My South Side Story: Azariah’s Homeschooling Story

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My name is Azariah Uelese I am 9 years old. I am of Samoan heritage and my parents and I moved up from Sydney 7 years ago for a change of scene. We had not been up here in Far North Queensland before but with some encouragement from our relatives that live in Cairns we took a leap of faith and decided to move up to the paradise we heard much about every time our Cairns family visited us down in Sydney.

My mum had always wanted to homeschool me and so she had resigned from full time work and became my home tutor. I was homeschooled for 2 years. It wasn’t complete homeschooling where mum had to come up with what she was going to teach me. I was enrolled into a School of Distance Education. A school that still taught all that was taught in regular schools, except I would be learning at home.  Some of my classes were to be attended online and some were taught by my mum. It had children from all over Australia. It even had kids attending from overseas. One of my class mates attended from Bali. Another attended while their family traveled around Australia in a caravan. It was always pretty cool talking to my class mates about some of the amazing things they got up to.

I really enjoyed attending classes online. This meant that I could be super comfortable on the couch and still be in my pajamas at times, and then other times we might be out by the beach or at the Esplanade and still be in class. If for some reason I couldn’t attend a class, I could always listen in later. This meant I could always catch up if I felt I was falling behind.  I definitely had more free time to do things that I enjoyed. As long as I had attended my classes and got my class work in, mum let me do the other things I was interested in. For this reason I always tried to get my work done fast. In my free time I would compose musical beats on my laptop then I would write raps to the beats I created. I love to make music, this is a big hobby of mine. I also started training in power lifting as both my parents are passionate powerlifters.

Learning online I found that many of the assessments were multi-modal. This meant that I needed to know how to use technology to create video’s and presentations to complete the assessment tasks. This was a great challenge for me as it wasn’t something I was very good at. Each term there would be days where a lot of the students would come together for a “Connect day”. We would get to meet each other face to face and do some fun activities. I love making friends and meeting others so I did look forward to these days.

Homeschooling many times was a new adventure. We visited for walks and hikes some beautiful places.

With the blessing of the birth of a new family member last year. My mother returned back to work which also meant that I needed to return back to school. I felt a little nervous and super excited at the same time to make new friends. I returned back to school last term and now attend School. I am in year 4 and am enjoying being back.

If there is something I have learnt from being homeschooled it is that learning is in everything we do not just what we learn in classrooms. Every day and every place is a place of learning.