The start of our story

My name is Chelle and I am mum to 4 beautiful children. Courtney (16), Violet (11), Dawson (7) and Baby Darcy. I decided to start this blog about my decision and Journey in Home educating Violet.

I am not anti school and think we are really lucky to have our education system but every child is different and that system doesn't suit them all.
Courtney had a wonderful school experience  and is now doing an engineering apprenticeship and I couldn't be more proud of the young lady that she has become.
Dawson has special needs and we are lucky to have a school near us that offers him amazing support. His year group of children (and parents) are so lovely, he has some great friends and he enjoys school.
Violet on the other hand has had a very disruptive year group all through primary school and we hoped the mix in secondary school would help dilute this however when she started her secondary school her attitude towards us and learning was getting really bad.

As a parent i am no different to anyone else, we all want the best for our children. Violet approached us about home educating her and sent us links to lots of sites. After we looked into it we decided to give it go in the hope this would be a good option for her and she would, again, enjoy learning.
We had our own fears about our ability to do it and to do her justice as she is a bright kid. But we could see she was unhappy and the fear of her spending the next 5 years unhappy was far greater.

In October 18 we took the leap and deregistered her from school. Yes, it really was as easy as that. A letter saying we would be home educating her and she never returned to school the next day.

We next had to 'unschool' ourselves. Violet was so used to having 6 lessons a day that she was trying to copy that at home. We could not sustain that. She would start one subject and just as we really got into it she would assume we had to finish to do our next lesson. So now when we start a piece of work we can keep learning and gaining greater understanding and interest without stopping. We decided to cover the basic subjects maths, science and English every week and we would then choose other areas of learning to spend time on. Violet has a very creative side and a love of maths but really struggles with English. So we work at her levels of understanding and build from there. We use a variety of resources and get out of the house to learn as much as we can.

We are not teachers, we don't have all the answers and to be honest we are learning with her. But we are having fun doing it and getting to know Violet in ways we never had a chance to before.

I look forward to sharing our journey with you.