OER Summer Newsletter 2024

That's a wrap for 2024!!

Hi everyone and Merry Christmas!

As we come to the close of another year in the OER, I'd like to take a moment to reflect and share with you, the highlights of our very busy 2024. 

We currently have 1540 students registered from 939 Tasmanian families.

In 2024, we

• completed 1904 registration visits,
• welcomed 106 5-year-olds into home education,
• approved 504 provisional registrations (newbies),
• issued 39 Year 12 Equivalent Completion Certificates, 
• issued 41 Year 10 Equivalent Transition Certificates.

Thank you all for being a part of this wonderful community!

Our Registration Officers (HERO's) truly enjoy visiting homes and connecting with families. These visits provide a wonderful opportunity to see the unique and enriching learning environments that each family creates. It's always inspiring to witness the dedication and creativity that home educators bring to their child's education.

I would also like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to THEAC for their advice and counsel during the year.  It is so important to have the voices of home educators reflected in our decision making around home education and I really appreciate the time they give to doing that.  Thank you, Denise Cox (Chair), Andrea Ferguson (Deputy Chair), Fiona Lohrbaecher, Martin Hamilton, Christine Buist and Jon Targett.

I hope you are able to take some time to spend with loved ones this festive season while enjoying a restful and cheer-filled break.

Warm regards,

Jo (Manager Home Education & Registrar)

Catherine, Jenny, Donna and Nick
and your HERO's (Home Education Registration Officers) 😉
"Not all HERO's wear capes"

OER Office closure - Mon 23 Dec to 6 Jan 25

The Office of the Education Registrar will be closed to the public on Friday, 20 December 2024 and reopen on Monday, 6 January 2025.

Should you wish to make contact throughout this period you can do so via email at registrar@oer.tas.gov.au.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year!

Congratulations to our Year 12 students

We extend our congratulations to our 2024 graduates (year 12 equivalent students) and their families as they come to the end of their home education journey.

It's important to celebrate this significant milestone, and the OER hopes to contribute in a meaningful way. To acknowledge this achievement, each young person will shortly receive a small token of recognition from the OER.

We believe that these moments of recognition are crucial in marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

On behalf of our Registration Officers who have been part of your home education journey, I wish you all the very best for your future as you move into the next chapter of your life.

The OER commissioned some tokens for our 2024 graduates as a keepsake of their time in home education and as a mark of congratulations to them for their achievements.  The tokens are glass prisms engraved with the OER logo and the student’s name and year. 

Additionally, we have 41 Year 10 equivalent students transitioning to college or other educational pathways. We wish them all the best in their future endeavours. There are 75 Year 10 equivalent students remaining in home education and the registration officers look forward to the registration visits in 2025.

 Best wishes to our Year 10 Students heading to other educational pathways.

2024 Home Education Survey

In September 2024, we conducted a survey to better understand home educators' experiences with the registration process and how the OER can improve it.

We had hoped to share the survey results with you before Christmas. Unfortunately, we were unable to finalise our presentation and infographic in time. We understand this may be disappointing and apologise for the delay. However, it is important to us that we identify the necessary improvements and determine the best way to implement them with minimal impact on home educators.

Rest assured, we are working diligently to complete an infographic and PowerPoint presentation. We aim to share these with the home education community in early 2025.

Thank you for your continued support and patience.

However, I can tell you that:

Diverse Learning Needs - Short Videos

Principal Family Therapist and Neurodiversity Consultant, Justine Demaine, is a highly qualified behavioural and family therapist. She specialises in working creatively and therapeutically with families, teens, and young people.

Recently, Justine was approached by the OER to create a series of short videos. These videos cover various topics and explores each in a home education setting.

You can find these insightful videos on YouTube.

Topic 1 – Community Connections and Family

Topic 2 – Home Learning Space

Topic 3 – Wellbeing Natural Flow and Timing

Topic 4 – Autonomy and little choices

Topic 5 – Learning challenges, PDA, ADHD, Autism

Topic 6 – Motivation, timelines, values

Photos in HESPs

We have noticed that some home educators are providing photos of their child’s activities within their HESP.  While this adds to the enjoyment of reading HESPs, it is not necessary to include photographs or links to online records such as social media accounts in your HESP. Your Registration Officer can view these at your visit.

