Learning in the Absence of Education
Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Setting Up ‘School’ At Home
I find my long telephone chats with families inquiring about home education simply not long enough! I’m one of those efficiency buffs who hate re-inventing the wheel, and therefore become frustrated at the thought of all these new homeschoolers starting at the beginning, going through the process of learning how to homeschool. Because it seems, although we hail from quite a variety of philosophies and backgrounds, the process is similar.
It can be difficult giving people advice on ‘short -cuts’, or offer ideas that will save time, money and effort. Many always need to find out the long, hard way. In my rush to give families as much information as possible in such a short time without blowing their minds, I often forget some of my favourite hints.
For example; the shift from school to home often has the legacy of the need for a school look-a-like environment. This is probably a hang-up from our own schooling days. We have all been conditioned to believe that learning is intimately related to school and should be carried out in a similar environment and in a similar way.
Most of us rush out and obtain desks. These we set up in a corner lined with shelves covered in tins of pencils, appropriate reading matter and other ‘educational’ resources. Our ‘learning corner’ set up, we stand back and feel ready to learn - or teach!
Some families even set up the spare room as the place where it will all happen. I converted the playroom. However, as I soon found out, most of our learning activity happened at the kitchen/dining table. It was there I planned the children's lessons and activities and these were generally carried out right there!
It soon became apparent that most of the learning took place where most of the family living did. The focus of our family living was the kitchen and dining room, and also the garden. The children invariably chose to be around us and our activities, unless playing one of their games. They were not happy to do 'school work' up in the area set aside for it, and I found it hard to tear myself away from the kitchen/living area of the house. We found we tended to want to be close together, to maintain the constant stream of conversation we all valued so much.
So I like to tell people that setting up their ‘educational corner’ close to the centre of general activity in their home is one short-cut in the ‘how to’ of homeschooling. But people are very reluctant to let go of their image of what education is - school. Setting up 'school' at home is not necessary.
Interestingly, over the years I have found that our open plan living room has tended to look a lot like a junior primary classroom. The dominant features have always been children’s artwork and writing proudly displayed on walls and windows, bookshelves overloaded with fiction and non-fiction books, educational texts, games, overflowing maths and science boxes, boxes of considerable art and craft resources, lots of labels everywhere, charts, television and video, and more recently the computer. Craft work, both finished and unfinished, and little odd collections of all sorts of things lay everywhere. This layout provided easy access to most of the learning resources inside the house, and of course, the children spent many, many hours in the garden. A place to play in the dirt, a sandpit, trees to climb and places to build cubby, as well as jungles to explore and a lawn to run on - these are the essential features of a homeschooling environment!
As the kids have grown older I have managed to set aside a small accessible area in their play room as a store room for all but the displays, and this works well now. At least our living area no longer looks any thing like a classroom!
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Excerpt from Learning in the Absence of Home Education: Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine, 1999
