The compulsory school age here in the UK is 5 years old (Year 1), and a lot of kids will start school at 4 years old entering reception class.
My eldest is now 6 years old, but when she was around 2, I remember speaking to my neighbours with children around the same age, and they were already urging me to start deciding and preparing to apply for schools for my child at that point. They all had older children as well, so they were briefing me on the procedures, and told me that the "best" school in our area was catholic, so unless we were catholic ourselves, we had no chance of getting in.
So I looked around at the other available schools in my area, and none of them sounded that great. All the schools that sounded remotely promising, we were either out of the catchment area for (we don't live close enough to, so pretty much no chance of getting in), or only prioritised entry for children of the school's religion. Honestly, the whole thing just felt stressful and felt off. I remember thinking that this can't be how things have to be?!
So this led to my husband and I doing a bit more research, to see what our options were in regards to educating our child. One thing led to another, and eventually home educating became a realistic option, especially as I researched more and more the benefits of starting schooling at a later age. In countries like Finland, Denmark and Sweden, children don't start school until the age of 7. Finland has a great reputation when it comes to their education system, so I looked into it and found that I really liked what they were promoting. Here's some reading on Finland's education system if you're interested 🙂 This became one of our main driving forces to home educate until our children are at least 7 years of age!
Another reason I didn't want my children to start school until at least 7 years old, is because I believe they should mainly learn through play at this age. More and more are expected of our children nowadays, they hardly get a chance to just be kids anymore. And many studies are showing that playing gives children vital skills in how to learn. Here's a great read on this topic based on the Lego Foundation's findings and here's another article worth reading on this topic.
Another benefit to home educating, that fits our specific family lifestyle is being free to go on holiday/an adventure whenever we want. We have family all over the world, and because of my husband's work, his time off is sporadic, which means that we have to be very flexible when we get to go travel/visit family. Another big benefit is that I get to spend as much precious time with my children while I still can, and while they still actually want to be with me! If my child had started school at age 4 (as lots do), she'd be gone for 6-8 hrs a day, 5 days a week. Although this is the norm for a lot of people, we just didn't want this to be our normal, not at that age anyway!
There are many more reasons as to why we home educate our children, and love doing it, but to keep this post short and sweet, I'll go into those another time! I will also do a post soon about what I do with my kids regularly, instead of them going to school 😊
I hope you enjoyed this post, and as always, please do comment if this resonated with you in any way, I always appreciate any related comments and engagement from you!
Much Love from Redrica :)