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.