From the end of July 08 this website will no longer be updated but will remain online as an archive.
For current information about home education in Australia please visit the Home Education Association of Australia.
While there, please consider joining this vital support network that works hard to promote home education in Australia.
Please note that Beverley Paine is unavailable to answer telephone and email inquiries, etc. Please join a support group in your state.

Home education is a legal alternative to school education in Australia. State governments are responsible for regulating home education.
Different states have different requirements, however homeschooling families are able to develop curriculum and learning programs
to suit the individual needs of their children.

© Beverley Paine

"Natural Learning sounds considerably more involved than the average curriculum and might be difficult for many parents to do well. " Sharon

Which is why most of us begin with the average or traditional curriculum and move to more learning naturally methods as time passes and we gain confidence and experience.

I get worried I am neglecting my children's education from time to time with our approach, but I as I record our daily activities it's easy to see how filled with learning they are. As I record I convert our daily activities into educational jargon - this trick especially reassures me. If I couldn't see that playing postman and dress-ups was essentially covering language learning, social studies, personal development, drama I'd feel very insecure about our 'play curriculum'. Likewise with Lego - I've learned to recognise the traditional curriculum in everyday Lego play (classifying, sorting, patterns, symmetry, levers, pulleys, planning, design - all elements of the mathematics and technology curriculum learning areas). It is by doing this consistently over many years that I was able to see how closely our non-curriculum followed the school curriculum, which led me to believe that the school curriculum is based on a child's natural developmental progress as well as society's requirements (employment training based aspect of all school curricula).

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