After the second world war, one of the 12 rounds of trials at the Nürnberg High Court, was focused on the human experiments carried out on prisoners by German doctors. This trial led to a convention, that should protect us from this happening again.
I really would like my children to learn, that the only people, who can make any decisions that involves their body, is themselves.
So I took all of them to see the Nürnberg Memorial Trials Museum in Germany.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is knowing your rights.
We have been homeschooling for 13 years now in Denmark’s capital – Copenhagen. Recently we moved out into the countryside. This has made me want to write a piece on, how where you are situated, when you Home School, affects your children’s learning.
Homeschooling in the city.Homeschooling in the country.
Generally I would say that it doesn’t matter where you are located, it depends on your set of mind, how well your home school works. But your location does give you different opportunities. It is how open and how well, you are able to grasp these opportunities that matters.
When you Home School in the city, you often have theaters, libraries, playgrounds, other Home Schoolers, spare-time activities and museums near by.
When you live in the country you have nature near by, more space for creative projects, opportunities to keep animals, less distractions and you can be self-sufficient. Often people around you have more time to talk to you and you can develop close relationships with you neighbors.
Generally learning and Home Schooling is all about grasping the opportunities that come along in life. Keeping a positive outlook and trying to get the best out of life. Remembering that learning is not just for children aged a specific age – but that you learn from the day you are born until the day that you leave this earth. Hopefully. What gives life meaning is all the time learning and understanding new about being alive and what it is all about. Moving a bit around is refreshing and can renew your understanding of life.
When you homeschool you decide for yourself what you want to use your time on. You can plan your own day, week, month and year. You have the opportunity to be impulsive and take the chances that pass you by.
You can dive into the children’s interests and offer an interest based learning that turns on their enthusiasm. Most interest based learning brings around multiple areas of learning and often touches basic areas such as math, reading, writing and languages.
In our homeschool, the pupils are very creative, artistic, physical and likes to perform. When we met a doctor who is fighting against censorship in the media, we were offered a chance to be a part of a new TV channel called “Danmarks Frie Fjernsyn” and create our own channel on that TV channel.
The TV channel set up a studio for recording and streaming live TV from Nytorv in Copenhagen (the studio has now moved to Israels Plads). At that studio (which is called “Cuben”) we have performed live 3 times now.
It has involved a lot of learning. Our goal is to spread a positive idea with children and youths, that learning is fun and what makes people grow. There is too much focus on fear and negative news in the media and no solutions offered. We want to focus on how wonderful a gift life is and how grateful we can be every day that we are alive and experiencing this wonderful world.
If you want to see more, have a look at Danmarks Frie Fjernsyns website:
When you homeschool, you have the opportunity to be engaged in real life projects.
I have many talks with the children about what they would like to change in our society, so I said that we have democracy in Denmark, so we can just make our own party and sit down and think about how we would like our world to look like.
So we sat down and wrote down all the things that was important to us and set up a website, where we have stated our political programme.
We applied to get our party name accepted by the authorities and now it is up and running for signatures to take part in the next election.
One of our kids came to us and asked if we could set up a demonstration to save the peoples money – cash. So we arranged a demonstration in front of the Parliament and it was great to feel the power of doing something to change the world we are living in.
We set ourselves the goal many years ago, to make a you tube channel to show that learning is fun and exiting. It is called “videnskanalen”. We have played around with it for many years and have been learning how to make films. Then a new TV channel started in Denmark and we got the opportunity to make TV together with them. The channel is called “Danmarks Frie Fjernsyn” and we have a channel called “Schouserne” which is a channel about how wonderfully exiting life is. It is about DIY, science, stories, biology, stop motion, animation and much more. Have a look here: https://www.danmarksfriefjernsyn.dk/velkommen-til-bu-tv/
This april the TV company got a permit to build an art installation with a studio inside on Nytorv by Strøget in Copenhagen. We have been performing there and making TV the past few weeks. It has been a lot of fun and a good chance to get the positive message about life out to young people.
The art installation is covered with information about the TV channel and we have designed one side of it and written texts to go with it. I tell about the Cube here:
Learning by doing is the most meaningful way to learn and making TV this way together with a lot of positive, enthusiastic and brave people is very motivating and a great way of learning for the kids.
In Denmark we have a special part of Copenhagen called Christiania. It has a history of freedom and rebellion. It also has a history of violence and drug trade. It is also a huge piece of land, with a beautiful lake. It has ecclectic houses spread out in the green flowery landscape. Most of them build by the 700 people living there. The ground was a military area, where hippies and squatters went into the area in the 70-ties and settled down.
The area has been threatened with getting closed down many times since then, but have in a magical way managed to survive.
Today we went there with our kids and a good friend, Grev Lyhne who has lived there for many years. He showed us around and we had a nice pick nick there by the water. Grev Lyhne is a royal court fool, a drummer, a performance artist and a writer.
Grev Lyhne and the Schou family.
We like to show our kids different ways of life. Different people. Different surroundings. We hope that it will help them have more ways of life to choose from when they grow up, and that they will find relating to society and people around them easier. That it will help them become more empathetic towards other people.
Through the years we have often been asked, which method of homeschooling we use. It has never been important to us to have a method of homeschooling. But we learned that to many homeschoolers it was very important to define themselves in a method. The method defined who they were. Especially with those people we met who defined themselves as unschoolers.
We don’t define ourselves as homeschoolers. Homeschooling is something we do at the moment. We may have done it for 11 years now, but it is still not our identity. It is a personal choice to us.