However, if you choose to include photos or links, in your HESP, please consider that the OER is required to store anything that you provide to the OER that relates to your registration (HESPs, photos, reports, links to social media, etc) on our database (until the youngest child in your family has turned 25 years of age). 

Also, please consider the privacy of any other children (who are not in your family) who appear in the images and whether the parents of these children have provided consent for you to include them in your HESPs.

Do your research and save money on resources!

If you want to home educate your child, it’s important to research different home education pedagogies/styles/methods.

You don’t have to follow the Australian Curriculum or buy an expensive structured curriculum.

We recommend starting with the many free resources available. Many new home educators buy costly online curriculums only to find they don’t fit their child’s learning style or needs. Start by understanding what works best for your child and then decide if you need to buy any resources.

The Chair of THEAC, Denise Cox recently provided excellent advice about this matter in the THEAC Summer Newsletter.

Please share this information with those who are thinking about home education for their child.

Support calls or visits

If your visiting Registration Officer finds that parts of your program are working towards or not meeting the Standard, they may recommend a support visit or phone call to review the development of your program in those areas, and to offer further advice if needed.

Your Registration Officer will discuss this with you during, or soon after, your visit if needed.

What to expect at a support visit or call

Support visits and calls help you develop your program to meet the Standards. They will focus on areas that did not meet the Standard during the registration visit, but you can discuss any part of your program.

During a support visit or call, your Registration Officer may suggest resources and activities to help you, but these are just suggestions. The OER does not endorse any specific methods or resources. You decide what works best for your child.

After the support visit or call, the Registration Officer will write a support report for the Registrar. You will receive a copy of this report and any advice from the Registrar.

Premier's Youth Advisory Council

Do you know a young person aged 12-24, living in Tasmania and passionate about Tasmania’s future?

If so, you can encourage them to express interest in becoming a member of the Premier’s Youth Advisory Council (PYAC) in 2024. There are 12 positions available.

 The PYAC is an opportunity for young people to meet with the Premier, Minister for Education, Children and Youth and Government to discuss their ideas on how we can make Tasmania a better place.

All young Tasmanians are encouraged to apply regardless of their background or participation record.

 The PYAC has a diverse and inclusive membership where all members feel welcomed, safe, and supported. PYAC members come from different backgrounds and we encourage applications from diverse young people so that the Council has a mix of beliefs, skills and life experiences.

 The PYAC values the unique experiences, knowledge, and skills that its members bring to the group. If this sounds like you, we want to hear from you!

 Recruitment is now open and closes at 11:59pm on Monday 27 January 2025.

More information

For more information and to apply, visit www.dpac.tas.gov.au/pyac

email youthadvisorycouncil@dpac.tas.gov.au or call 6232 7676.

School Student Broadband Initiative

Free Wi-Fi at Tasmanian Government Locations

Free Wi-Fi is provided at many Tasmanian Government locations through the Statewide Wi-Fi Access Program (SWAP).

Access to free Wi-Fi can promote digital inclusion, support tourism and encourage business activity by providing convenient, free access to online content and services.

You can connect to the TasGov_Free or Libraries_Tasmania network with your Wi-Fi enabled device.

What's on at your local Library

Big Summer Read for Kids

The Big Summer Read at Libraries Tasmania provides the opportunity to win prizes, share book reviews and be part of an online reading club over the summer holidays.

The Big Summer Read is an interactive and fun way for children and young people to read over the summer school holidays.

What's On Guide

On your next visit to the library, grab a copy of the What's On Guide to see what's happening at all the libraries in your region, including your local library.

There is also a fabulous page on the Libraries Tasmania website that lists all events by month or by day. 

Outsourcing your Home Education Program

Outsourcing your program to tutors, online education providers, co-ops, mentors or others.

Home educating your child lets you create a program that fits their unique learning needs and interests, with you as their primary educator. Your program may include activities like tutoring, mentoring, camps, workshops, bush schools, co-ops, or online resources.

You become your child's primary educator, and you are required to ensure that the home education program is provided primarily by you as the registered parent. You need to be able to show your involvement in your child’s daily education and how you review, record, and evaluate their program.

Outsourcing the delivery of your child’s program to a third party is not home education. For example, you cannot drop your child off to a place where they are educated and supervised by others and then pick them up later in the day on a regular basis.

