First Up - IGCSE English Language

DD had used wordweaver wings from Catherine Mooney and using her IGCSE English Language course seemed like an obvious choice.

She is a home-educator herself, and has extensive experience in teaching and marking English.

The course currently costs £210, and for that you receive the course bound book  which includes 10 tutor marked assignments including a past paper.  The course is also provided on CD's for those who prefer to listen to their courses.  She also provides access to an annotated anthology which you download.

The course is easy to follow and most students I know who use it, enjoy it.  She is very helpful and does answer emails.  

Below is a link to her site if anybody is interested.

http://www.catherinemooneytutoring.co.uk/

This was the start of DD's journey into studying for GCSE's, alongside three other courses, and she timetabled one hour a day for this particular course.

She completed the course in 8 weeks.

I would suggest that she rushed the course.  Even though all the marked assignments came back with grade B's, and some A's, I think a slower pace would have meant that the information was more completely absorbed.  However, DD worked completely on her own, with no imput from me.  

Also, because DD was only 13 when she studied and sat this exam, her writing style was not yet very mature.  Catherine did advise DD to wait six months before taking the exam, to allow her writing style to mature.  I couldn't see how much it would change in six months, but actually, Catherine was absolutely right, and I can see that the essays she produces now, for Drama, and for Music, are better than the essays she was producing six months ago.

However, having said that, it was an excellent course to do first, because it has prepared DD for the essays that she has to write in her subsequent GCSE's/IGCSE's with regard to planning, paragraphs, beginning - middle - end.  So much so, that her essays have been used as demonstration essays in some of her classes.

Catherine taught DD to plan her essays before she writes them up in exams, which is excellent advice.  However, DD was thrown in the actual exam, because she was expecting to be allowed some scrap paper to write her plan, and wasn't aware that she could write her plan on the answer booklet.  It wasn't something I had bothered to check beforehand, because I remember being allowed scrap paper when I was in school, and I wasn't aware that the situation had changed.  

DD ended up completing paper 1 without a plan, which threw her.  She then wrote her plan for paper 2 on the exam booklet, as I advised her to do.  

In the end she got a C grade, which isn't bad for a 13 year old, who has not had much in the way of English 'lessons' from the age of 6 until 13, and who completed the entire IGCSE course in 8 weeks as opposed to the two years that is taken to study this course in school.  

There were things she could have done better in retrospect, such as write her plan on the exam booklet in paper 1, and wait 6 months to get a more mature writing style.  But all in all, an acceptable grade that is the standard required to get into further education college.  

Which GCSE's to start with?

One thing that is common to Home Edders doing GCSE's at home, is that, for the most part, they need to do IGCSE's.  These are International GCSE's, which have an extra exam paper in lieu of the controlled assessments that they do in the classroom at school.

Doing these qualifications makes it a relatively straightforward affair.  You just need to find an examining centre that caters for the particular qualification you wish to study.

Living in London, we did have a choice of commercial institutes where you can sit exams - for a fee!  And WHAT a fee.  Each IGCSE costs approximately £130 to sit the exam.  However, what you do get what you pay for, and using London Brookes 6th Form College took all the pain out of organizing the exam.   You just fill in a form, send the required ID and cheque and it's done.  You can also sit ANY exam there, from ANY board, including exams that require Orals or Lab access.

There are ways of doing the exams cheaper, usually in state or private schools.  But it is luck of the draw if you find somewhere willing to take you, and you have to do a lot of donkey work, ringing and emailing different schools to see if they'll let you sit the exam there.

Some only will let you sit the exams their own students are sitting, others will let you sit anything.  It should be easy, they have invigilators, and all they need to do is order the exam paper, then send it off, then email you with the results, but for some reason, schools seem reluctant to offer this service.

Both Cambridge and Edexcel provide a list of private centres you can contact to sit their exams.

DD decided to do her English Language IGCSE first, together with a Music GCSE.

We soon discovered that you can't study Music GCSE from home, as it has 60% controlled assessment.  Home Ed Partners, in Monmouthshire do offer the facility to do controlled assessments, but because we do not live close by, and because they need to pay for an invigilator, the high cost involved meant that joining the Blackheath Conservatoire for their saturday GCSE class was not much more expensive, and DD would get a 3 hour class every Saturday.  This will most likely be the most expensive GCSE DD studies, as the course costs £1200 a year.  For that reason, I told DD that she had to complete the course in one year.

Another reason for the one year limit, is because DD wanted to do a few GCSE's each year for three years.  This is common practise for home edders.   When you have to pay for the courses and the exams yourself, you need to spread the cost.

At the same time, the opportunity came up to do a Drama GCSE with the Otherwise Club in Kilburn over 20 weeks, for £5 a week.  This was too good an opportunity to pass up, so DD took it.

Therefore, this year, DD has studied for IGCSE's, and GCSE's in English Language, Music and Drama.  At the same time, she's been working through the Maths IGCSE book, continuing her ABRSM grades, and studying portuguese.

There was also an opportunity to get some NICAS levels in Rock Climbing and she spends every Friday morning studying Art under Sue at Courtyard Arts in Hertford.

A Bit of Context

I have decided to start up this little blog as it may be of interest to home-edders wishing to go down the route of exams for their children.

 It's not a process all home-edders take, I understand that it's not necessarily necessary and this isn't a blog to convince people whether they should or shouldn't go down the exam route with their children. This is just a description of our journey and I hope that the information I convey will help others if it's a route that they are taking themselves.

 For friends and family that read this blog, you will know who my dear daughter (DD) is, but for those of you who do not personally know me, I will be using the term DD, as this isn't really a blog about my daughter specifically, but rather, the process we find ourselves going through, as a family, doing GCSE's, from home.

 My DD decided when she was 13 that she wanted to start taking GCSE's. She hasn't decided what she wants to do when she's older and doesn't want to limit her options. Also, there are lots of subjects she hasn't covered in much detail, and she is keen to discover if she has talents in other areas, other than music and drama. She also wants to leave home-education with similar qualifications to school-going children. 

She feels that the GCSE courses form a 'package' of information that is pre-selected, and that it will be a useful way to tackle subjects that she hadn't studied in much detail before. Whether it's useful to study a subject in a manner that has been pre-selected by other people rather than discovered through your own exploration of a subject is debatable. But when you start from a position of very little knowledge of something, she feels that it was a fair assumption that the courses designed for school children will cover the basics, and save her the trouble of having to re-invent the wheel. She is of course able to completely disagree with the texts and it's not a case of studying without engaging your own thought processes. When you study by yourself at home, you very much have to think about the material you are studying and decide whether it is something relevant or useful to you. You make that choice. It is not a choice decided for you by a 'teacher', even though you are following a curriculum.

 Much of her education has been music and drama based, with the addition of lots of reading, RIGB science lectures, museum trips, field trips and interesting TV programmes, especially with regard to history and sociology. But she feels that there are gaps of knowledge in the fields of science and geography.

This blog will talk about the resources we used.  How effective we think they are, and how DD studies.  It's not a 'how to' blog, but I am just putting the information out there in case anybody else finds it interesting or useful.

 The next few posts will describe the process of choosing the first GCSE's to study for and why.