QUICK GUIDE to teaching your children at home!

Interested in homeschooling, but still not sure? Read All You Need Is...'

The information in this guide can also be found in Beverley's comprehensive The Educating Parent Resource Directory, a free download.

• About Home Education
• Is it Legal? Registering
• Getting Ready: learning plans, environment and resources
• Assessment
• Keeping Records

Deschooling Defined

Deschooling specifically refers to a period of adjustment experienced by children removed from school settings. It also can include the process of deschooling parents; that is, the unlearning of concepts and beliefs about the nature and purpose of education we’ve picked up along the way, mostly from our own schooling experience.

School based methods of instruction and thinking rarely translate directly into the home educating environment, and where they are tried, often parents run into the same kinds of problems faced by teachers in schools – reluctant learners, acting out, anti-social behaviour, etc.

If the children have been at school or preschool for any length of time they and their parents will need time to adjust to the new arrangement. Often this is begun with a ‘holiday’ at home, a time to observe and record what naturally occurs in the child's life, and where additional resources are needed to introduce additional learning activities considered important and essential.

It can take many months and sometimes even a year for a child to deschool. There's a good chance that the child has had her natural desire to learn, as well as her creativity and imagination quashed. She will need time to detox, take a vacation, have some down time – or all three!

How do you know your child has had long enough deschooling? Easy! They will happily and enthusiastically take an interest in what and how they are learning, suggest activities, and be curious and keen learners again.

Do all kids need to deschool? No, definitely not. For some children the style of teaching dominant in school classrooms already aligns with their personal learning preferences and they will thrive with a similarly structured home educating approach.

However many of us are home educating because school and our child were not a good fit and it will take us time to get to know what conditions and materials and approaches work best for them.

Deschooling is a time where we can observe our child, get to know them better, think about how they, as individuals, learn. It is a time to look at what they choose to do with their time and why, and think about how we can build on their interests to further support their education and growth.

For the parents, deschooling provides time to rethink the whole idea and purpose of education and how it is conventionally structured, and to ask ourselves is this the best or only way to help children learn?

Classroom learning is geared to educate thirty children with one teacher. It's not impossible, but it is difficult and frustrating to try to impose classroom teaching methods and resources directly to the home learning environment.

For most of us the only educational approach we’ve known is some kind of school or institutionalised learning. We're used to the idea that education is a passive ‘they teach and we learn’ activity. However, educators, even in schools, know this is only a tiny part of what really happens.

We need to update our notions about constitutes an education. The easiest way to do this is to talk to other homeschooling families, hang out with them, and see for ourselves how children learn outside of a school setting.

Deschooling should not be confused with unschooling, which is one of many approaches to home education.

Read the next page of this quick guide: the nature of home education.