A Year of Living Differently : Home schooling newbies!

In 2015 as we planned for our year of coastal living, we knew home schooling would be the best option for our boys. They are both on the autism spectrum and experience anxiety, particularly when faced with new situations, so the thought of plonking them into the local public school - which would be a completely new and unfamiliar situation with no familiar faces around them - did not appeal. The only real solution was home schooling. Initially I felt a fair bit of trepidation about this prospect, having no idea where to start with planning for teaching the boys ourselves, and overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility for meeting their educational needs for the year. My husband never doubted we could do it.

As 2016 drew closer, I linked in with some home schooling groups on Facebook, sought advice from friends who have home schooled their children, read information about how to include Australian National Curriculum into home schooling and started researching curriculum options. We submitted our application to the state body for home education registration and we were successfully approved right at the end of December.

After researching various resources, I decided to purchase lesson plans for Maths, English, Science, History and Geography that aligned with the Australian National Curriculum. There's a vast array of content available but I was able to narrow down our choices and bought some excellent complete lesson plans from First Class Resources and RIC Publications. Once I had the curriculum sorted, I felt much more settled about commencing homeschooling and even began to look forward to starting!

We started on 3rd February. The boys were fairly enthusiastic and actually had been asking when we would be starting for a few days beforehand. I drafted up a schedule and we experimented for the first few days to see what would work best. A few weeks into home school, the schedule has been refined somewhat and seems to be working well. Obviously this will be subject to change! I'm a bit anxious about making sure we get through enough formal learning content each day, which from my reading of others' experiences, seems to be a common concern for home schooling newbies. I'll probably relax with it as we grow more confident and comfortable. Fortunately the boys seem to be happy with home schooling most of the time, aside from the expected hiccups as we transition to a different way of doing school and add in much more structure to life at home. We finish our formal learning around 12pm - 1pm most days and this means the afternoons consist of more fun, experiential learning tasks.

We set up a designated space in the living area to do our formal work and this seems to help the boys get into a good head space for doing "school". Eventually we plan to build on an additional room to our shack, which can serve as the home school space and will offer more work space to set up computers and so on.

Thought I'd add some photos of our early days of home schooling!