A Video in Praise of Organic Learning

At Dreaming Spires Home Learning, we use this term "organic learning" a lot when describing our style of teaching.

We're talking "organic" here!

What exactly does that look like? Here's a video with some thoughts, but also, and invitation to share your ideas, too. After all, we're all home-educating parents, and learning from each other is key to our own family's growth.

Video about Registration Dates and More about Dreaming Spires

To Coach to the Exam or not (hint: NOT!)

In the UK, students have just been receiving their GCSE grades over the past week or so. Judging from the comments on Facebook, the results have been mixed. Some really high highs, and some reporting ... bravely reporting, imo -- those that are not so great.

In England, taking GCSEs is a secondary-school milestone

I think we home-educators have advantages on the one hand when it comes to exams, and disadvantages on the other. On the one hand, we can choose only the ones we want to do, and we can take some a year or two early so to spread the load. On the other hand, we have to pay for them separately, find a centre that will take us as private candidates, and of course, there's a lot of re-inventing of the wheel whereas school teachers will generally have more experience in preparing students for the exams.

It may or may not mean home-educated students get better or worse exams than their schooled counterparts - many articles and postings online will trumpet success or broadcast poorer results for everyone who took the latest round of GCSE or IGCSEs.

So for those who are preparing for next year and perhaps worried about these results, I just want to say that I think there is only one way you can really screw this up, and that's by ...

COACHING ONLY TO THE TEST.

I'm not saying you shouldn’t coach your child to take the exam, but I’m really unsupportive of teaching ONLY to the test. That is, for a year or two years, to drill and drill.

What am I basing this opinion on? I suppose it's related to the three hats I wear: that as a former teacher who taught up to A-level and even US university; as a home-educator of four children; and as a current examiner for CIE/OCR.

It seems to me there are three reasons that keeping those exams under the microscope is less than ideal.

The obvious reason is that, once the test is over, what have you got to show for it except that your child jumped through some hoops that are now irrelevant? Where do you go from there?

The other reason is that the hoops you jump may or may not be a real-work experience and translatable beyond that narrow exercise.

Another really important reason is that you run the risk of killing your child’s love for the subject, for exploration, and maybe even for learning anything at all.

Did you ever have a teacher say to you something like, “I know this is what we taught you about, say, Physics last year, but I want you to forget all that because that wasn’t really true - it was just a simplified version to make it easier to understand, but now we’re going to do the REAL stuff.”

You what???!!!!

Man, I hated that! You might has well have said, “Everything you’ve done up till now is a waste of time.”

This is why I make my own children, and all my online students, learn the REAL thing from the beginning. This is particularly true in English, my subject, but equally true in other subjects when it comes to exploring the subject and not drilling to the exam paper.

We don’t read abridged books. We don’t use Cliffs Notes or other summaries. We don't drown under twenty-five past papers and just work and re-work them for a year or two. If it’s writing, we learn the real-world skill of revising essays. We learn how newspapers differ from speeches. We learn how to explain ourselves and our thoughts so that the books come alive and we remember them.

Reading the real thing helps it all sink in.

Sometimes, the topic or approach is over their heads, but sometimes, it’s exactly that stretching approach that brings them to a higher level - a level they would not have reached if we didn’t try in the first place.

Am I saying you should never do a past paper or coach to an exam? Of course not. The exam that I mark is, in my opinion, notoriously counter-intuitive, so you do need to go over some past papers and learn its idiosyncracies, but to do ONLY that for a year or more, I don't think a student will be best served by not gaining any higher literacy skills during that time.

So if you have a big exam coming up in the future, I urge you to study subjects in a solid and true way as the majority of your learning. You can then practice the hoops either little and often (key word: “little”), or in a more focused, short-term way such as in the month before the exam.

This way, you don’t lose sight of the reason you’re probably educating your children at home in the first place: to create life-long learners who can think outside the box.

Loving to read hard books is rarely normal!

Middle-Ages Literature Student Wins Charity Speech Contest

A student from the Middle Ages Literature class at Dreaming Spires Home Learning has won the annual speech contest where the winner sees a donation sent from Dreaming Spires to a charity of his or her choosing.

