Bel - Central Highlands, TAS / Muwinina Country
"We don't need to be doing something exciting every day to make our home learning worthwhile.”
Bel is raising her two boys (aged 8 and 5) alongside her sister and daughter (aged 6) with the loving support of their parents. They all live & learn together on four acres overlooking the beautiful Derwent River in the Central Highlands of Tasmania. This multigenerational family are an inspiring example of folk who have dared to do things a little differently. They are all reaping the benefits of living life without school, with plenty of love and support.
This is Episode 32 of the Australian Homeschool Stories podcast - Bel’s Story:
Summary:
Born and bred Tassie girl Bel attended a tiny primary school (42 kids in total) and aside from two difficult years, she mostly loved school. She had a great memory, was an early effortless reader and eager to please - a teacher’s dream! She excelled academically and loved being busy with choir and plays, debating and band.
She went on to study pharmacy at university and now owns her own pharmacy, in which some of her family members work too.
Bel always knew she wanted to be a mum, but was unlucky in love. After a few nudges from others, she woke up one morning and thought, I’m just going to do it myself. It felt like the right thing to do and it was a straight forward IVF experience.
“My sister, the minute that she met Campbell, she really wanted to be a mum as well. So she started looking into it and decided that was the right thing for her as well. I guess it's unusual to have two sisters in the same family in the same situation like that, but it works really well for us.”
Bel recalls how one property sparked all their imaginations and brought three generations of the one family together, six years ago.
“When my sister was pregnant with her little one, we started looking for a place that we could live together, the two of us, because we were both solo parents by choice. My dad and I went to look at this property together, you know, just getting the fatherly advice, and we both loved it and so the imagination just started to run wild and he knew that mum would want to be around the kids all the time anyway and they lived an hour and a half away from this place, so yeah, it just all kind of came together.”
Her eldest son enjoyed his kindergarten experience so it came as a shock to Bel when his teacher suggested he would be labelled a naughty kid at school for being a bit of dreamer and that maybe she should consider homeschooling.
“He was really interested in these bugs that they'd found when they were at bush kindy and he didn't hear the rest of the class pack up. They've literally all moved on back down to school and he's still got his little magnifying glass out looking at this book and then getting into trouble for not listening to the teacher. I was just totally naive, because I said to her, I didn't mean to be rude but I kind of thought it was up to the teacher to find ways to communicate with all these different students, because they've got all these different communication needs. I manage nearly 30 people and I have to adjust the way I deliver my communication for those people. I really honestly thought that that would be a part of being a teacher. It's one of those things that should happen but often doesn't happen in practice and that opened my eyes a bit.”
Over dinner that night Bel mentioned the homeschooling comment to her own mother.
“My mum said, ‘I'm definitely not homeschooling these kids. I won't be able to make them sit down at the table and do their work’. And I just put it out of my head. I didn't think it was a possibility for us. I didn't even really know what it meant, of course.”
When Tassie borders re-opened post covid lockdown, Bel’s hand was forced into giving homeschooling a chance so to keep her family healthy in order to keep her business running.
“They were bringing in things like kiss and drop where you can't even go into the classroom with them. That just did not sit well with me, in my gut, to not be able to have that interaction with the kids and the teachers and get my own sense of what was going on. So I said, right, we're just going to homeschool for term one and see how things roll out.”
They began with a play based pre-school curriculum at home and were learning & deschooling on the fly with their choice to homeschool being a last minute decision.
“And then by the time I’d really read into homeschooling, I was like, well, this is it. I can't go back now.”
She took every single homeschooling book out of the library that she could and read them all. Including Free to Learn by
.“About Peter Gray - a lot of people say, oh, it was so eye-opening, but to me it was not eye-opening. To me I was reading and going, yes. I feel like I already knew this, but I just wasn't brave enough to acknowledge it.”
She and her sister were on the same page from the outset:
“We both really didn't want to have their natural curiosity squashed out of them because we already could see these beautiful little curious minds at work all the time and seeing the light bulbs go off all the time and we had both had that experience of, even if it hadn't happened to us, we'd seen it happen to other kids where all that curiosity is is taught out of them.”
