Brought to you by Westpac who is proud to offer Mathspace Essentials free for all Australians

The funny thing about being a homeschooler is that people have a lot of questions and/or misconceptions. When someone asks where your children go to school and you say the name of the school they  might say ‘oh I’ve heard of it’ ‘or ‘oh ok’ and that’s that. But when you say you’re a homeschooler, well you’ve just opened a can of worms and started a whole conversation. Are you a teacher? How do you teach the hard subjects? You must be really patient. What about socialisation? Are you anti – school? How will your child cope in the playground when they go back to school? (yes I got that question!), When do you get time for yourself? What if they fall behind and can’t catch up at school? I’ve heard of all these questions and more.

It is a big responsibility to take on the job of homeschooling. You are no longer just helping your child out with homework and getting them to school on time but you are now responsible for making sure they are learning, finding the curriculum or creating a curriculum, teaching and then marking work, keeping records and just keeping on top of it all whilst also keeping on top of family life. No small task. But it is actually fun, rewarding, brings the family closer together and everyone learns…..including you the parent.

You might have seen the statistics where Australia is falling behind in maths. In our homeschool we make maths and english a priority so that if/when they return to school they are not behind. In fact my goal is that they are ahead of grade level. To do this we set 4 pages of maths a day and completing tasks in an online program each week. Even if we had an outing planned or a busy day of appointments the maths and english books came with us. Starting out with that set in stone made my life easier and meant we didn’t fall behind. In fact, my son was doing year 3 maths while he was in Year 2 at home. And my daughter who once struggled with maths at school and refused to do the online tasks set by her teacher ended up sailing through the NAPLAN questions even though we’d been using a variety of different books and methods.

I am so glad that Westpac have partnered with Mathspace a leading online maths program to help your children with maths.  The Mathspace program has been winning awards and is considered the best online maths program. I have to admit that at home we’ve been using the online maths program that they used at school so I was interested in trying out Mathspace. We tried Mathspace Essentials in our homeschool for a few weeks and a few things I noticed that made it better than the online maths program we are currently using were:

• You can watch video lessons made by real maths teachers whenever you get stuck, like this one

• You can do NAPLAN practice questions in the grades that NAPLAN is tested (3, 5, 7 and 9);

• You can click on hints and get one and then another hint to help you solve the problem. This is a real confidence booster as it gives you a prompt to help rather than the big tick or cross you get in other maths programs; and

• We could use it on the PC, tablet and smart phone and with handwriting recognition your child can write the answer and its then converted to type. We really liked this feature as it made it fun.

We made a little video of us using Mathspace at home and I have to tell you we took so many videos because little ones kept walking into the room, the baby would burp on my shoulder, other children were calling out to me from another room, we noticed a smudge on the computer, someone was eating in the background. But we got there eventually……

Overall, we are really impressed with the Westpac Mathspace program. The app is great for when we are ‘on the go’ as my big girl can be doing her maths while we’re out and about and then we can tick it off for the day. She found the questions got more challenging as she worked through them but was able to keep trying with the hints. We’ve been having trouble understanding angles and time always seems to be a bit tricky so it’s been great to watch the lessons and then have a go with the answers and I can’t rave enough about the hints – that’s usually what I have to sit and do so it’s great that she can read the hints and help solve the problems herself.

To try out Westpac Mathspace for yourself just visit here. Mathspace Essentials is easy to access online, across any device and all you need to do is sign up with an email address, create a password and you’re off. You don’t need to be a Westpac customer to take advantage of this offer. Once you have signed up you can select the country and state you are in (for Australia) so that it matches the curriculum for your state. You can also select your grade from year 3-12 and in year 11 and 12 there are further options (general, standard, advanced and extension).

And my top tips for teaching maths at home

• You don’t need to be a teacher! Most maths programs come with teaching guides and answers are always provided plus you’ll be surprised how much you remember once you get started. Mathspace Essentials comes with videos that explain each topic so that your child can learn or revise the topic at home and then do practice questions on each topic after watching the video. 
• If you start a resource or buy a book that isn’t working don’t be afraid to dump it and move on to something that engages your child.
• Sometimes you might need to go back to basics rather than stick to where they should be at a school grade level. Don’t worry about this because it means that they’ll have a stronger base in maths to build on.
• Online programs like Mathspace make maths fun, if someone in the family is refusing to sit down and do maths in a book then take it online.
• When all else fails and there is a lot of anxiety and worry about maths then set aside half an hour in each day and sit side by side and go through the work together. This proved the only way I could get one little person to gain confidence in maths and do maths each day. Now she does her maths first thing in the day and comes to me when she gets stuck. It’s a huge improvement.

