What I've Learnt From Homeschooling my Daughters.

We have what will be our final assessment from the home education office coming up. Once my youngest turns 17, she'll no longer be on their register and I will no longer have to prove my ability to teach my children, once a year. Don't get me wrong, all the home education officers have been lovely, supportive and helpful, but there is still that feeling of big brother breathing down your neck. It likely helps that we have the right appearance for them. Married, a reasonable income with the ability to buy resources some families may not be able to and a clean and well maintained house.

Filling in the forms ready for assessment has been interesting this year, because meeting all the curriculum areas becomes less of a worry as they look towards where their focus will go as they consider careers and the job market. Because of this, I haven't been worrying too much about covering every curriculum area. So when it came to filling in something for all the areas, I was wondering if there would be something I couldn't make an entry for.

There are 8 areas to cover in the Australian curriculum; maths, English and science I did make sure she had covered. English was more done via encouraging her to write about what she's been doing with her photography and she's been writing a fiction story. Maths and science she mostly did on Khan Academy, with her older sister teaching a bit of extra maths. Health physical education she mostly covers with her gymnastics we are health aware in the house with cooking and food choices too. Languages isn't something they worry too much about for home edders, but we do have an interest in German because of family and friend connections.

We hadn't purposely covered the arts but I realised daily life often covers these things. My mum took her to Sydney late last year, where she went to the Sydney Opera House. Her current interest is photography, which comes under the arts. She makes her own greetings cards for friends and family's birthdays and even the performance side of her gymnastics counts towards the arts.

Technologies was again covered by her love of photography. She uses editing software and studies online. The camera itself is technology that she uses. Then I came unstuck for a moment with humanities and social sciences, before I remembered that this area is mostly our day to day interactions; cultures, politics, business, geography and such. I just needed to single out some of the things we discuss from news, politics and even her travels. We enjoy documentaries and some of these fall into this area.

For me, filing in these forms today has given me more insight into the effectiveness of unschooling, which is something I've always struggled with due to having them in the school system for the first few years of their compulsory education. Over the years of homeschooling, it's been a slow move for me away from trying to enforce a more structured learning environment, which rarely worked for long, to more of a child lead learning approach. Each year I would worry that we weren't covering everything if I didn't put enough structure in.

With my eldest now in university, something she took control of and worked towards herself, I now know that despite not having teaching accreditations, I had the ability to raise and educate my children to fend for themselves in the adult world. Now I'm confident that life offers us plenty of learning opportunities and we just need to allow our children to follow them while we offer support and encouragement.

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