This month marks the second anniversary of our home education experiment. I really shouldn’t call it an experiment since it appears to be the norm for the foreseeable future.

This was our third attempt at home education. The first attempt goes back to Game Fanatic’s second formal year of schooling when we made a temporary move to Canada. My plan was to home school while there so we could keep him up to speed with our local curriculum. That didn’t work out and when September arrived, he started at the primary school. The second attempt followed our return from Canada in the middle of the following year. By late October, he was back in the classroom at a new school.

The reasons the first two attempts failed were many but ultimately, it was due to trying to emulate school in a home environment. For some children this might work but for Game Fanatic it definitely didn’t. By the time we pulled the boys out of school, Game Fanatic was in year seven. It was clear that a classroom learning environment was never going to work for him. We spent four years trying to work out problems that couldn’t be fixed. Actually the first year back went pretty well for him with a brilliant teacher who really “got” him from the start. Teachers like that are rare, and even this teacher was limited by needs of many of the thirty other children in the class.

Lego Lover started formal schooling a couple years into the schooling experiment and all went seemingly well the first year. The second year was a different story and it’s still not completely clear what changed. In retrospect, I think the problems were already there and we were blinded to their effects.