When we started meeting people who said they were unschooling, we heard about the method and thought, well that is what we do. Child-led and interest based learning. But the people we met said, we were not allowed to call ourselves unschoolers, because we sometimes use classic school material and sometimes teach our children classic knowledge, as learning to read, write and math.
Well, just the fact that other people saw themselves in the position to judge other peoples lives, without having lived it, made us quite negative to the unschooling method. It seemed more and more like an ideology or religion. But most of all it seemed like the main focus in unschooling, was to reject and be against all classical learning and school-like learning.
We see homeschooling as a positive way of learning, that can be merged into daily life and gives you a wonderful opportunity to get to follow your children’s learning and development. What you call that, really don’t matter to us. It is just a definition. There are already too many boxes in life.
Our homeschool is all about content, not ideology. But people around us got more and more angry with us, if we called us the sacred word – unschoolers. So I started looking into what methods there was to choose from on the market, or if I would have to invent my own word, for what we do. Well, we found the following methods on the market (I have organised them in the order of amount of discipline involved. Most discipline first, least discipline at the end):
The Classical Method
School-at-Home
Unit Studies
Eclectic
Charlotte Mason
Montessori
Waldorf
World Schooling
Free learners
Natural learners
Self directed learners
Unschooling
un-parenting
One particular box we seemed to fit into, was Eclectic learning. It is a method that mixes all methods and uses it as a palette of colours as you need them. Most homeschoolers end as Eclectic learners, when they have been homeschooling for many years. It is a natural process of learning – to stay open to all methods.
So to us, confining ourselves to a method, is more of a communication tool, to communicate with particularly unschoolers, where method seems very important. We just live and learn.
If it should happen that some people that call themselves Eclectic learners should forbid us to call us Eclectic Learners, we would just call us the Pippi Longstocking and Gyro Gearloose method. It wouldn’t be a problem to us.
The United Nations building in Copenhagen is open to visitors, if you book a tour with them. So we did just that. Gathered 16 homeschoolers and had a look around the building. Before the visit we talked to the children about the purpose of UN, and how, and on what basis it was founded in 1945.
Tour of the UN building 2019-11-08Entering international territory.The broken piano.UNICEF.
How does spare time activities work together with home schooling? Fine, actually. We see it as a kind of out-sourcing of areas, that we are not capable of teaching in ourselves. Areas that interest our kids.
Through the years, we have attended many different spare time activities. Mostly, a new activity has come around like this:”Mum, what is a scout?” (Watching a movie with scouts appearing in the story). “Mum, I want to be one”. Ok, so we started looking around, to see if we had any scout groups, near by. Non of us had ever been a scout, so we had no idea either, what it was going to be about. We then found a new concept starting, where you could attend a scout group with your family, even though, you were only 1 year old. That meant we could be scouts together as a family (our kids were 5, 2 and 1 year old at that time). That appealed to us. So we ended up being scouts for 5 years. We learned that being a scout involved learning about nature and being able to set up a fire and cook lots of food over the fire. Great fun. Loads of teamwork building stuff out of wood and learning how to use a knife and an ax. Learning morse signals has been very popular here too.
Scout meeting 2011-09-03Scout meeting 2011-09-03
Another time, one of our children said:”I want to dance ballet!” When she had said it a few times, we started to ask into why she wanted to dance ballet. She was motivated by a friend who danced ballet and she had seen her dance. So we found a class that seemed good and she enrolled. That is 4 years ago now, and she is still very fond of dancing ballet.
Store balletskoledag, Royal Theatre 2019-03-31.
One of our children have been fond of writing since she was 6 years old and have practiced and practiced on her own. When writing classes have popped up around us, she has taken part. Some has been good others not so fantastic. But it has been a learning process.
Another child has taken part in Break Dance classes.
Our oldest child has made her own writing group with another aspiring author, which she meets up with regularly to work together and exchange ideas and support each other.
One day two of our kids came to me and said:”We have found a drama school and we want to try to audition”. So I contacted the school and got them set up for auditions. It was fun for them to try, and one got in and the other child found out it was not for her to act.
We have also made use of the free offer of evening classes we have in Denmark, when the children are in 7th to 10th grade. One of our children have attended dance classes in musical dance and ended up taking part in a show. She also took part in an arts class and a physics and chemistry class through this free offer.
Recently, we have enrolled in karate classes where we can train together across all age groups and levels. Just in the homeschool spirit.
Our oldest child was researching to find a map of Copenhagen from the 16th Century, and found that it was possible to look at one in real life, in the Copenhagen Town Hall public library. She asked for help to find out how to visit that library and it resulted in us all going there on a tour of the whole town hall and the tower. It was a good way to learn about the democratic process in Denmark, and to understand the way the councils work. The Copenhagen town hall is open to the public, which in itself is quite unique, and you can pay to get a tour of many of the areas not open to the public. You can also pay to get a tour of the tower, which has a unique view over the city. Copenhagen has many towers and we want to climb all of them. We have gone through quite a few of them by now, but this was our first time in the Town Hall Tower. The Town Hall is full of wall paintings, many by famous artists. It also has a room full with unique woven tapestry, with motives from Danish history. As our oldest daughter said:”We just didn’t have enough time there” 🙂
The Copenhagen Town Hall 2019-09-20The Town Hall Garden in the centre of the building.The speakers chair at the meeting room for the citizen representationThe Tapestry workPainting by P. S. Krøyer at the entrance to the libraryView from the tower.The main hall.
