Registration...Moderation...

Well we have come up to our first Registration review!!!! Blog's been a bit quiet for that reason as have other things because, hey, we've been doing a bit of ' real life' (and enjoying it!) and also tidying papers (they were in pretty good order but we wanted to knock the year on the head in order!) and preparing for The Review. Thankfully it was with Sally Robbins (I don't know if she currently has anyone else working with her) and we saw her last year for the original registration so I didn't expect any surprises.

It was great (though a bit rushed in the end, having spent all last week ill when I was thinking of getting the review ready that week) going through all LittleH#1's work and remembering and summarising in report form the year's work. I'd had the bright idea of bringing the review forward so that we can get it done before we go to England in 2 weeks. (2 Weeks!!!!!!!!!).

The Report I prepared was longer than you are probably expected to do and I prefaced sitting Sally down with a cup of tea with an apology as to length and I think I said I am incapable of writing anything short. (Are you feeling that?). She was actually really pleased with the detail, it helps her with her job, because she has to write a 4 page report on us and it saves her having to tease out the information that she needs so that she can write it all. A fun job at times, I am getting the impression.

Oh it was such a wonderful meeting. LittleH#1 was there (the others were all accounted for, asleep / quietly reading etc!) and he sat through the whole meeting and played a good part in it too. She took time out from reading it every now and again to say "Oh, you went to xxxxxx did you?" and then he told her a bit about it, or found something in his folder to show her.

We were so encouraged. Matthew was there for most of the meeting too so that was brilliant and he talked a bit about some of the things he has done with the boys. She said we have had a very good first year, and lots of other complimentary things. I am not saying this to boast - actually I am really just wanting to share how encouraged we were from the meeting. Sometimes it is hard to see the wood from the trees. In the midst of a difficult day, week, or season, or just having had a baby, I have wondered whether we are doing the right thing by the children, whether we have achieved anything good and what on earth the review would look like. I have worked out some things:

We are saving more time than we realise by learning at home.

The extra distractions that teachers have in the classroom cannot be underestimated - crowd control, constraints of curriculum and protocol, timetabling, etc.

When we do a big project, like volcanoes (the only one I have blogged on so that's the best example) the work is more intense than I realise.

We work longer days than is necessary for home educating, for the above reasons. I like that. It gives us freedom to have a bad day, an 'unschool day' or just go shopping and do school out of the house like the day we played 'Phonics Detectives' at Tea Tree Plaza while I bought some essential items, whatever they were.

I had thought our school day (being, maybe unusually for homeschooling, but it works for us) say around 9 -4 or something was long because I allow for play periods, sleeps (some or all of us) and maybe taking longer to get dressed than we might otherwise, housework etc. Actually we are getting more than I thought done during that time. But I can't see that when I am in the middle of it, I see it now I have summarised and looked at what we have produced this year.

Oh they are a few random thoughts but it gives me more confidence, and maybe the difficult wading-through-treacle-learning days will be less worrying as we move ahead because I know the bigger picture is a little different. I am having the perfectionist smoothed out of me (it's a gentle refining process, largely, rather than a chip-chip one) and I can be a little more gentle perhaps with the perfectionist child(ren) that I appear to have given birth to.

I need to have some free time now (we are about to watch a film we have diligently put off till the registration thing was finished) but I will come back and post again about what I really think about registration, how my views on it have changed, and for now, (while we are in Australia and whilst it looks nothing like the draconian measures being threatened in the UK) why it feels like a good thing. In Moderation. Ha ha.