Following on from this post I thought I’d write about how homeschooling is going. Earlier this year we removed our daughter from a small special school to homeschool her. It was a stressful time because our plans for the year had to change. A new baby was coming into the family and we were certainly worried how we would manage it all.

And before I start I have to say that special needs really does cover a whole range of things and every child is different. But when you are searching on the internet for resources or help you just need to type in special needs homeschooling to find that information. I’m not assuming all children with special needs are the same!

When we started out our little girl knew a few letters of the alphabet and could write a few letters too. She could count to 5 but after that it was muddled up. She has a mild intellectual disability (moderate for verbal) and a genetic deletion (which also causes some physical issues).

I liked that we were starting at a local learning centre and we are there twice a week for a total of 2 hours learning. In fact it was during their assessment when I was shown a plan of what they would teach and what she could work through that I decided that she was certainly not going back to school. I could see that we could do much more in those 2 hours than she would get in a week at school. Edited to add this is where we attend, if you live in Sydney and can get here you will love the personalised attention, happy and dedicated teachers and there are a wide range of students who attend from kids who just need a bit of help in maths or english to special needs children. We also do our speech here and that’s amazing too.

They have taught her the alphabet with letterland and a variety of resources and at home we’ve been doing handwriting and more activities. She can now write the entire alphabet. If you spell out a word letter by letter then she will write the word, She copies whole sentences if it’s written above for her and she correctly forms all letters as well. She always had great pencil grip but this was much faster progress than we were expecting.

She is being taught to read simple readers and a few sight words. She loves writing and spelling out words and just last week spelt out the word ‘jam’ as I was making breakfast and was very proud of herself then saying ‘here tis again j – a – m, jam!’. Tears in my eyes that morning.

Numbers are tricky and she can count to 10 and write the numbers to 10 but still can get a bit muddled so I think maths will be harder for her.

Our week is quite busy but it’s much more relaxed than a school day was. Monday and Tuesday mornings we are at the learning centre, Wednesday is our home day where we get things done (as in I catch up on washing, floors and the kitchen), Thursday mornings we have speech, every 2nd Friday we have OT in the park, Saturday mornings we do gymnastics and Sunday afternoons she has swimming. In between we play at home, do our handwriting books and activities, she loves to play with her little brother and cook. We do colouring, read books, write out our letters, play outside on our scooter, visit the park and library, run our errands like the Post office, shops. other kids activities and dr’s appointments. She is learning lots of skills wherever we are and I now realise even more than ever that life outside a classroom will be her best teacher. I am always there to prompt her when she needs it or help her out and no where else would she get that focus.

Her speech which has always been our greatest challenge is coming along so well because we are always helping her with it. She is saying longer sentences and often blurts out words that are perfectly pronounced. She can tell us what she wants, when something is hurt, when she is angry (oh she likes to tell me that one) and we working on pronouncing our name as everyone thinks it’s annie when she says it.

We see benefits all the time and are amazed at her progress. She won’t go back to a classroom anytime soon. Our goals are to have her reading and writing and to find her talents. Our bigger goals are to see her have a part time job, travel on transport independently, have friends, participate in special olympics and her activities. We have a family dream of running our own business to provide her and our other children with opportunities to work together and be happy. It’s always a big worry what happens when we won’t be here but that’s for another blog post.

In terms of resources we are using lots of different ones. I love letterland, teachers pay teachers, seton handwriting books, pre-k workbooks designed for preschoolers before school, online resources too.

It’s not easy to homeschool, there are days I would like a break because it’s a big job having a child who still needs assistance with a lot of tasks that other children her age would be able to do. Every day without fail we will have an emotional moment. It just is part of life when she doesn’t get her way or is angry. That’s the hardest bit for me. The beauty of an unstructured day and not being tied to our books at this age is that we can go and do something fun to tire her out or change the mood of the day. The hard bit is when she decides she doesn’t want to do her hour at the centre or speech. At the moment banana bread and a hot chocolate (she calls it coffee tea) are making things easier.

In the beginning we also had a big problem with separating. As in I couldn’t leave the house without her. She wanted to be with me all the time and when the babysitter came in so I could go to the dentist she would want to come with me not be left at home. This lasted for a few months and thankfully we have moved on from this stage.

