About us
We are a Catholic home-educating family in the UK with eight children ranging in age from 24 down to 9. We've been home-educating 'officially' since our eldest son turned five in the year 2000, but it really started before that. None of our children has attended school, except the eldest and the third son who went to 6th form to study for A levels. So far we have prepared our five oldest boys for GCSE exams, and since we have not had the means to employ tutors, we have gained quite a bit of exam experience (and not a few grey hairs) in the process. Altogether we've worked our way through about 30 exams covering 11 or so subjects (we'll hopefully be adding two new ones to that in the next couple of years - Astronomy and Classical Civilisation!)
God in His wisdom has blessed us with a preponderance of boys, which has had a marked influence on our approach to lessons (especially to 'desk-work' and the issue of writing at an early age). What this means in practice is that the younger children (up to 11/12) only do 'school' in the morning, and only three mornings a week, leaving Thursday for other interesting stuff (games, walks,seeing friends, listening to music, watching DVDs, thinking, reading, staring into space etc.) and Friday for the boring things in life (shopping, cleaning, appointments etc.). I've tried doing lessons in the afternoon but it never seems to work well.
Our children are all quite different: they are all 'bright' but do not all tend to the academic side of things: some are more practically minded. In terms of teaching we have not followed any particular curriculum but have selected, set and where necessary marked all the work ourselves. This means that along the way we have developed a fairly comprehensive curriculum of our own, which is the basis of much of what you'll read on this site. We have also, along the way, developed a children's 'library' which probably rivals the non-fiction section of our - admittedly very small - local library: at the last spring cleaning I totted up over 350 books covering everything from history, geography and science to poetry, art and calligraphy. The 'fiction section' has taken over the house. Not that anyone needs this many books to home-educate! We just have a peculiar approach of wanting to investigate just about everything there is to know about teaching any subject, and have acquired a ludicrous number of books in the process - some good, some not so good, some probably quite bad.
My point in mentioning our obsession with books is to warn you that despite my attempts to be as objective as possible, everything that you read here is personal and will be influenced by my own individual approach to things. You probably won't agree with everything I've written, nor will you find everything equally useful, because your family, your background, and your needs will be different from mine. That's why I can't emphasise strongly enough that all of this is here simply to help and encourage, not to hold up some ideal or some list of what you must do to educate your child well. Take what helps, leave the rest.
Finally, I've said it elsewhere but please don't think that what you read here is what I have done with all my children - no, what is written here is the result of lots of experiments and mistakes, and to date I have not done anywhere near all of this curriculum with any one child. I'm working on it, slowly: maybe this is why God gave me eight children...I'm a slow learner!
We are a Catholic home-educating family in the UK with eight children ranging in age from 24 down to 9. We've been home-educating 'officially' since our eldest son turned five in the year 2000, but it really started before that. None of our children has attended school, except the eldest and the third son who went to 6th form to study for A levels. So far we have prepared our five oldest boys for GCSE exams, and since we have not had the means to employ tutors, we have gained quite a bit of exam experience (and not a few grey hairs) in the process. Altogether we've worked our way through about 30 exams covering 11 or so subjects (we'll hopefully be adding two new ones to that in the next couple of years - Astronomy and Classical Civilisation!)
God in His wisdom has blessed us with a preponderance of boys, which has had a marked influence on our approach to lessons (especially to 'desk-work' and the issue of writing at an early age). What this means in practice is that the younger children (up to 11/12) only do 'school' in the morning, and only three mornings a week, leaving Thursday for other interesting stuff (games, walks,seeing friends, listening to music, watching DVDs, thinking, reading, staring into space etc.) and Friday for the boring things in life (shopping, cleaning, appointments etc.). I've tried doing lessons in the afternoon but it never seems to work well.
Our children are all quite different: they are all 'bright' but do not all tend to the academic side of things: some are more practically minded. In terms of teaching we have not followed any particular curriculum but have selected, set and where necessary marked all the work ourselves. This means that along the way we have developed a fairly comprehensive curriculum of our own, which is the basis of much of what you'll read on this site. We have also, along the way, developed a children's 'library' which probably rivals the non-fiction section of our - admittedly very small - local library: at the last spring cleaning I totted up over 350 books covering everything from history, geography and science to poetry, art and calligraphy. The 'fiction section' has taken over the house. Not that anyone needs this many books to home-educate! We just have a peculiar approach of wanting to investigate just about everything there is to know about teaching any subject, and have acquired a ludicrous number of books in the process - some good, some not so good, some probably quite bad.
My point in mentioning our obsession with books is to warn you that despite my attempts to be as objective as possible, everything that you read here is personal and will be influenced by my own individual approach to things. You probably won't agree with everything I've written, nor will you find everything equally useful, because your family, your background, and your needs will be different from mine. That's why I can't emphasise strongly enough that all of this is here simply to help and encourage, not to hold up some ideal or some list of what you must do to educate your child well. Take what helps, leave the rest.
Finally, I've said it elsewhere but please don't think that what you read here is what I have done with all my children - no, what is written here is the result of lots of experiments and mistakes, and to date I have not done anywhere near all of this curriculum with any one child. I'm working on it, slowly: maybe this is why God gave me eight children...I'm a slow learner!