Clonlara School is the perfect infrastructure for home educating families:   advice, record keeping, review, mentoring - all the glue it takes to provide official school transcripts documenting independent student work.

 Go there,
click image

States are investing considerable amounts of money in pre-kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds. A new study finds that the quality of interactions between teachers and children plays a key role in accounting for gains in children’s development when compared to typical quality indicators such as teachers’ education, class size, and child-to-teacher ratio.

The study suggests that efforts to promote interactions with teachers that are instructionally and emotionally supportive can help children gain the most benefit from their pre-K experience and be more ready for school.

"These results provide compelling evidence that young children’s learning in pre-K occurs in large part through high-quality emotional and instructional interactions with teachers," according to Andrew J. Mashburn, senior research scientist at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the study. "This helps parents, teachers, and program administrators understand the specific features of pre-K programs that directly support children’s academic, language and social development," Mashburn said.

"These results also have important implications for state policy-makers who are deciding how to design and regulate pre-K programs in ways that truly benefit children. Efforts that focus on the quality of instructional and emotional interactions within pre-K classrooms appear to have the potential to improve children’s development, more so than the traditional approaches of class size, teacher qualifications and student-teacher ratios" "Given that other studies have found the quality of instructional and emotional interactions in pre-K classrooms to be average at best, these results point to the importance of working to improve teacher-child classroom interactions."

More of the story,
click image

Teenagers today face increasing pressures and demands from school and home. New research has found that stress at home affects adolescents’ school life, and vice versa. What’s more, that stress lasts for two days and affects academic performance across the high school years.

The research, carried out at the University of California, Los Angeles, examined the implications of stress in adolescents’ daily lives, looked at the spillover between daily family stressors and school problems among an ethically diverse group of 589 9th-grade students in the Los Angeles area. The teenagers reported their daily family and school experiences in a diary every day for two weeks, completing a checklist that assessed conflict with parents, family demands, learning difficulties, school attendance, and other experiences.

More of the story,
click image

“We found out that it was more helpful for him to learn if he got to pick and choose what he wanted to learn,” said Kawai Brown.

Brown prefers the term child-led learning. She homeschooled her sons in the method, which allows them to decide what to learn and when.

“It’s basically, do whatever you want for school,” said 9-year-old Dustin Brown. “You can do math. You can do science. You can do anything. You can read another book.”

Dustin typically spends most of his morning outside. During the snowstorms, he spent his days building a makeshift hill in his front yard to snowboard and sled on. Then, he would spend time breaking up the ice on his sidewalk before finally deciding to sit down and do some work.

Homeschooling grows in popularity. 9NEWS at 10 p.m. 2/27/07

More of the story,
click image

Truancy statistics show that more than 348,000 pupils in England are classified as being at risk of becoming "persistent truants".

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7385275.stm

This two-part essay was written by my unschooled teen son for his Composition I college class. Zach has been radically unschooled for the past five years and relaxed homeschooled prior to that. He’s never been to school except to play clarinet in a band and beginning this last January he decided he wanted to enroll in a writing course at our local community college. Video games are his number one passion with writing a close second.

In his essay, Zach writes about how it felt to be a child who wanted to please no one more than his mother but also a child who’s passion I did not value or respect. Parts of Zach’s essay were difficult for me to read but I knew the truth of it already and I knew that he had an important message to communicate to the mothers and fathers of the world. The sting of reading about the damage my old ways inflicted on my child were soothed in the knowledge that I’ve seen the error of my ways and have worked hard to repair our relationship I now know the beauty, peace, and extraordinary amount of learning, embracing his interests has brought to both of our lives.

We are looking for volunteers to help coordinate their local networks with the International Learning Freely Network.

Coordinators and Contact persons play a very important role toward connecting  Natural Learners, Unschoolers and others seeking learning freedom, throughout the world. communication and sharing information are what makes such a network function well.

Interested? Read more

Hello All Coordinators,

The on site mail plugins for WordPress 2.5  are not dependable so messages to the Coordinators group will be posted here (latest on top).
You must be logged in to read these, they are marked "private" not published.
You can comment or write posts in this ‘Coordinators’ category

There had been some problems with on site publishing. These have now been corrected, and the roles and capabilities for coordinators re-configured. All coordinators should now be able to publish on-line without any difficulty.

The categories coordinators can post to have been extended beyond the country categories to include "The News" (international) and "Articles". You may also request author permission for other categories, just ask.

Please publish something in your country’s categories, even if it is just a test post, so we can determine that the system is in fact working for all coordinators.

Kent
Site administrator

CONCORD, N.H. — Parents of home-schooled children asked lawmakers Tuesday to reject a proposal to increase state oversight of what they teach.

Bill Would Require Home Schools To Submit First-Year Plan

A bill being considered by a House committee would require parents to submit a one-page plan for a home-school student’s first year of education. Supporters said it’s intended to keep children from falling through the cracks.

"To have that initial year be a planning stage, it allows communication between the district and the parents," said Roberta Tenney of the Department of Education.

But home-school parents said the paperwork would deter parents from considering home schooling."It ends up being intimidating to them so that many people who would start home schools just choose not to start," said Chris Hamilton of the Home Education Advisory Council.

More of the story…

There are two websites now that are partly or entirely written in English:

• Life without School in Austria - Leben ohne Schule in Österreich

About home education in Austria in general, though the focus is on the child-led spectrum.

• Unschooling in Austria?
  

This blog is a mixture of glimpses into a family’s individual life and posts about countrywide issues.