A little wobble

Ok, so we've been autonomously learning for nearly a year now and we're having a little wobble. My husband is now at home helping with it all, and its working out really well, although sometimes we feel like we're not doing enough and we want to record what the kids are learning for a while to see what they're actually doing - and to give ourselves a kick up the backside!

The situation as it is now is that Amy (15) has just sat 3 GCSE's and has been accepted to go to College in September to do a level 2 animal care course, she spends a lot of time on her laptop talking to friends and researching about animal care. Over the past few days she has (with help from her granddad) transformed our unused summer house into a "Rabbit Palace" and she's collecting two rescue rabbits today - there's still a bit more work to do on it, like connecting a run to it with a little cat flat type thing and making her "Office" side of it more tidy and organised.

I'm still a little concerned about Amy going to college, as she is a lot like me and will throw herself into it until she burns out, either from too much social contact or from too much sensory stimulation, and then teachers and friends will have no idea whats happened and will try but fail to understand why she is struggling with things she used to find so easy. I'm hoping that the trick is to keep her downtime simple, and to allow her to relax in her room and not to let her take on too much when it comes to extra curricular stuff - I truly believe that keeping herself together during college hours will be hard enough for her.

Danny (14) spends most of his time on his computer playing Mine craft, or Sims City or any number of different games - his favorite though is Mine craft and he is very very good at it. He also likes playing with fire, building bonfires, BBQ's etc. Recently, he's started becoming interested in how things work, like laptops and stereo's and we've been able to let him smash them up with an axe in the garden, which then led onto taking another one apart bit by bit with a screwdriver. We've also relaxed bedtimes which was a hard thing for me to do, however, I feel it has massively helped with Danny and he appears to be really coming out of himself and learning who he wants to be.

Danny's main struggle is still the social side of things, although he is becoming much more animated and social within the house, which I hope is the first step into learning to cope better outside of the house. I'm quite pleased that he's decided not to go to college until next year, I feel that he's only just really started to de-school and get to know himself, and he is so easily led and eager to please that I worry if he went to college now it could be right back to square 1. I'm also not sure that he knows himself well enough to know what he's really interested in yet, he had chosen horticulture but I'm pretty sure that was just because it was the best of a bad set of choices. I hope by next year he will be able to make a more informed choice or even look into different colleges which have courses that are better suited to him.

We have also started having regular family meetings, which give us all the opportunity to make decisions as a family about the way the house and family are run, this is something which I find quite hard as I am used to being the one in control and that's a hard habit to break!

Alice, (7) is loving being Home Educated and she is interested in so many things, over the past few days we've had in depth conversations about Flint and where it comes from, managing money and getting bargains, ants, animals, bugs, birds and tadpoles. Yesterday she found a frame of an old boat that my uncle had started to build about 50 years ago, and she was trying to work out ways to cover it and what material would be good to make it waterproof. She loves camping and she loves any of the groups we go to where she gets to see her friends!! She is such a sociable one! She is also loving the DIY Skills website which gives children the opportunity to learn new skills, upload their achievements for others to see and earn badges.

The only and main problem with Alice's learning is that she is completely adverse to "Learning" if she thinks it's learning!! For example, she has quite a good grip on CNC words like Dog, Cat, Mug, Job etc but is convinced that she cant read and will not tolerate us even trying to read a little with her. She also sometimes "clocks" when I'm trying to teach her how to add or takeaway even if she knows how to do it!!! She is totally against school and says that she would hate to be stuck in a classroom all day "Learning!" I'm hoping that if we give her time she'll realize she wants to learn these things and then it will be a lot easier.

So this gives an overall round up of what we're doing it at the moment, I'm hoping to post a little every day to remind me that we are doing a good job and also post some pictures. I love looking back on when we were more structured and kept a journal of what we'd been doing and looking at the photo's. I am also conscious of the fact that my uneasiness with all this is probably alot due to the fact that I have Aspergers and I like to be in control of whats going on around me, I have lost a lot of that control recently and I think I'm coping pretty well but I am aware of my need to grab hold of something and take ownership again - I really need to channel that energy into a project or business idea instead of trying to over control my family but I also don't want to neglect them by throwing myself into something different!!! I just need to keep working on finding a good balance.