WRITING FOR CHILDREN
Home time!
Children’s literature is full of school stories – but what about stories featuring children who are home-educated? Amy Sparkes looks at creating possibilites for home-schooled children to see themselves in a book.
Amy Sparkes
There are more children than ever being home educated – but how often do these children see themselves represented in a book? How can we use home education as a launch pad for storytelling and create authentic home educated characters?
Why home education?
I am a home-educating mother of six (although my eldest is at college, so I only home educate five children) and one thing I have learnt is that the home education community is extremely diverse. People home educate for different reasons. Why is your character receiving a home education? Reasons for home education (and it could be more than one!) may include:
• Family set-up
• Lifestyle / cultural / philosophical ethos
• Travel opportunities
• Dissatisfaction with school environment
• Special educational needs
• Medical reasons
• Exclusion
• Moving to a new area
It’s worth remembering that some children may have tried school but others will never have set foot inside an educational institution.
How can you use the reasons above to generate story ideas? Or inciting incidents? Let’s take ‘family set-up’. One of the great advantages for home education for us, is that we can travel whenever we like to spend time with grandparents. Everything is so beautifully flexible, and you can work out what is right for you. So, for example, what if your child protagonist maybe splits her time, and spends some of her year with a parent, and some of the year living with a grandparent and doing home education with them? What if this grandparent had something slightly magical about them? Maybe an object, or perhaps they were magic themselves? Which other characters might your home-educated protagonist meet when they go and spend some time with Granny? Do they have a best friend they link up with there? If visiting Granny is a regular occurrence in your protagonist’s life, there could be scope for series potential, with a different adventure each time. Or think about lifestyle. Home education offers wonderful freedom. What if your character travelled around? Or what if they lived deep in the countryside and offered guest accommodation? The arrival of certain guests could act as an inciting incident, and with your home-educated character around a lot of the time, there could be potential for them to find out more, rather than spending most of their day at school. Who might the visiting characters be? What secrets do they have? How might their arrival initiate a story?