Newcastle Photographer and Content Creator, Mandy Charlton, Always on a quest for adventure, often seen on buses, trains and planes. On a quest to be happier and healthier. Lives in Newcastle with her 3 cats, Iris, Maggie and Arthur. Loves good vibes, musicals and cakes. Full time professional wedding photographer in the north east of england alongside content creator on Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook

Monday, September 11, 2017

Home Educating My Teen, Our First Week



home educating Looby, our first week, mandy charlton, photographer, writer, blogger


Oh, hey you, remember me?

Yes, I know, I was trying to blog more often you know but the first week back after summer always seems more than a little chaotic.

The funny thing is that Looby wasn't going back to school but we were settling in to our new way of life and anyone who's seen Looby in the last week or so has commented just how happy she is and how she's more like Looby again, hurrah for that I say, long may it continue.  It is amazing though, I think perhaps we're both so much happier and it was only a couple of days before we attended Home Ed trampolining where she made her first similarly aged friend.  I have no worries at all about Looby feeling any kind of feelings of isolation, she's made a new friend, she spent a day with her best friend from school at the weekend and then she saw all of her riding school friends yesterday, my social butterfly's wings have certainly not been clipped by the introduction to this new way of life.

What's amazing is that I wasn't sure when we should commence any kind of formal learning, the guidelines say that you need around 1 month for every year the child has attended school as a deschooling period and during this time you don't do any formal learning at all.  In Looby's case that would be 10 months which seems like an awfully long time to me so I decided that we'd just do things our own way, it usually works!  I feel and so does Looby that she's learnt more in a week about  real life than she ever learnt at school so that's already a win and within the first couple of days she set up her own blog and now she's blogging on a daily basis, please go over and give her blog a read, it's quite early days but she writes eloquently with a bouncy kind of style which makes for easy reading, she's more amusing than me and let me tell you, her blog about why she's home educated made me so proud, she also has had way better reader stats in a week than I ever had when I started blogging, she's a whizz!

This week is our first full week and we have lots of interesting things, we're at the Theatre tonight and tomorrow we're helping out at a dementia charity tea dance, home ed is brilliant because there are no boundaries and my financial aim this week is to accrue the funds needed for our cultural trip to Gdansk at the end of the month.

I need to sort my working times out, I am much behind currently as I wanted to spend as much time as I could with Looby but it's still early days and we need to work out how it's all going to work, it's probable that I'll just end up editing, sending newsletters and speaking to clients in the evenings and early mornings but that's fine, it's all doable, with my job, the brilliant thing is that I am mostly a digital nomad from Mon-Friday, I can literally work from anywhere on the entire planet!

I think I'm happy with life at the moment, I said yes to lots of great work things last week, nothing personal came up but there was always a chance that would happen, I'm just going to have to make sure I keep making my mark in a work sense so that I don't completely get forgotten about.

So this week, watch out for more blogging, more vlogging and definitely some new and interesting adventures, home educating is going to be the best ride we've ever been on together.
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