughts. I am sure that I have missed some real gems of books out there (and probably left some huge gaps which others will spot and hopefully fill). Please help to build and improve on this site by offering your comments, positive or negative. If you'd like to know more about what we do as a family and why we do it, please read the About and various General Advice pages. In fact, they might be a good place to start.
God bless you in your home-educating endeavours!
This site is primarily aimed at Catholic home-educators in the UK who are looking for support, suggestions and materials to help them educate their children from the early years through GCSE level.
Why another Catholic home-education website?
There are already many excellent sites out there which offer support for Catholic parents, and over the twenty years of our own home-education adventure we have benefited enormously from their wisdom. What we've also found, however, is that the majority of such sites are aimed primarily at American home-schoolers and while (particularly in terms of our Catholic faith) there is a great deal of overlap, there are also some very important areas in which UK families have different requirements. This is true not just in terms of subject specific requirements such as history, geography, grammar, maths and so on, but also in terms of the kind of state-education system in which we are raising our children: most obviously, at secondary school age the American resources cannot help us very much if we wish to prepare our children for the UK standard qualifications, GCSEs.
Is it really a 'curriculum'?
Yes and no. I've always been wary of off-the-peg curricula which tell the teacher/parent exactly what to do. Perhaps that's because I'm old enough to have attended school in the days when teachers were given a great deal of freedom to indulge in their own teaching styles. In the days before the National Curriculum, so long as a child could read, write and cipher to a reasonable degree by the end of primary school, the teacher's job was considered done: but there was a great deal of leeway given with regard to the means by which the child was brought to this point! As home-educators we are not (yet) obliged to follow the National Curriculum or take SATS (nor even to take GCSEs), which means we have the freedom to tailor our own curriculum to the needs and preferences of ourselves and our children. My own approach to school curricula reflects the fact that I'm very much a practitioner of home-education (which has little to do with replicating school-based education), as opposed to 'home-schooling' (which is often an attempt to recreate school-style education in the home).
How am I supposed to do ALL this?!
What is offered here is not meant to be a prescriptive or exhaustive list of what must be taught: it is meant, rather, to be a guide to help you teach whatever it is you want to teach. The extent to which you follow the proposed schedules is entirely up to you: you can follow the whole thing, or just dip in, taking as much or as little as you find useful. In other words, depending on your own requirements you can view what's offered here as a curriculum guide or simply as a series of suggested - and often meandering - paths through the adventure of home-education, with plenty of (hopefully useful) tips and signposts along the way. I hope you will be able to use the outlines here as a base on which to build your own unique, tailored approach.
I have to stress right here at the outset that I have not covered everything on this site with any one of my children: I'm not sure any ordinary parent could. What you see here has been built up over several years of trial and error. The idea is to cover as broad a spectrum of ages and subjects as possible not because every child needs to do everything, but because that is the only way to make sure everything is covered (one parent might be looking for ideas for history and never look at the science pages; another might do the opposite). So, whatever you do, please don't read this site and feel discouraged as to how much needs to be done or how 'little' you yourself do in comparison!
What's the 'shoestring' part all about?
Well, there are a lot of wonderful materials available to home-educators. If you want to, you can buy a whole curriculum pack for a child of any age - you can even have all your child's work marked and assessed by a tutor. But all this costs money - often a lot of money - and there are many parents out there who genuinely feel called to home-educate their children but just as genuinely worry that they will not be able to afford it. As a family of ten with not much money to throw around, we've spent years building up a collection of resources (some bought, some created) to help us educate our children, and we've tried to do this on as low a budget as possible. My aim here is to share with you what has worked for us, to recommend and source inexpensive materials and textbooks, and, where possible, to offer for free the materials we have created for various subjects at various levels.
Finally, if you are unhappy with any of the ideas and/or materials offered here, or if you have used materials which you think are better, please contact me and let me know your thoughts. I am sure that I have missed some real gems of books out there (and probably left some huge gaps which others will spot and hopefully fill). Please help to build and improve on this site by offering your comments, positive or negative. If you'd like to know more about what we do as a family and why we do it, please read the About and various General Advice pages. In fact, they might be a good place to start.
God bless you in your home-educating endeavours!
