Our home education was a complex mixture of freedom and structure. This is illustrated well by my approach to handwriting.
With some aspects of life, the best way to approach things (and the easiest in the long term) is to work hard to get them right from the start. So, with writing, I showed the children how to hold the pencil correctly and how to form their letters in the right way. I was keen that they should be able to print letters clearly and neatly. We used some excellent Oxford workbooks, which began with basic lines and patterns going from left to right, to practise staying on the lines, and progressed to forming all the letters of the alphabet. A lot of the early writing the children did was writing over my writing. This meant that they didn’t have to decide where to write on the page, or worry about the spelling, and it helped them to write neatly.
So, where was the ‘freedom’ in this? Well, we didn’t do a huge amount of writing! I think it’s unreasonable to Continue reading →