Home Schooling Part 11: End of Home Schooling 2014

Originally written in November 2014 as 'End of Home Schooling 2014'— Updated for clarity and reflection in 2026.

This is our final week of home schooling for the year.

People always ask the same thing.  

What about December, Martyn? Why stop now?

The answer is simple. 

I follow a school calendar. By this point in the year most children in mainstream schools slow down. December becomes a mix of Christmas songs, rehearsals for the school play, wall displays, letters to Santa, and every craft activity under the sun.

[Image 2. A school display board featuring 6 Christmas themed painting od trees and snowmen.]

So why should home schooling be any different?

It is easy, when you home educate, to forget how a schools routine and much time schools spend on seasonal activities. You get into a rhythm. Week after week becomes a pattern of lessons, worksheets, resources, and structure. December breaks that pattern in the best way.

Our home schooling style has always been semi‑structured. We do our focused “sit‑down” learning on Mondays and Tuesdays. We follow the government curriculum, and the quality of William’s work shows how well this approach suits him.

We are not stopping learning altogether. We are shifting it.

This term in literacy we covered reading, lists, labels, alphabetical order, rhyming, poems, adjectives, smaller literacy activities, and storytelling through writing. When you see it written out like that it looks like a lot. It is a lot.

December gives us space to layer that learning with Christmas activities.  

We will:

- Make a list for Santa  

- Writing Christmas Letters and cards

- Create labels for presents  

- Write a Christmas poem  

- Build a Christmas story using rhyme, order, and adjectives  

It reinforces everything he has learned. It keeps the skills alive without the pressure of formal lessons. Schools rarely get the chance to revisit topics like this. Home schooling gives us that freedom and advantage.

So for the next three weeks everything will be completely Christmas‑themed. I am looking forward to it. I have no idea how it will turn out, which is half the fun.

If you want to see the rest of our 2014 home schooling journey, you can find the full set of posts here:  

Home Schooling 2014 archive.

2026 Reflection

This was a version of me who was starting to get into the day‑to‑day of home schooling stride, after building structure from scratch, and trying to make learning joyful for a little boy who needed something different from mainstream education. I hadn’t quite mastered the act of unschooling but this post shows the beginning of that aspect.

It is strange to think how much life has changed since then. William is older now, left home school in 2021, and started attending a specialist autistic school in 2022. My work in accessibility, faith, disability, community looks nothing like it did in 2014. Yet the heart of this post still feels familiar. I can see the early threads of the home educator I eventually became. I also appreciate how far I had come from the years before, like my first Christmas as a single parent, the following nervous breakdown, climbing back up, and adjusting to being a single dad.

If you are reading this as part of the revamped archive, you might want to jump forward to posts where home schooling evolved and spanned eight years into wider reflections on parenting, recipes, health and disability, and resilience.

This post reminds me that even the small decisions we made in 2014 were laying foundations for the life we have now.