When something goes wrong This week, I have spent quite a lot of time talking to the police and CID while supporting somebody who was mugged at knifepoint for their clothes and shoes. That is frightening, and it is serious. I am sharing it with you via The Orchard Gate because something important came out as the police began taking witness statements and putting together what had happened. It became clear that one of the young men involved may not really have been happy about

Our Orchard Gate assembly — a moment to gather, reflect and wonder, wherever we learn. The Orchard Gate is our equivalent of a school assembly — a moment each week when we all come together, wherever we happen to learn. Every Friday, I’ll be posting a new Orchard Gate. It’s a chance to pause at the end of the week, look back at what we have achieved, celebrate the things that have gone well, think about the things that perhaps didn’t quite go to plan, and look ahead to what i

When children are small, it is very easy to concentrate on the next thing. Learning to read. Remembering number bonds. Writing a sentence that somebody else can actually read. Then suddenly they are twelve. Then fourteen. Then before we quite know how it happened, conversations begin to include college, apprenticeships, qualifications, jobs and what they might like to do with their lives. So what are we actually preparing our homeschooled children for? We are preparing them f

It is relatively easy to see when a small child is making progress. One day they can't read a word and then suddenly they can. They count to ten, then twenty, then one hundred. Their first attempts at writing might need a little imagination to decipher and, before you know it, they are leaving you notes on the kitchen table. As children get older, progress can become much harder to spot. They are reading. They are writing. They are doing maths. So how do you know they are act

One of the worries parents often have about homeschooling is whether their child will spend too much time on their own. It is an understandable worry. After all, the word homeschooling rather suggests a child sitting at home. However, learning at home doesn't have to mean learning alone. In fact, some of the best homeschool learning happens when children have someone to talk to, someone to ask, someone to work alongside — and sometimes someone to disagree with. Meet your Stu

When we tell Orchard families that we expect around 20 hours of purposeful learning each week, I think it can be difficult to picture what that really means. Twenty hours can sound like a lot. Or, if you are comparing your homeschool with a child who leaves for school in the morning and doesn't return until mid-afternoon, it can sound surprisingly little. So let's put those 20 hours into perspective. A school week isn't 25 hours of lessons A child may be away from home for si

Two of the questions parents ask me most often when they are thinking about homeschooling is: “But how am I going to teach them everything?” and How much teaching do we parents really have to do? The answer is — you probably aren’t. Homeschooling does not mean recreating a classroom at the kitchen table, with a parent standing at the front explaining every lesson. Nor does it mean handing a child a pile of worksheets on Monday morning and hoping for the best. There is a much

September is suddenly not very far away, and things are getting busy behind the scenes at Orchard Homeschooling. How are we getting ready for September? We are welcoming new families, getting our existing families ready for the new year and putting together the first weekly learning packs ready for Week 1 on 1 September. There has also been a lot of work going on with the curriculum over the summer. We have been looking carefully at what our children will be learning this yea

This is probably the question I am asked more than any other. "I'm not a teacher. Can I really homeschool my child?" My answer is always the same. Yes! In fact, most of the parents at Orchard are not teachers. You don't need to know everything. You don't need to stand at the front of a classroom. You don't need to recreate school at home. What you do need is a willingness to learn alongside your child. You already have the most important qualification to homeschool your chil

Well done, everyone, for looking after yourselves last week! We had the perfect storm of very high temperatures, high humidity and exceptionally high pollen counts. For many families, this meant poor sleep, reduced concentration and increased frustration, making learning much more difficult than usual. Now that the worst of last week's disruption has settled down, we have the final three weeks left until the end of term. During this time, we need to: Finish any work that was