#161: When School Failed Her Neurodivergent Kids, She Built a Worldschooling Life in Spain

What if the problem isn’t your child—but the environment they’re expected to learn in?

In this episode, Cheryl talks with Corianda “Corey,” a homeschooling mom of six living in Spain, about raising neurodivergent kids and what happened when traditional school stopped working for her family. With three sons on the autism spectrum and experiences with ADHD, Corey began questioning whether the system was actually designed to help children like hers thrive.

She shares how her family transitioned from the UK school system to homeschooling, how environment and freedom dramatically changed her children’s confidence, and why self-directed learning can be especially powerful for neurodivergent kids. Cheryl and Corey also discuss worldschooling, socialization outside the classroom, learning to read when children are truly ready, and why giving kids agency over their time can unlock creativity and real-life skills.

Today Corey runs a worldschooling community in Spain where homeschooling families gather to learn, explore, and grow together.

If you’re a homeschooling parent—or considering home education for a neurodivergent child—this conversation will open your mind to what’s possible.

Find Corey here: www.shepherdsrest.org  

Facebook: www.facebook.com/shepsrest 

Instagram: www.instagram.com/shepsrest

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📘 Feeling overwhelmed about where to start with homeschooling?
After three years of interviewing homeschooling families, I compiled the best advice, practical tips, key questions, and trusted resources into one clear, actionable e-book: The Homeschool How To Complete Starter Guide.
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Transcript

Why I Chose Homeschooling

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I didn't plan to homeschool. I started asking hard questions, realized how little control parents actually have, and made the hard decision to leave a government job to homeschool my kids. Now I interview other homeschooling parents to learn how this all works. I'm Cheryl, and this is the Homeschool How to Podcast. Let's learn this together. Welcome, and with us today I have Corianda. She told me I could call her Corey, but Coriander's such a cool name. I feel like I can't cut that short. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:32

I'm good, thank you. How are you? Good. Now where are you from? So we're from Brighton, UK, and um we now live in Aurea, Almeria in Andalusia, Spain. So we've been here uh 11 years in June, and we love it.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Wow, okay, amazing. So are you guys homeschoolers?

Autism And Rethinking School Experts

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yes, so we haven't always been. So I've got six children. The oldest is 29, and the youngest is nine, and the youngest four have had certain amounts of time in home ed. So the oldest two went through the school system in the UK. The oldest one, no problems at all, just sort of flew through it, and it seemed-I mean, I didn't even think outside the box so much then because everything was just easy. Um and then my three boys they have autism, high functioning, but they were the next three in line, and so they did have a few struggles in school, and I was not happy with the way that things were working out for them, and then I realized I was expecting the school system to provide something for them, and actually, why do we expect that as parents when we are the ones that know them best? So I I feel like now I'm totally awake to this, and I'm just like, why would I put my children in a situation that was gonna be difficult for someone else to deal with, you know? Because you can't expect too much.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

That's interesting because a lot of parents say, Oh, I'd like to homeschool, but my child is on the spectrum, so I have to leave them in school where the experts can give them what they need. But I've talked to so many teachers that are like, No, it's not, no, they're better off at home. So yeah, talk to us a little bit about how like you went about educating them because it probably is very different than sit in front of this textbook and memorize it.

Moving To Spain And Starting Over

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Completely different. Yeah, we realized um, so we moved to Spain and we moved with we left the 18 and 16-year-old with their dad, and um, they were in college and university studying music, both of them. So they were fine, settled there, and still had all the rest of the family in the same hometown. So we bought our 10, 8, and 7-year-olds um over here, and then since had Magnolia, who's nine. So when we started over here, we were thinking, oh, we might end up home educating because our eight-year-old had been expelled from the school system in the UK, and yeah, I mean, he had a diagnosis from young, and I'd only ever bothered to get the diagnosis because they said, Oh, we can't help him without one. But then we got it and it didn't change anything. And I'm thinking, why you know, where do we go to at this point when we're trying everything? I'm asking for help and approaching all these different avenues, holistic sort of therapies, play therapies. I didn't go the medication route. For me, I've never really been into medication. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging anyone else that does because I know some children might need it. But for me, it was a no-go, especially when they offer it to you the day they get a diagnosis. I'm like, well, now I know what I'm dealing with. I don't want the meds because I want to try and read up on these situations and see what I would see what we can improve without that sort of intervention. So, anyway, we thought when we came out here that we might end up homeschooling. The truth of it is we didn't know it was actually um classed as illegal in Spain to home ed. Really? Yeah, so we we hadn't we'd sort of come out quite blind to that fact. And as it happened, we took a few weeks in the summer because we arrived in the summer, so we spent a lot of time integrating our three with the locals at the park. So we would sit every evening at the park and we'd take our camper van up there and make a coffee. And to start with, our kids wouldn't get out of the van, and me and Joel were the ones playing with water balloons and footballs and basketballs and hoops and god knows what, and we were playing with all the local kids, and then our kids started well, the other children started coming over to the camper van and saying, Oh, you're gonna come out and play. Our children just naturally progressed, and within a week they were all playing, and me and Joel were able to sit in the camper van and have a coffee and watch them.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

So they like wonderfully painted this image of like a big van pulling up and only adults getting out to play with random kids. Like in America, I don't know that that would fly anymore.