This is not home education, it is outsourcing their program, and you may need to show again how you are providing a home education program to your child.

Keeping your child safe

Child and Youth Safe Organisations

If your child has a tutor, mentor, or attends a club or association or similar, make sure they follow the Child and Youth Safe Organisations Framework and the Reportable Conduct Scheme.

In Tasmania, it’s the law that anyone or any group working with children must show they follow this framework to keep kids safe from harm.

For more details, visit the Office of the Independent Regulator website.

What is Meant by Natural Learning?

The following Natural Learning article is by Beverley Paine

There are many misconceptions about natural learning, or as I prefer to call it, learning naturally. I want to talk about these, rather than define what learning naturally is, as I think it’s important to break down the barriers of misconception that prevent communities of learners from having meaningful dialogue with each other.

A useful place to start delving into the complexities of learning naturally is by sharing with you what I believe natural learning is not…

It is not allowing the children to choose what, when and how to learn things on their own. It is, however, allowing the children to participate in decisions made about what they want to do, and how, and when, and it gives them the opportunity to have greater responsibility within the framework of the family for their own lives. Children are not left to be responsible for their own learning, but are encouraged to explore and learn responsibility, knowledge and skills, and to develop self-motivation and self-discipline gradually according to their developmental needs.

Learning naturally is not focussing on the child’s life as the centre of the family.  Natural learning allows the process of building families, and thus communities, in a time honoured and tested way. It emphasises the development of beneficial and cooperative relationships and associations. It is centred in family and community values and respect for all people.

Natural learning is not something that we can do with our children. It is what happens, despite what we do.  There is a general misunderstanding in the homeschooling community that unschooling or learning naturally is simply a matter of letting children do whatever they want, or not setting out anything for them to do - that is, completely unstructured learning. Some people think that natural learning means children are supposed to educate themselves.  However, it doesn't happen like that. We allow life, with all its complexity, to guide the content and direction of our learning. 

In order to feel confident educating my children as we walked along the path of homeschooling, I studied education and child development, both on my own using library books, the internet, and talking to other educators and friends who were teachers, and also at University level for a couple of years in the early nineties. It was important for me to know what my children were learning and why, and how to help them set and achieve their own learning goals. I discovered much about individual learning styles and about how learning occurs and applied this to each learning situation.

Some people believe that natural learning is a “do nothing” or “anything goes” approach." I’ve found that “anything goes” quickly leads to children feeling so out of control that conflict arises – it isn’t long before my guiding hand is needed to bring their life back into balance. The key element to learning naturally is the natural hierarchy of experience guiding the inexperienced. Some call this the apprenticeship model of learning, or mentoring. We are our children’s first mentors, their first and most trusted teachers.

Some people believe that learning naturally means abandoning a structure. I’m not sure we would have survived homeschooling as a family without a solid structure or scaffold in place! In practice this meant setting long term goals – we envisioned the type of adults we wanted our children to become and the type of children we wanted them to be. We set yearly educational goals for each child, as well as short-term goals that encompassed anything from a week to a few months. Goals like learning to read simple sentences, know the times tables, learn first aid, etc. Our short-term goals were often stated as projects - build a fox proof duck yard; learn about the solar system; or the history of South Australia. We set daily objectives – both educational and lifestyle, and often recorded these as a list of things we wanted to do that day. Our days, weeks, months and years were definitely planned and structured, although from an observer's viewpoint it would have looked like we were doing whatever we wanted to each day based on what our immediate needs were.

This generally meant talking to them, showing them, helping them, challenging them, encouraging them, and listening attentively to them. I never left my children to learn things by themselves – I always made sure that guidance and help, if needed, was at hand.

If the learning is meaningful and in context children will work on a concept until they have mastered it, even though the tasks involved may be unpleasant, frustrating or difficult. This is a fact of life and it’s one that children accept from the cradle. Not all things in life are pleasant. Our current obsession with the fad “learning must be fun”, one of the most wicked tools of the companies that make profit from education, demeans the natural intelligence of our children and ourselves.  We celebrate the learning that each moment brings and reject the notion that learning has to be fun, or happy, or cheerful, or easy…

Most of us begin with ‘school at home’ because that is what we are comfortable with and what we know. It’s a great place to start. All families move on to find the structure and routines that best suit their individual family values, needs and lifestyle. We select from a vast variety of learning tools. John Holt, the writer and educational reformist who coined the word ‘unschooler’, believed in textbooks as a useful method of instruction. As a natural learner I’ve learned from textbooks and courses, both in class and as a distance education student, as have all three of my children. The difference is that we are in control of our learning processes – we negotiate with our mentors the learning objectives. We make the learning tasks personally meaningful.

