How it Started and First Success Story

How it Started

Shortly before Covid-19 forced the hands of practically all parents and carers to temporarily ‘homeschool’, I’d decided to travel that path with my two kids.

We’d moved countries and into a location where many options existed for homeschooling. I’d heard we’d be spoilt for choice with a wide range of groups they could attend.

I envisaged my time split between discussing art history during sunny beach picnic breakfasts (‘Let’s talk about where the term ‘Impressionist’ comes from,’ I say, pointing out to the sunrise…), teaching maths skills at the local market purchasing fresh produce for dinner later, dropping the children off for group home-education activities so I could have ‘me time’ (or ‘work-for-money time’!), and then chuntling them home for a wee session of mama-lessons on, say, how to cook a meal from fresh veggies we’d selected earlier at the farmers’ market.

I was deluded.

And things didn’t go quite to plan.

Putting to one side my naivety, for now, I can safely blame the pandemic (that old chestnut!) for scuppering any plans of cultural trips, markets, or any kind of outing at all. Groups of all description were put on hold. Instead of new freedoms, we experienced ‘lockdown’!

The Magical Day I Discovered Workshops

Thankfully, we were ‘all in it together’ (in some ways – lone parents with a brood of children in an apartment block certainly had different experiences to affluent families with a garden, for example – but that’s another subject), and some incredible people put together a plan to save the education of our children and the sanity of mere mortal parents such as myself.

We enrolled in online workshops – which were a great beginning at introducing just a smidgen of much-needed structure. Many of these workshops were run by My HELM.

Some weeks later, as the world opened up once again, the My HELM workshops – strictly following government guidance on Covid-19 – became the building blocks we put together to construct our homeschooling programme.

The results were pretty awesome!

Here’s an article on our shaky homeschool beginnings and how the workshops organised by My HELM completely changed our worlds.

If you’re in the East Sussex area of the UK, workshops are open, including tasters.

Current subjects include Art and Crafts, Drama, Urban Nature, Phone Photography, and Science ‘n’ Tech.

You can see more photos and descriptions of what’s going on here.

Hope to see you there!