If you are thinking about taking a child out of school I would say do it. You’ll never regret it and you’ll only wish you did it earlier. School will always be there as an option if you need to and some homeschooling families do put their children into school at various times when things happen or if things aren’t going to plan. I do wish it was presented as a viable option for schooling instead of being seen mostly as a last resort option. It shouldn’t be. It’s a more natural way to teach our children what they need to learn and I feel that by being at special school she would be locked away from the outside world for most of the next 11 years or so.

I do have to say that I know families with children with special needs who need the time that their children are at school. Children who run away, hurt themselves or others, can’t be left alone unsupervised or have severe behavioural issues or very high care needs. I am sure those parents would wonder how on earth they could do the care 24/7 for 365 days a year and be the teacher as well. I can’t tell you that everything would be perfect and that you could cope. In those cases I would really say you would need your respite and breaks organised so that you did get a break. Whether that could be provided by the NDIS as part of your plan or through the AIC payment and you paying for that help yourself.Any questions just ask……….

Before I write how well we are doing homeschooling I thought I’d write a few thoughts on homeschooling and special needs homeschooling. Otherwise it was going to be a very long post.

Firstly,  I love teachers. Whenever I share a homeschooling post on FB I seem to get someone commenting on how hard teachers work. Absolutely. That’s a given. My mum and granddad were both career teachers and devoted their lives to it. Teachers work long hours and have even more work as they try to teach a crowded curriculum, prepare children for NAPLAN, testing at earlier ages, more children in the class and more children with a range of special needs in there (without help). So I love teachers, we’ve had lots of great teachers in our schooling life and I have friends who are teachers and wonderfully dedicated.

Next up inclusive education is wonderful…………when it’s well funded. Unfortunately for us we were never going to get funding and an inclusive education locally. Having a mild intellectual disability means any access to funding in a public school is equal with children who are struggling to read, have dyslexia, learning difficulties or are undiagnosed. Mild ID  as a diagnosis is a bit misleading because mild makes it seem like it’s the mild end of things but really it’s a lifelong disability that affects every aspect of a person’s life. There is a local private school that has a great reputation for children with disabilities and it does it very well for children with physical or hearing issues but if you have an intellectual disability you need to provide your own aide or go to their special school which starts from a moderate ID later in primary grades.

When you start homeschooling any child you realise that children don’t have to go to school to be well educated. 13 years of a child’s life spent in the classroom doesn’t always make them happy, well educated, lead to a job or a successful life. When you throw disabilities in there you really question why a child needs to be in a classroom when really they need to be prepared to live in the real world. Homeschooling allows you to choose your own priorities for what they need to learn, fit in therapies comfortably into their day and pursue their interests as well.

Even as a homeschooler I have to provide a year’s plan of what we will teach and how I will meet all KLA’s of the NSW curriculum. And it still strikes me as a little bit silly that I need to teach geography and history to a child who is still learning how to use the toilet independently or learn what ‘in’ and ‘out’ or how to ask for something.  Thank goodness we have a sensible Authorised Person from NESA (formerly the Board of Studies) who tells us what to focus on and meets the child before approving your plan. Yes we have a plan that shows we will meet all subject areas but we do our maths and english every day and try to tick off our other subjects in less conventional ways compared to how they would be taught in a classroom. It’s still a lot more work than would be done in a special needs classroom or meeting goals in an IEP and that makes me happy.

If you live in Australia, Centrelink have a scheme called Assistance for Isolated Children whereby parents of a child with a disability can receive $4k a year ($1k a term). This money could be used for tutoring, supplies, help coming into the home, classes, courses and more. It is a huge help and we use it for our sessions at a local learning centre. There are 2 forms to fill in and your GP or paediatrician needs to complete the medical form.

Homeschooling any child is a big responsibility and commitment, it assumes that there is someone at home who can do the teaching and care during school hours. Not everyone has a parent who is home during the day and there can be a huge financial cost to homeschooling if one income is lost. I know that families might have a parent stay home during the early years and then when the children start school that parent goes back to work. There are families where both parents work and homeschooling is achieved and it’s worth researching how other families make it work before ruling out homeschooling.

You will have good and bad days just like you do when you send your child off to school. Sometimes the bad days make you want to pack everyone off to the local school tomorrow but I’ve found once I relaxed our daily routine and stopped stressing over everything we had to cover that we just got into our routine and everything seemed to get easier.

There is a lot and I mean a LOT of support on Facebook. There are local groups, special needs groups, australia wide groups and more. You will get lots of tips, advice and reassurance on the groups and sometimes it’s nice just to know that there are other people out there with a bit more experience or you can help out someone new.