Education Outside School

This  has  been  a  long  time  coming  and  we  are  very  excited  to fnally see it published. From the start, our idea has been to provide an informative, sometimes thought provoking, but above all helpful and fun-to-read resource for current and potential home educating families. The kind of magazine we’d have loved to have been able to buy! At the same time we also intend to be of interest to those families who choose to send their children to school, giving them an  insight into what we do, and some ideas for spare time with their  children.
This  is  going  to  be  a  positive  magazine  that  focuses  on  the  whys  and the hows of home education. You’ll nd stories of other families’ home ed journeys and have a chance to meet different educational approaches.  We’ll  also  feature  things  for  you  to  do  with  your children, from quick activities to longer projects, designed to be used as they stand or modifed to suit you. EOS isn’t affliated to any home education groups or organisations  to remain truly independent, and it won’t feature big discussions on  politics. But we won’t have our heads in the clouds either. When there  is news that we feel will be of interest to our readers we’ll report it, as far as is possible within our publication dates and lead times.
We home educators are a diverse bunch; often interested to hear how someone else does it, and always on the look out for ideas of things to do, books to read, websites to visit. Whether you just want  to recommend something or have an article you’d like to write, we’d  love to hear from you.
The  middle  pages  will  be  a  pull  out  section  just  for  the  children.
It will include some quizzes, craft ideas, website suggestions, book  reviews and a competition! We’ll try to cover all ages, and we are  particularly keen to hear from any of your smaller people who’d like  to tell us what they’d like to see there. Meanwhile enjoy the recipes  and games we’ve put in there for this first issue!

Questions. They just come with the territory when you home educate! We’ve all been there, 
from the family gatherings when you’ve been gearing yourself up to tell everyone that you’re 
taking your children out of school, or that you won’t be sending them in the first place, through to 
those ‘at-the-supermarket-checkout’ moments when you find yourself so interrogated you’re looking 
around for the Mastermind black chair!
These questions are sometimes born of disbelief and horror that you could even consider such a 
strange idea, occasionally they are honestly curious and interested, but almost always demonstrate 
that the questioner has pretty much no comprehension of what home education is, is entrenched in 
a system and believes that this system must be ‘the right way’.
We’d like to feature those common questions to find out how you answer them! What do you say? 
Does it depend on the questioner, or their attitude? Does it depend on why you chose to home 
educate in the first place? Does it depend on how long you’ve been home educating? Have you 
answered these questions so many times that you have a quick one-liner all prepared! The first 
question we’d like answered is that old stalwart:
‘But what about socialisation?’
We want to hear from you! Write in and tell us what you say 
to people that ask you. If you’re new to home ed, we’re sure 
you’ll appreciate some tips on how to retort.
And  tell  us  what  are  the  other  questions  that  crop  up 
with predictable regularity and we’ll feature them in future 
issues.