Talia shows off her winner's certificate

Talia K, a 16-year-old from Maine, spoke with great passion about Dress a Girl Around the World. She continually asked us to envision a world where every girl owned at least one dress, and pointed out how a well-dressed girl was actually less likely to be targeted for the slave trade. We learned that people help sew the dresses rather than relying on machinery or mass-production, and each dress is distributed on mission trips in person, not just shipped abroad.

The external judge gave Talia the nod for not only her crafted speech, but because she had personally raised money and sewn dresses for the charity herself.

Congratulations, Talia!

"The Vision Thing" -- Part 3 of Transitioning Your Teen to Secondary (Home)School

This is the third post in a series about transitioning your teens to secondary (home)school. It is the second of two parts about teens and routine, the one that is going to focus on choices in academics and how routine fits in with that.

Let's Do The Vision Thing

However, before getting stuck in to a discussion about books and hours of study and methods, I think it’s important to cover what your vision is for your child. That way, you can better tease out the details that will work for your family.

I think a decision-tree here would be helpful, so you can see how this series is being organised.

According to this schema, today’s blog post is the top line of the green level: “Your visions/aims” of the academic-side of your child’s home education.

I’m a vision-kind of person, so this is always in the back of my mind when I make decisions about any of my four children’s education. Even if you’re not into “the vision-thing”, I think it’s crucial that you stop for just a short while to think about your vision and aims, or you will find it difficult to settle into the kind of routine for your teen that will achieve results you can be happy with.

Here’s a quick check-list for you. I want you to rank the statements in order of most important to least important (from 1 to 14, with 1 being the most), as a way of helping you clarify your vision.

For me, a chart like this is tough. Do I really want my teenager to keep doors open to the future more than I want her to have good morals? Of course not! However, I am likely to put the academic success ahead of character training if I don’t think through my vision beforehand.

Let’s now just look at two extremes of responses to the check list. You can imagine that parents who seek their child’s happiness, social life, and extra-curricular activities is going to seek an entirely different programme from someone who is emphasising exams, academics, and university entry.

Would someone really put a child’s happiness behind some of the other issues on the list? Of course – I’m sure you see it all the time. It can be argued that many people do this when they send their children to school rather than home educate, because they think the child needs the education more than they need to be happy (especially as it’s likely their happiness ebbs and flows anyway). 

Or when, as some homeschoolers do, parents force a dry and boring workbook-style curriculum on their little dears, from which they require six hours of toil for five days every week. Or, make them play the violin, or enrol them in knitting classes, or take on a paper round.

I do it, too! My son says he doesn’t like swimming, and yet, four days a week, we have him plying up and down the swimming pool. My reasons? I value things over his happiness – partly, it’s the only sport we have time for him to do, and I want him to do a sport, ergo …. Partly, I think there is a chance to build his character through it. Partly, I’m hoping he will come to his senses and see how good he could be. A little success, I’m sure, will see him suddenly enjoy it and be glad he toiled for so many years. Who knows? On balance, swimming is better than no swimming, so I have decided that he will continue to do it.

Am I wrong for valuing these other things over his happiness? One day, I might think so, but for now, this is my vision, and this is how I make choices for my own children.

Some kids go, some kids stay --
You know your own child best!

Equally, I would not try to judge the decisions that you make for your children. You know them better than anyone, and you know how certain values and aims will suit your children. I’m just wanting to help you clarify what might be otherwise a vague idea, because you will be in a better position to help your teens transition to secondary (home)school that way.

Once you have ranked the 14 statements, you should get a fairly good idea about the kind of thing you’re putting the highest value on. If it’s academics, then you will want to pursue a more strenuous approach to your child’s studies. If it’s more about personality and well-being, then you will want to open up opportunities and activities that will probably be less focused on books and such.

In the next post, I’m going to suggest ways of transferring your vision into practical application, so that you can get the best out of your teen while still going “up a level” for secondary (home)school. If you want to make sure you get notified when the next post is available, then please subscribe via the various options in the sidebar to the right.

Dr Kat Patrick is a veteran homeschooler of 12 years. She grew up in Texas in the USA, taught at American university and then at secondary schools in Oxford, England. She is an examiner for the prestigious Cambridge board of exams at both GCSE and A-level, as well as founder of Dreaming Spires Home Learning, online tutorials for homeschooled secondary students all over the world.