“How many of us are in our 40s now only just learning how to be artists again because we were told we weren't any good at it?”
Despite being nervous about her mum’s initial reaction to homeschooling, Bel said it helped that it began as temporary and that they had a curriculum they were following.
“But mum is actually like… she's an unschooler without knowing it.”
Unschooling clicked into place for everyone in the family on an extended caravan holiday on the mainland.
“We dropped the curriculum while we were doing it and we just learned on the road and mum and dad were with us as well, so they were in their caravan and my sister and I and our kids were in their motorhome, and they just saw firsthand every day how much they engaged with everywhere we went… That just really sealed the deal in terms of how amazing unschooling is and how cool life without school is. So now we're hooked and there's no going back.”
How Bel is able to run her business, unschool her kids and take care of herself and her family:
“There's three pillars to that and one is support. The second is the freedom that unschooling gives us, and the third is prioritising mental health, because it can be very overwhelming.”
Bel outlines how each member of the family has a different role to play in the larger dynamic of this multigenerational household and how these have naturally fallen into place over the years.
“I think one of the reasons why the transition to homeschooling was so easy was that we've always just included the kids with what we're doing rather than saying, oh, I'll have to do that when the kids aren't with me or when they're asleep or whatever. We just do what we need to do and take the kids along with us.”
Living in a small country town their local homeschooling community isn’t overly large but there is still plenty of opportunities available to connect with other families.
“You have to be quite disciplined to say no to a lot of them so that you're not busy and hectic all the time. There's so many great things that you can be doing. But we really try to prioritise lots of free play rather than hectic days out, as worthy and educational as they can be.”
“I would say the one thing that would stop me from ever going back would be autonomy. That's one of my strongest values and I can see that in my youngest especially, that that's really important to him as well. So I'm really pleased that he's never even had to navigate the school system because I can just see that it would not be a good fit.”
Despite easily deschooling, Bel still gets the reading wobbles! Don’t we all?
“If we are going to have a struggling reader on our hands, I would rather that he was at home being supported and not learning a story that he is dumb because there is one school skill that he's struggling with. Because it doesn't matter, you can tell them, ‘But you're so great at maths’ or ‘You're so great at science’ or ‘You're so great at sport’ or ‘You're so great at caring for your friends’. That doesn't cancel out feeling dumb because you can't read. And I just see with boys all the time that they get this messaging that they're not good at school because they can't read and it just breaks my heart. So I feel like even though I feel wobbly about reading, I think in the long term this is still the better option.”
“From the beginning humans have been oral communicators and oral storytellers. Our brains are wired for talking and as we've evolved we've been speakers for tens of thousands of years longer than we have been readers and writers. In fact humans have spent roughly only 8% of their time writing and reading and because of this our brains have been configured for speech.”
Quote from the book 7 Steps to Get Your Child Reading by Louise Park
Freedom and time together are her favourite aspects of homeschooling.
“We would like to all stay together forever. Obviously the kids will get to a point where they're old enough to choose for themselves. But, yeah, definitely forever. I would like to be able to repay the favour to my parents and look after them when they need support.”
“Homeschooling kids deserve to have interests that aren't an educational topic. As much as you can turn absolutely anything into a learning experience and you can document that as a learning experience, kids have the right to just, you know, spend their pocket money without it being a maths lesson or to be interested in an animal or a country or something without it turning into a million projects or mapping it to a curriculum.”
Inspiration
The Brave Learner by
Free to Learn by
Seven Steps to Get Your Child Reading by Louise Park
Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne
Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn
A Different Way to Learn by
Connect
Instagram - @bel.birds
Food for thought
Are you looking for more stories of homeschooling further afield? Check out
by . Dive deep into the wonderful archives of featured guests who share what a day in the life of their homeschooling family looks like.
This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be aboriginal land.
Original Music by Daniel Garrood @garroodcomposer
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