Ignite
Channel their interests to spark curiosity and make learning something they genuinely love. When the maths turns up inside something they already care about, most of the resistance simply isn't there.
A different way to think about home education
It shouldn't feel this hard
If you're home educating and it's taking more out of you than you expected, you're not doing it wrong. Nobody ever showed you the craft. That's what this is about.
You spent an hour last night finding the right resource. This morning your child looked at it for about ninety seconds before their attention went somewhere else entirely.
You're planning more than you're teaching. The sessions that do happen feel flat. You've got a nagging sense that you're covering things without much of it landing, and you can't quite tell where your child actually is or what should come next.
And you're mostly doing this on your own. There are groups and forums and plenty of parents sharing what works for them, which helps right up until it doesn't, because what works for their child isn't necessarily going to work for yours.
You're not doing it wrong.
Whatever's making this feel harder than it should isn't a failure of commitment on your part. It's something a lot more fixable than that.
The method
The Empowering Potential Method
Three pillars hold it up. There's an order to building them, and Ignite goes in first, because nothing else stands on a child who doesn't want to be at the table.
Unleash
Free the mind and develop creative and critical thinking, so they can adapt to any situation. This is also how you find out where your child actually is, because you can't see thinking from the outside.
Flourish
Build their voice, confidence and resilience so they're ready to face the world. A child who can judge their own work has stopped needing you to be the judge.
Watch
The method in five minutes
Video coming soon
Mark walks through the three pillars.
Free, every week
Thinkers at Home Live
An hour, Thursday evenings at seven. It's free, and you can ask me anything.
Each one takes a piece of the craft and does it properly. How to get a child who doesn't want to be there to the table. Why something that worked on Tuesday falls flat on Wednesday. What to do when you can't tell whether any of it is going in. Small things you can use the same week, rather than a theory you have to work out how to apply on your own.
Sign up once and I'll send you a reminder before each one, along with anything useful I write in between. No pitch, and you can stop the emails whenever you like.
Save your placeSign-up opens shortly. Email mark@thinkersathome.co.uk and I'll add you to the list myself.
The invitation
You don't have to do this on your own
The part nobody warns you about is how isolating home education gets. Not just for you, though that's real enough. For your child as well.
So that's what we're building. A community of home educating parents working at this seriously, comparing what's actually happening in their houses, and getting hold of the craft nobody handed them.
It costs nothing, you're not committing to anything, and you'll find people three years ahead of you and people three weeks behind you all in the same place.
Background
Who I am
I've spent sixteen years in education. Classroom teaching in the UK, then a government school in the United Arab Emirates where every child was learning in their second or third language. Back home I went into leadership at a primary school in Huddersfield, led English and then Maths, and left as Quality of Education Lead. I'm a maths specialist too, which is either useful or unbearable depending on who you ask.
For a lot of that time I was also mentoring trainee and early career teachers. People who cared about children, knew their subject, and hadn't yet been shown how to actually do it in front of a class.
That's the same gap most home educating parents are in. You've got the relationship and the commitment. What nobody ever offered you is the craft.
I live in Yorkshire. I'm still teaching. Sixteen years and counting.
Work with me
Working through it with you
You can read all of this and still not know where to start on Monday morning. Knowing what good teaching looks like isn't the same as knowing how to do it with your child, in your house, this week.
That's what working together is for. We go through the whole method around your child specifically, and by the end you'll have built a cross-curricular project from their own interests, ready to use. More to the point, you'll know how to build the next one without me.
You won't be doing it on your own in between, either. You get direct access to me when something isn't working, and every session ends with one thing to try that we pick up next time. Not homework, and nothing graded. It's the part that makes it stick.
There's no VAT on it at the moment. That will change once I cross the registration threshold, so what it costs today won't hold indefinitely.
I keep the numbers small, because it only works if I know your child's situation properly. We talk about what it costs on the call, once I know whether it's the right thing for you at all.
If it sounds like it might be for you, book a call. Half an hour, free, and it's a conversation about your child rather than a sales pitch. You tell me what's going on, I'll ask questions, and at the end I'll tell you honestly whether I think I can help. If I can't, I'll say so and point you somewhere more useful.
Leave your details and I'll ring you to sort out a time. I'm still teaching most weeks, so it'll usually end up being an evening or the weekend.
Book a callThe calendar isn't connected yet. Email mark@thinkersathome.co.uk and we'll find a time.