Self-education is a good term for what I now call 'learning naturally'. I don't like the term 'natural learning', even though I occasionally use it as it's too vague and nebulous - all learning is natural. Learning occurs 24/7 (as my daughter would say). If you're breathing, you're learning. You can't help it.

Please refer to The Educating Parent (merging Beverley Paine's Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia) for more information about natural learning and the rest of the article What is Meant by Natural Learning. 

Natural learning: Capturing the records and what to show at a visit

In Tasmania, Evaluation is one of the Standards that home educators are required to address.  Record keeping is an important part of evaluation so you can see progress in your child’s learning. 

Recording natural learning activities takes more thought and intentionality to ensure you can evaluate your child’s progress and show their accomplishments and learning at the visit.  Furthermore, your record become a precious and valuable story about your home education journey, which rewards the extra effort of recording natural learning. 

While we can suggest various ways of recording your program, it is important that you find methods that work for you and your family.  Your records should be dated and filed in an ordered way so you can find them when needed. 

Some suggestions are:

• Collect any scrap of writing of the children and put into a scrapbook. You can use one big scrapbook for each child.  Date the “sample” and write some evaluative comments.
• Record in diary a description of what your child has done, particularly those activities that are packed with new learning.
• Record discussions you have with your child, research URLs or books, educational viewing, outings, experiments, projects, writing, classes/workshops attended etc. Include, or record separately, reflections and observations of the child’s learning and progress.
• Take photos of activities, especially those that don’t have a tangible outcome afterwards, such as cooking, gardening, excursions, art/craft projects, LEGO, STEM. Paste into a scrapbook and either write yourself about the activity or make it a literacy exercise for your child. Or your child may like to compile a digital presentation to showcase the photos.
• Paste into special “year” book information, flyers, brochures, and news clippings of events and excursions that are part of the learning program – write objective and evaluative comments beside each entry.
• Keep a binder with plastic sleeves to store certificates of achievement, special events (news clippings, photographs, awards, invitations, etc) calendar pages, television program schedules, club or association calendars, forward planning outline and checklists, as well as library book borrowing lists.
• Date and keep projects, and items designed/created/produced/built by your child, including some sort of evaluation of the learning. For example, art portfolios, nature journals, creative writing, poetry, construction projects, gardens, preserves, models, etc. all provide evidence of your child’s engagement and progress in learning.
• Create checklists or goal setting documents to record development of concepts, demonstration of skills/knowledge and/or achievement of goals.

We encourage you to try a variety of methods to find what works for your family. Other home educators and your Registration Officer can be great sources of ideas and suggestions to try.

Tas Home Ed Camp

The Tas Home Ed Camp is on again this February 10-14 2025 @ Gumleaves Bush Holidays, Little Swanport, Tas.

For more info or to book your place, please contact Fiona Webb at tashomeedcamp@gmail.com 

Devonport Tennis Club Holiday Camp

The holidays are nearly here, so here is some information for the holiday program just before Christmas.

It is such a joy to have new players come along and discover that they really enjoy the game of tennis. It is also wonderful to see how much the players have improved throughout the year and the wonderful friendships they have made too. 

Kind regards, 

Pip

*******************

Philippa (Pip) Martin

Head Tennis Coach

Tasmanian Tennis Academy

Ph 0438 687 542

devonporttennis@yahoo.com

www.coachpip.com

Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary's Junior Rangers 'Joey Club' Program

We are pleased to share with you Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary’s - Junior Rangers ‘Joey Club’ Wildlife Conservation, Environmental and Cultural Awareness Education Program.

As part of the Sanctuary’s ‘Conservation through Education’ Program, this half-day school holiday experiential education session provides a hands-on opportunity for children (6-13years) to interact and engage with Tasmanian wildlife to promote conservation. We are proud to advise it will be running again in the January school holidays. 

Please follow the below social media accounts for additional information and to share Program posts:

Instagram: @trowunna_wildife_sanctuary

Facebook: facebook.com/trowunna/