AEFES Home Education & Unschooling Festival

There is a new home education festival with a strong Unschooling ethos. Having been inspired by HESFES, many teens and young adults wanted to create their own festival and so AEFES was born. AEFES stands for Alternative Education Festival and so encompasses not only home education but many other alternative forms of education.They're a community of adults, teenagers and children all working in unity to create a festival where all voices can be heard, all opinions considered and all decisions made in a democratic setting. AEFES believe in trust, faith and community spirit. Working as a team to create something magical for everyone.  Tickets can be purchased from http://www.aefes.co.uk/acatalog/AEFES_home_education_festival_tickets.html.  If you want to join the community check out the facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/516810371859856/

HESFES Home Education Festival

Anya's Reading Takes Off!

Anya's reading has also started to take off now.  Guess How?  By being provided the time to pursue her interests and chat to her friends online.  Anya's main interest at the moment is a game called Roblox.
Last year I spent a whole year offering Owen and Anya one to one learning.  The sessions included reading books matching reading level and age level day reading, playing spelling games, playing reading base board games and working through reading programmes aimed at kids with autism.  We did make some slow progress but the real progress has been made by the kids teaching themselves.  They often ask me how to spell a word when they are chatting to their friends online.  I have learnt to simply spell the word and not irritate them by trying to make their question into a lesson!

Roblox does market itself as an educational game with a belief that kids learn best by making things — by engaging in the creative and complex process of imagining, designing, and constructing.  Roblox provides them with a safe place to build, gives them the requisite tools and lets them play.  They say they are inspired by the educational theory pioneered by Seymour Papert of the MIT Media Lab. This theory — labeled "Constructionism" — holds not only that kids learn best when they are in the active roles of designer and builder, but that their learning is optimized when they're assuming these roles in a public forum.

The Power of Autonomous Learning

We have been moving more towards an autonomous unschooled approach to our education.  The change in direction has been influenced by studying the many and varied books and articles written by a variety of authors including John Holt, Roland Meighan, Jan Fortune-Wood, John Taylor Gatto, Linda Dobson, Ken Robinson.  However, the main reason for our move towards autonomous education is the astounding improvement in Owen's reading as a result of his interest in Roblox and subsequent online chatting.  Both his reading and spelling have improved so significantly that he has even started to watch subtitles Manga cartoons.  His improvement in reading and spelling as a result of online chatting out ways any of my attempts to improve his spelling with Wordshark or the books aimed to match interest and reading levels.   His improvement in reading and spelling is down to his obsessive interest in Roblox and endless game designing and online conversation.  I simply allow him the time in indulge in this interest.

Kids Hate School

"As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all"

Our Decision to Home School

Like most parent we simply want our children to receive an education that allows them to reach their potential and develop with a positive image of themselves. After much deliberation, careful thought my husband (Mark) and I have decided to remove our children (Owen and Anya) from main stream education and educate them at home. We have struggled with the local school to provide them with adequate and positive education but after four year we do not feel they (not any other main stream school) has the ability or capacity to allow our children to reach their full potential.