What We Dropped That Didn’t Work in Home Ed
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learnt in home education is that not everything you start needs to be finished.
When we first began, I felt a quiet pressure to do all the things. The curriculums, the workbooks, the structured plans. Surely that was what “doing it properly” looked like.
It didn’t take long to realise that some of what we’d bought simply didn’t work for our child.
We dropped full curriculums that relied heavily on repetitive book work. Ibrahim found it draining, disengaging and, if I’m honest, so did I. For a long time, anything that looked too much like school at home was met with resistance.
We also dropped the idea that learning had to happen at a table. Some of our best learning has happened on walks, through conversation, while cooking, or halfway through a YouTube video I originally put on “just to fill time”.
We dropped rushing. Ten to fifteen minutes of focused learning turned out to be far more valuable than an hour of forced work.
And we dropped guilt. The guilt that came with stopping something we’d paid for. The guilt of changing our approach. The guilt of realising that what works for one child or family doesn’t automatically work for ours.
Home education isn’t about sticking rigidly to a plan. It’s about paying attention. Adjusting. Letting go when something no longer serves your child.
Dropping what didn’t work didn’t set us back. It moved us forward.
– Kam