Stumbling over home ed vocabulary.

As soon as I started to look in to taking our children out of school I immediately saw there was home schooling and home education.  Now, I think, homeschooling rolls of the tongue nicely and people get it, but this is an American term and home edders here in the UK don't seem to like it.  I think that is because it just sounds like you are running a school from your home...? rather than an autonomous approach.

There, see!  In that paragraph alone I have dropped two more terms in to the mix.  Home edders are people that do home education?  Are home educating? Are home educators?  You see my dilemma, the language is tricking and people are quite specific about what they are/are doing.  An autonomous approach is learning on the go, if you like.  We know that children are learning all of the time and this approach follows their led - also known as the child led approach.

I, like many others, struggle with wanting to do some kind of 'formal' learning with the kids, but as others ask themselves "Is this for their benefit or mine?".  I am inclined to think that my boys like a bit of structure/routine in their day, so this may work for them.  Now some home edders don't even like the words structure/routine: by routine I simply mean sometime between getting dressed and having lunch we may try and do some writing or maths etc  But when I think about doing this I don't even know what to call it...

work: sounds like work and not fun at all
learning: sounds like this is the only time they are going to learn today
studying: sounds intense and way too serious
schoolwork: well, speaks for itself

I am stumped by this, answers on a postcard please.

I hope it doesn't really matter what words we use.  Aren't we all just trying to do the best for our kids and making sure they are having a good time doing it?

You get to use food for maths.

Wednesday was a good day.  The two littlies were at preschool so I was going to take the two bigger ones to the woods, to meet some other home ed families.  Unfortunately Howabout was poorly so he stayed at home with Daddy.  So Why? and I went by ourselves.
On the way I asked Why? his thoughts about home education he said it was good because: you don't have to do the same thing at the same time every day and you get to use food for maths.  This made me smile.  I think it will be helpful for me to ask this question more often, the kids just have a nack of nailing it on the head with a simple and honest answer.

Our time at the woods was fun, relaxing and muddy (in JUNE!).  The kids, of various ages, played in and out of the trees whilst the mums had weighty conversations about our hopes for our kids and our disappointment with schools so far.

I would like to say at this point that I am not anti-schools or teachers.  We have just had a bad experience recently and I believe it boils down to one thing = 30 children and 1 teacher.  My child was not encouraged to thrive at school because the teacher did not have the time to give him extra work to keep him motivated, tragic but true.  In essence we took our son out of school because he wanted to learn too much!  We were told that he has too many questions, so on his folder I have put a poster with a quote from Albert Einstein,

"The important thing is to NOT STOP questioning."