Monday, February 05, 2007

Hands Up 4 Home Ed

Whilst all the adults are getting on with the Home Education campaign, let's not forget the kids. After all, it is all about them.

A very dear friend of mine grasped this point, and captured it beautifully with the launch of a project called Hands Up 4 Home Ed - please take the time to read this, and to visit her blog, and to pass on the message to as many HE families as you can:

"How did Hands Up 4 Home ed sprout into being ? Well to be quite honest I can see all dissenting people, discussing whether autonomous or didactic, scheme or first hand, school at all? or maybe a bit of flexi time? In whatever guise we appear as home educating parents, the main thing at the centre of our endeavours is the well being, happiness and welfare of our children. Everyone of us are hoping to do the very best we can for our children.

The other thing I see is that our children often have ideas why they are proud, happy, delighted, smiley about home ed. Indeed some might at time question or wonder "what if we went to school?" but in light of that and after much soul searching we carry on with home ed; we may tweak it to fit our own situation, to make it our own. There are as many ways of doing home ed as there are families doing it.

Well there we are; the government policies and meddling ways threaten our existence, threaten our lives , our ways of living, so what can we do about it?

I for one am rather hopless at understanding the Ps and Qs of it all, but what I do understand is this welfare/happiness of our children. I also understand that we need to unite ourselves in some way that is easy for everyone to understand. A thing that will be colourful and exciting but will shout "Hey we're holding up our hands to home education, we do it and we are proud we live it."

Even the children can understand it Hands Up 4 Home Ed, lets yell it to anyone up there who needs to hear it.

PLAN: Can every child do an outline of their hands and decorate it with their first name on each palm. With your beautiful pair of hands write a wish for your life, your home ed, putting family first.

Send your hands and your wish to me

How fantastic would it be to have thousands of hands and wishes to show how determined we are. I'll post them all on a blog.

It will be a great unifying movement, whatever our views we can all join in with this. Imagine the impact.

Get busy - lets make a big waving of hands !!"

2 comments:

dawniy. said...

thank you Ann.
lets hope we get lots of hands waving :-)

Lady Liberty said...

I was wondering if you heard about this family in Germany.

http://www.netzwerk-bildungsfreiheit.de/html/pe_erlangen_en.html

It is about a 16 year old girl, who has been ripped from her family and placed in a child psych ward basically for homeschooling.

There are places to write to protest, but many would not feel comfortable with speaking to a foreign government, but you might wish to write to Melissa directly.

Melissa Busekros
Klinikum Nürnberg-Nord
Haus 48 B
Prof.-Ernst-Nathan-Str. 1
D-90419 Nürnberg
Germany/Deutschland

I am sure she could use the encouragement.