Hello - Thinking of homeschooling for secondary school

Hello everyone

I've only just found this site. My son is in Year 5, diagnosed with Aspergers. We are thinking of homeschooling because he seems to learn in a different way to other children and has panics when work is presented to him in a way he doesn't understand.

Although this is the reason why we are seriously considering homeschooling, I am also concerned that we wont be able to find the right way to teach him and our relationship with our son become one of battling to get information into his head!

I would like to know others thoughts on this.

Does your relationship with your child change?

How does one find the right stratagies?

Welcome.

Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act states that the parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude, and to any special educational needs he may have. This implies that the teaching style used should be the one which is best matched to the child's preferred way of learning.

This website does not promote any particular styles or methods of teaching because the optimum style will always be dependent on the child, their background, the subjects they are studying, the resources available, and whether they are taking exams amongst other things. Therefore it becomes the duty of the parents to identify preferred learning styles in order to formulate strategies. This is something that all parents should carry out regardless of whether their children attend school or are home educated. Identification of preferred learning styles and the formulation of strategies can only be accomplished through observation and some experimentation over a period of time. It is likely that there will be some variation in the preferred learning styles from subject to subject and situation to situation rather than being uniform for every subject and situation.

Thank you for this advice. It is very helpful. Food for thought!

Hello Haree,
I have been home educating my secondary school, son for just over a year now. Yes our relationship has changed beyond all I could have dared dream of.
He is so happy and relaxed, that learning is now possible, it hadn't been at school.
You know your child better than anyone, You will notice quickly when he's bored or frustrated when "he's just not getting it" and you can change direction, or just leave it for a while until he is more ready.
There is so much info on the web these days, you really will never be stuck for ideas of what to teach and ways to go about it.
There were times in the begining, when I felt I was merely telling my son, as opposed to teaching him. For us, it is better to keep everything as practical as possible, especially in science and humanities, we go on lots of visits to museums and such, and do lots of experiments at home so that there is always something he can relate too.
My son leads a lot of what we do, If he shows interest in a topic that I hadn't planned for, I just change the plans.
and I remind myself, that it's ok to have a bad day, when I'm getting no where I put on a wildlife dvd, and we just chat about it for ages. The animals, the habitats, the climate, food chains, conservation. My point being that any interest can lead to lots of learning.
I hope thats of some help x

I have home educated my son since he was 10 and I agree with everything that marniklou has said. He become so much happier and confident after leaving school that most of the problems at home that occurred during his time at school vanished overnight.

We have generally followed an autonomous style of teaching and learning because my son is very good at finding things out for himself and feels that he doesn't need teachers telling him what to do every day. So far maths has been the only subject he studied formally because he took an IGCSE exam but most of the help and support he received from his tutor dealt with the exam system rather than the subject itself. He studies several other subjects including science and history in a more casual way by visiting museums and places of interest, watching documentaries, and reading books and websites that interest him, rather than studying these subjects formally using standard school textbooks because he has no plans to take exams in them. Computers has been a more interesting story because he initially wanted to study the subject formally but after finding out about the Computing A Level course he found he didn't really like it or find it particularly interesting, so he ended up going down the self education route because of a lack of suitable courses and qualifications. He particularly enjoys video and multimedia technologies.

HE provides a golden opportunity to teach life skills that are not taught at school. I'm of the opinion that children and teenagers with AS require extra support in this area as they are unable to learn certain life skills by just picking up subtle hints like many NT children do.

I will also add that much of the social skills and counselling services available in secondary schools is not applicable for AS.

We live in such an information rich society nowadays that marginalises schools as a source of providing knowledge and information. I encounter information overload many times more frequently than information deficit. This contrasts sharply with my own school days when I found it very hard to find the information I wanted because the internet didn't exist and locally obtainable information was very limited. In 1987 I tried to investigate how to receive the signals from weather satellites but had no success in finding any information, and I would get stroppy if I even missed a single episode of Tomorrows World. That was how bad things were.

I personally think that mass HE is a child of the internet because it has enabled HE families to find information they wouldn't otherwise be able to find and communicate with people they otherwise wouldn't be able to communicate with. It was also instrumental in propagating a once obscure piece of government legislation that HE is legal into something now approaching mainstream knowledge.

Now that information overload has overshadowed information deficit it makes me wonder whether the role of teachers should be teaching students how to find the information they are looking for rather than acting as a repository of knowledge and imparting information to students. You will find many such teachers in the real world but schools have yet to catch up...

Thank you everyone for your replies. All of them are very helpful. I have lots of thinking to do.

Haree