You don’t need a teaching qualification to home educate — but you do need to think differently about what teaching actually is. This section covers the practical side: how to plan and run lessons, how to handle reluctant learners, how to teach core subjects without a textbook, and how to build independence gradually so it’s not all on you. From someone who’s been in the classroom at the kitchen table for a decade.
We made a thing. It started as a practical problem — when you’re writing for an audience and you want to use emoji well, the grid of yellow faces is genuinely unhelpful. They all look the same at small size, and knowing which laugh means what requires a kind of cultural fluency that’s hard to…
Three pieces of furniture in our house are permanently decorated with my eldest child’s name. Almost illegible letters, but his name as he saw it at three. Before a child picks up a pencil with any kind of intention, a lot has already happened. They’ve watched you write shopping lists and birthday cards. They’ve scribbled…
Copy work is the most commonly used handwriting activity, and it can be effective, especially when the text itself engages the learner. But its purpose is always visible. The pupil knows they’re practising handwriting, and that knowledge creates pressure. A useful workaround is to make handwriting incidental to something else. When the stated objective is…
There’s a myth that all home-educated children are eager and active learners. Theoretically it should be true — home education only works if it’s meeting the educational needs of the child, so in theory any child being educated at home will be engaged because the curriculum was built for them. But theories always have exceptions,…
Screen usage is one of the trickiest aspects of home-ed to navigate because there are so many useful resources available on screens but you don’t want them plugged in all day, so we’ve had screen rules in our house for years: used for relaxation within reason, used for a purpose after books. The screen rules…
How can we make learning fun? 4 tips to keep the fun in home-ed learning
Adding a regular reading aloud time into a homeschool timetable has numerous advantages.
There’s a worksheet on the table. It asks him to colour the correct answer. He circles it instead, and marks the wrong ones with a cross. According to the worksheet, he’s getting everything wrong. According to the worksheet, he hasn’t done a single question correctly. But watch what he’s actually doing: he’s looking at each…
When we started home-educating, my evenings were taken up entirely by lesson planning. I had a planned-for-the-year timetable, wrote detailed notes for each lesson and I’d make worksheets (this was in Twinkl’s infancy and downloadable resources for UK home educators were scarce). I even wrote timings in the margin of the plans. And then my…
‘Can I teach my kids at home?’ is the wrong question if you’re thinking about home education. The right question is: ‘Can I provide a good education at home?’ And the answer to that, for most parents, is probably yes — because providing an education and being a teacher are not the same thing. One…