Welcome!

This page is a culmination of a few years of research and experience in the world of homeschooling, unschooling and alternative forms of education for children. I started off as a teacher and a principal, believing public education was the best thing for children and ended up here as an unschooling mother to an 11 year old son and a home school coordinator for a public school division. I could tell my story here but I’ll do that in the ‘about’ section. For this page I wanted to talk about purpose. My purpose of creating this blog and this website was to share my expertise with homeschooling families. I noticed early on in my new career as a home school coordinator and facilitator that when families decided to home school, teachers and admin would sometimes make them feel incompetent and stupid by using the specialized language that teachers are taught in teachers college in their Bachelor of Education programs. That irritates me because the last thing an educator should want is a family to feel a lack of confidence going in to educate their children!

So this page, the book and the Udemy course (coming soon!) is to demystify all that vocabulary, the attitudes and beliefs and philosophies of those who work in education, and to provide support for families who have decided to home school their children.

To educators who find this page I want to say this: Parents who decide to home school are not making a light decision. It has taken weeks, months or years for them to decide to pull their kids from school. It is often a financial sacrifice as one parent stays home to home school the children. When they call me for advice and help getting started, they are scared and are NOT feeling confident. I think that if you ever run into someone like that, find some time to build them up not tear them down. Research has shown that kids that are home schooled do not fare worse in post secondary and in their careers than kids that are public or private schooled. In fact they often do better! There is also absolutely no correlation between a parent’s education and abilities and a child’s success later on. None! You can find the research I did on this here: https://firstnationsstudents.weebly.com/blog-posts You can also find research by the Fraser Institute on this subject here: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/home-schooling-in-canada-2015-rev2.pdf Everyone in education always has stories for me about that one family whose child ‘didn’t learn anything’ and they are shocked that they finish at year 12 of school and don’t know how to write an essay or some other such measure of ‘success’. I always say to that particular argument that they are judging home schooled kids unfairly. There are plenty of students that graduate from our schools that don’t know how to read very well, can’t write and have difficulty with math (I was the last one…grade 6 math level when I graduated). I argue that the measure of success shouldn’t be those skills. I want you to start questioning what success in life is and how do you know when you have achieved it? You likely know how to write an essay if you are a teacher so is that the measure of success? Do you use the ability to do trigonometry as your yardstick (if that’s the case then I failed!). Happiness? A good paying job? I assure you that people can be happy if they have home schooled and they certainly can get a good paying job.

I hope you enjoy the page as much as I enjoyed writing it.