As I meet different home educating families, I am always amazed at the different ways that families juggle home education and earning money.

I have come across some families where there is only one bread-winner and the other partner, mostly the woman from what I can see, devotes themselves entirely to the education of the children.

Other families share the education and the work between them, where one person seems to educate during the day and work at night and their partner works during the day and has the children at night.

I have come across quite a few single parents, who work (part or full time) and/or run a business and home-educate and run the home and do everything else as well- with or without the support of friends or family. Amazing!

In our family, my husband works away a lot during the week and then when he comes home at the weekend he does a lot of the Maths, ICT and Science with the girls, as those are more of his strengths. We are also very fortunate in that we have found an excellent group to do Drama and the main Science Course.

I teach them English and Maths during the week and he picks up on the bits we need to expand on. We are doing German as well.

Whilst I don’t work outside the home, I run a home based business marketing HEALTHY CHOCOLATE. Much of this is done over the Internet or Skype, so I can work it at any time of day or night.

I love this. I have lost 17lbs and 8″ off my body so far in a couple of months, eating Healthy Chocolate. You can see the pictures on my blog: www.queenofchocolateonline.com

At the moment, we are in pre-launch with this in the UK. However it well established in USA, Canada, Puerto Rico, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. This means I can talk to people in different times zones at 10pm at night, when the girls are thinking about going to bed!

I have come across quite a few home educators who have businesses marketing useful resources for other home educators.

I am just curious. How do other people juggle home education and earning money? Have any of your children set up a business?

With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
Multi-tasking Home Educating Mum and Healthy Chocolate Eater

Tags: children by Amanda
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After much deliberation we decided to opt for the English Language exams offered by CIE, Cambridge International Exams.

This was for a few reasons. Firstly we were rather out off by the substantial anthology required for Exexcel English exams, not because of the quantity but because of the rather depressing or somewhat boring nature of most of the set pieces.

The other challenge with Edexcel has been finding a centre to take the exams. For us, personally, the process has been much easier with the CIE exam centres.

The CIE exams seemed to based purely on reading and writing English,as it is presented in the exam papers on the day.

I bought some excellent books from Amazon for the CIE English and we got to work.

For those of you old enough to remember “O-Levels”, you will find a lot of the material quite familiar. There are sections for reading, comprehension, picking key words and points from a paragraph, summarizing, paraphrasing, finding synonyms and use of language in general.

I was surprised to find how few of those basic skills my children had covered previously in school. I was astounded at their lack of knowledge of basic English Grammar. To me these things are vital to be able to communicate in written English.

We bought both the textbook and the workbook. So far, we have not had any of the diet of violence and unpleasantness that seems to be very prevalent in the texts studied in schools!

The books are fun and easy to work with and so far we are enjoying them.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: english by Amanda
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So, here we are back into a routine- well, sort of- and rapidly rushing towards school children breaking up for half term! What happened to September?

We have started back with all our regular activities.

Jacqueline has started back at Guides and they are preparing to go to the “BIG GIG”, which is a pop concert put on just for Guides. It has some HUGE stars performing, including “Avenue”, “The Sugar Babes”, “Scouting for Girls”, “The Saturdays”, “Alphabeat”, “The Script” and “The Hoosiers”.

Stagecoach has re-started and they are doing a production of “Scrugina”, written by the music teacher. It is really good!

The girls are riding regularly and Stephanie is doing her Stage 1 BHS (British Horse Society) Stable Management course. Once she gets to Level 3, that will count towards her UCAS points for University.

Guitar (Stephanie) and Drumming (Jacqueline) lessons have continued more or less through out the summer.

The girls are busy working towards their LAMDA Speech and Drama exams in November. Stephanie is doing Grade 5 Mime and Devised Performance (writing and performing your own piece) and Jacqueline is doing Grade 4.

We have linked up with the home education group in Oxford and both girls are doing Biology IGCSE. This is the first part of the Science course for either the double Science award or 3 single subjects next that. Alongside IGCSE Drama with the same group, Mum’s taxi service is kept very busy.

we have got some great resources for Maths and English. we use the Maths programme from the University of Plymouth. This is highly recommend, as it has loads of worksheets, as well as well-written lesson plans for subjects you may not be clear on.

I bought some books for IGCSE English for the CIE board, which I have been really pleased with.

I wonder sometimes where I find the space to breathe!

All that plus meeting up with local home educating groups and running my healthy chocolate business!

And the critics say that home educated children don’t socialize!

Speak soon.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
www.queenofchocolateonline.com

Tags: home education by Amanda
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Having waded my way through all the lastest “Statutory Guidance for children missing education”, I decided that the simplest way is to just say “NO! I don’t agree with this and I am not being bound by it”.

It is such a time-consuming exercise to respond to all this stuff, yet it is important that we say “NO” because otherwise, they think we are all agreeing- by our SILENCE!

Here is the response I sent in to the consultation. This is just my approach. I am not giving advice. Please make your own decisions as to which way to proceed.

Tags: children, home education by Amanda
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