Making Contact© Belinda Moore
Oct 28, 2002
One advantage of home based learning is the creative socialisation opportunities it presents. In the local community, children get to mix with people of all ages. For example, two of our girls have attended beginners’ netball and mixed with girls from many local schools over a 4-year age range. Apart from talking with our girls, the schooled children seem to only mix with their own school or class peers. Three of our daughters attend pottery club with an adult friend. Other members are older women, special needs teenagers and many talented artists. Each year our eldest four children spend six months at swimming lessons and have contact with their teacher/s and other children. Also, they each enjoy spending time with friends they met as toddlers at playgroup, as well as neighbours and family members. Other home educated children may have friendships made through sporting interests, scouts, church, or dance classes for example. Many families have a local home education network to share fun days, excursions, sport and group lessons. Some choose to spend plenty of time with their local home education network, others are too busy “in the real world” mixing with a wide variety of people. Outside our local community our children enjoy an annual home ed. camp, as well as other holidays and short trips. At the camp they enjoy a solid five days of play and activity, and come away with new friends of all ages. Three of our girls have penfriends around Australia and/or across the world. Some penfriends they get to visit on annual holidays. We are part of a Families Share Newsletter network, so the children get to write and draw things for our annual contribution and see what other children contribute to their own families’ newsletters. There are postcard networks as well, which have been popular with families we know, though have involved a greater time commitment than one annual newsletter. Finding homeschooled penfriends and networks can be done through home education newsletters such as Stepping Stones (http://www.australia.edu/steppingstones), on-line mailing lists (see my previous article, Finding Support, for a few of these), maybe even curriculum suppliers, the Home Education Association (http://www.hea.asn.au) or state education departments with which you may be involved. Penfriends needn’t only be homeschooled children though. They don’t necessarily even need to be children. It may be possible to correspond with older family members or friends who live far away, for example. They will often get much more interesting mail from an adult friend than one their own age.
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