‘The key to home-schooling is to make it fun’

Amanda Large from north Belfast has plenty of experience when it comes to home-schooling, for the 47-year-old has educated both her children this way for a number of years and has plenty of good advice for parents now faced with the prospect of becoming de facto teachers for the foreseeable future.

‘‘I am a big advocate for home education. It really works for us,’’ said Amanda.

Amanda’s approach to home-schooling her son and daughter is ‘child-led’.

‘‘You don’t have to set particular school hours, you can teach from 9am to 11am and 6pm to 7pm. If your child is most open and active in the morning that’s when you teach them, or if it’s the afternoon, then that’s when you should do it.

‘‘For me child-led was great because my nine-year-old son Phoenix, who is autistic and has learning difficulties, has a very short attention span.

‘‘So I would start off with 15 minutes and then a break and then another little session. As he got older we could get up to 45 minutes before he needed a break and that worked very well.’’

Amanda decided to take her daughter, now 18, out of the mainstream school system when she was 11 and had started high school.

‘‘After several months she wasn’t coping; she was getting bullied, she was getting headaches; she was getting really severe anxiety. Initially we took her out of school temporarily with the intention of sending her back, but within a couple of weeks she was suicidal, she said she’d rather die than go to school. It was that bad. So that’s when we started looking into home education.’’

Amanda didn’t know anything about home-schooling, but got a lot of advice and assistance from HEdNI, Home Education Northern Ireland.

The group also organises days out for home educated children to enable them to socialise.

Amanda also home-schooled her son Phoenix for three years.

‘‘I knew that educating Phoenix, who has learning difficulties, was going to be a lot more of a challenge than it was educating someone who is 11 and who can apply themselves.

‘‘I was prepared to send him to a special needs school and not home educate but there was no school that could accommodate him. So we waited until last November (he was eight at the time) to get a place in a special needs school.’’

With the schools now closed, Amanda, like other parents, will be home-schooling Phoenix once again.

Her advice for educating at home is ‘try to make it fun and activity-based’ and do it in ‘short bursts’.

‘‘Do it in short periods of 45 minutes or so. If it’s a nice day, after the 45 minutes let them go outside to the garden and give them a purpose, like find a bird or flower, make it fun and keep them occupied at the same time,’’ said Amanda.

‘‘Kids can pick up on routine quicker than we can; you have to establish a routine for them to follow. People should work around their own child’s needs but at the same time have some sort of structure. It is important to realise that you have to establish some form of new reality. Stuff that’s going to keep them entertained, baking cookies is still learning.’’

Amanda pointed out that home educators, who have de-registered their children from the school system, are not obliged to follow the curriculum.

‘‘Finding fun ways of teaching is, in my opinion, more successful than trying to create a school setting. For example, use Horrible Histories and other interesting videos on Youtube.

‘‘For the younger kids there’s Dinosaur Alphabet, the Colourful Monsters and other apps and videos with unicorns, etc.

‘‘Get them to read books that they like - for my son it’s the Mr Men. Consider lesson time like a fun activity, we called it ‘Phoenix time’ to differentiate it from mum’s time to work. Give your child activities that are timed, literally set a timer and after that they ask questions. That will give you a period of being undisturbed to do your own work.’’

Amanda believes that after the Coronavirus pandemic has passed, many parents will see the benefits of home-schooling.

‘‘There has been a big stigma attached to home education and a lot of people think that home educated kids don’t get as good an education as you do in school, but I would say that my kids are proof that is not the case. But maybe this whole thing will change people’s opinion on home education, maybe some people will actually find that home education does work for them.’’