unschooling in Aveyron?

[llinos]

Hello everyone!

 This is my first post on this site and I was wondering if any of you are in the Aveyron/Tarn/Lot area.  We have been here for two years and our daughter is 8.5 months old.  We would love to go the unschooling route although there arent a lot of activities and I havent found many homeschoolers in this area.  I know it is early to start worrying about this but I want to unschool so much!

Have any of you homeschooled in France and do you have any advice? 

We may move around Caen, Tours or Angers in the near future to be closer to my husband's family, I'm dying to find a good homeschooling group who meet up more often than once a month as is the case here.

Thanks in advance......

[MammaG]

Thanks for the PM! Good to meet you, welcome to Mothering.

As you see, I'm not in Aveyron...yet. We are thinking of moving there to start a business doing outdoor adventure tours, and to be closer to my Dad who lives near Villefranche. Hope you get some resposes. One of our reservations about moving is the sense that we'd be pretty isolated, especially as homeschoolers.

Best luck!

[Plaid Leopard]

http://www.cise.fr/index.php?page=37

Maybe you will find something helpful on this site. There is a section called accueil regional which lists contacts for different regions in France.

Here is another one. If you look under the section REseau you will find lots of HS families in France

http://web.mac.com/instructionenfamille/Instructionenfamille2008/Bienvenue.html .

[Eclipsepearl]

The homeschoolers I know have an inspector come and test the kids every year. So you might want to explore homeschooling, as opposed to unschooling. Not sure how that would wash with them. They do have the authority to force the child into the local school. 

[ewe+lamb]

Originally Posted by Eclipsepearl 

The homeschoolers I know have an inspector come and test the kids every year. So you might want to explore homeschooling, as opposed to unschooling. Not sure how that would wash with them. They do have the authority to force the child into the local school. 

Oh so true ...

www.lesenfantsdabord.org may be another place to start, although sort of paris based they'll have lots of information for you - even on unschooling. 

We seriously considered homeschooling here, however, due the social pressure etc in the community that we live in - Parisian Banlieu we decided against it, however didn't put our dd into school until Moyenne section in Maternelle at just 4 years old, just because we thought that this was the correct thing to do for her, kids don't have to be in school until 6 - or at least under scholastic instruction (loosely phrased) so you have lots of time to think about things!!  I'm not suggesting to not homeschool just that where you live has a huge impact on how things go, if we had been living outside of the Ile de France I'm sure our schooling would have taken a very different route!  We're just dreaming of a place in the country!!!

[llinos]

Thanks for replying everyone!

The ten or so unschoolong families that I know around here all live around an hours drive away, the reason I posted on this site was to find an anglophone family so my daughter can speak english with other kids, not just me...       

An inspector comes once a year when your child is between 6 and 16.  All the families I know here are unschoolers in that they dont follow a curriculum or have set lessons, nor are they trying to recreate school at home.  The french authorities dont care what label you give your teaching methods only that there is a rich learning environment and that your child is at the same level as schooled children of the same age (seriously, not a hard goal to reach).  The inspectors here are amazed at how advanced the kids are and tend not to bother the families too much because they also inspect the local schools so they are impressed generally.  

It would have to be pretty bad for them to force your kids into the local school, if my daughter was struggling that much I would have put her in local school myself.