A beginners guide to starting homeschool - a 4 week online workshop

Ever since I began home educating a decade ago, I've always believed that our community could benefit from training days just as teachers receive training days in school. To continue our own "professional development" in the educating of our own children at home and all that entails. It is certainly something I have always craved for myself and absolutely see the value in.
The role of the home educator is probably one of the biggest learn on the job responsibilities that any of us will ever face - and if there is something out there that can help us get started and find our feet, then brilliant!

I am thrilled to announce the launch of our four part online workshop: Homeschooling with confidence - a beginners guide to starting homeschool. 

Registration is open I am genuinely so excited for this; I really can not wait to work with a whole bunch of you on a much deeper level that the general support and information I love offering through the Muslim Homeschoolers Facebook group and Instagram as well as here. There is so much information out there, this workshop aims to give you everything in one place - but more than that, I really want you to walk away completely confident in your ability to start building the homeschool of your dreams that meets the needs of your own family inshaAllah - not mine or anyone else's.

To find out everything you need to know about this online workshop, you can download the Homeschooling with confidence information brochure, or continue reading below (if you download the brochure and want to enrol, make sure you come back to this post and scroll down to the end to join).

Your free 8 step E-Book guide to starting homeschool

I receive questions all the time, asking how to homeschool. From sisters wanting to begin but not knowing where to start. And whist I always endeavor to reply to each one the best I can, I am limited in the time I have. And so it hit me, why not produce a ready-to-go guide, responding to this ever-popular "how to start homeschooling?" question.
So here it is, a completely free, 8-step E-Guide to starting homeschool.

Brave Writer introduction and a Gracious Space Giveaway!

I have a little secret I've been sitting on, and its time I split the beans. If you know me, or  if you pay any attention to the FaceBook page, you might actually already know.

Online Book Club!

Despite our best efforts, sometimes a toddler tantrum or forever nagging a teen to tidy their room, eventually gets to us. We break. We snap. We scream. We lay down demands.

We can't understand why our 8 year old is creating such a fuss when we told him we need to get on our coats and get into the car!
We don't see what our 10 year olds problem is to share her books with her younger sister!
We don't see why telling the kids its bedtime causes such an eruption of frustration!
What is the matter with these kids!

Don't home school if you want the kids to work alone!

Everyone you meet and everything you read in the home school world seems to promote this idea of independent learners. Children being able to independently learn and direct their studies all by themselves.... and that's what we all want right?

I want to home school but where do I start?

When our broods are still in nappies so many of us ooze enthusiasm...we have so much of it we are like a child who has eaten too much sugar and now has a surge of energy she can quite literally bounce off the walls with and will happily try to!
We are eager to start putting our role of motherhood into action and can't wait to bring the mountains of precious knowledge to our little darlings.
We want our children to be successful; in both this Dunya as well as the Akhira. We are desperate to do something....anything to get the education journey started....because everyone else is and we don't want our child to end up being left behind!

Its not working doesn't mean you are failing

In about 2 months time, I will have been "officially" home schooling for 5 years Alhamdulillah! I can still remember the very first day I sat with my eldest to "do school", absolutely clueless of what to do or where to start!
We sat at the kitchen table, deciding to make a giant poster to show the numbers up to 20....so that we would have something to show we had "done" something that day! ....we had to show we had done something, whether or not she could actually count right!?

Oh those days of naivety....I almost miss them! Like a tiny dry seed buried under the soil, not knowing when the rain will come, not knowing when it will start to grow.

Discovering right brain learning part 3: I'm starting over

Okay, so over the past couple of posts I've been looking at how my understanding of how my children learn is evolving. I mentioned that although I always thought I was pretty intuitive to my children's learning styles, I'm coming to realise that I am not quite so open minded as I had myself believe!
I begun a research journey that took me through the possibility of dyslexia, through to the differences in how we use our brain having an effect on how we learn, and on from that, I have come to accept that I forgot what it means to be a home educator.
 And this is what I will share in todays post; how I am using what I have learnt and rediscovered about home education through this new understanding of learning differences inshaAllah.

Discovering right brain learning part 2: what is the difference between left and right brainers?

Our brain is divided into 2 distinct halves. Each side being responsible for an array of different task which effect how our bodies move, how we think and feel and even how we learn.

The brain is criss-crossed to our body, with the right hemisphere controlling our body's left side, and the left hemisphere controlling the right.
So if you pick up your left hand to scratch your face; that's your right side of the brain working, and vice-versa.
Here, I want to look at how the different hemispheres effect the way we learn, to help understand how to better the way in which I'm facilitating my children's education inshaAllah.

Discovering right brain learning Part 1: Our story starts here

This is the first in a series of posts about the learning differences between left and right-brained children (well and adults...we all have a brain!).

Most of us, so I am told, live in a "left brain world"....however, there are some who are in fact right-brainers.
But what does this exactly mean, and why am I writing about it?