A Small School That Finally Fits

Pulling A Teen From High School

SPEAKER_01 5:01

I know we were we were thinking that at the time we were like, kids, come out the van and sit at least on the bench or something so people can see that you're here because we're just like two random adults throwing water balloons at little kids. Do you know what I mean? So, but it it was good, and the um the local kids were fantastic, and they started saying to my children, Oh, how old are you? You'll be in my class at school, they were saying to them. So then then the kids were coming home after the park and going, I'm gonna be in so-and-so's class, and they're gonna be in their class, and so they'd like made these connections and friends, and so we thought, well, brilliant, you know, we'll try the school out. It's it only had 70 children in, ranging from age three to fourteen. So that worked for us because they'd come from a school that had six classes of 30 children in each year, and there was no space, no quiet, no peace, no beauty around it. It was just a very squashed in, noisy school. So over here they did absolutely brilliantly. For the first three, four years, they were doing great. They learnt the language, so they're fluent in Spanish, and actually, my the one who was eight when we got here, so he's got autism and AD. Um, and his emotional regulation has always been quite difficult for him when he was younger. And he was top of the Spanish class within six months, and we were in a Spanish village, so they all thought he was local. He spoke with the accent, the dialect, uh you know, just everything was just easy for him. And the other two, they learnt very easily as well, and we were learning too. We we put ourselves through the classes with the town hall because all small villages provide lessons for foreigners, which is absolutely fantastic, and it's free as well. So, why wouldn't you take advantage of this when you're moving somewhere and you want to integrate, you know? Right. We're not we're not the sort of people that think we're expats, we call ourselves immigrants because we've moved here to someone else's country and we want to take on board what we moved here for a reason, and that's to give our children a better life. So we now spend, well, we were able to spend so much more time with them outside in the nice weather rather than cold, grey, wet England where you'd have to take coats out on every journey, not knowing what the weather would hold, you know, but more than likely rain. So yeah, it was it was great to see the kids um outside together with new friends very quickly, doing well in school, and this all sounds like I'm not going to be talking about homed at all, you know. Essentially, it got to the point where they finished that school at 14. And for at 14, my older son, uh Lindon, who was uh just about to move to the high school, he moved to the high school, but there were a larger number of pupils there, it was all change, and he didn't do so well. So he was the first one that we took out of the system, and from that point on, I knew we'd made the right decision because he flew. He started concentrating on all the things he loved, and that's what we we just said. Well, what are the things you enjoy? What do you want to do? Um, he always struggled with maths, and so we didn't make a big thing about maths, but he loved baking, and he's now a baker, but he also sings, um, he acts, and so he's um joined a theatre group and he has singing lessons, he's recorded cover songs. Now, this is a child that when he was eight years old in the UK, he didn't speak for a whole year. He um suffered with well, suffered or had selective mutism. So to see this change for him was so nice because it's it it was such a jump in his personality, and we were able to enjoy seeing him rather than this this child that held everything in. He was uh he really came out of himself and and he's doing so well now. He's actually 21 now and doing really well. He actually works with us, with our world school that we run, and he runs a lot of the classes with us, especially the specific uh classes for teenagers. So he's like a youth worker with them, and it doesn't matter then. We we are neurodivergent friendly here, and we think that's really important to us because obviously, where we've come from, how far we've come, and how we've noticed that the environment alone can change a lot of the outcome for our children like this, and for the whole family setting, in fact. So we wanted to be able to offer that to other families as well, and it's been absolutely amazing seeing other children come here and parents saying to us, Oh, I'm not sure if we should come and stay because you know, will the apartment be like soundproofed? And you know, where where will we be? What what what if my children have a meltdown? And I'm like, just do not worry about it at all. Everyone's very accepting, and often the children really improve when they're here because there's so much open space, there's always something to do. The fact is, they've got other people to go off and play with. Um, they're not in the system, so nothing is expected of them. They're just free to be them, and they see their parents relax as well and chat with other parents. A lot of them are also well, they're home editing all the people that come here, except we probably get a few families in July and August, which in the UK that's UK summertime, so school summer holidays, and we do still get a few families that are in the school system, but they're trying out this lifestyle because they want to be out of the school system. And I totally think it's a privilege to be able to home ed actually, and really aware that there are so many parents out there that would love to do it, and it's so difficult. So, what we actually do is we keep our prices down in the summer, and they're some of our lowest price months in June, July, and August because we want to still attract those families, you know, air prices go up and everything like that, and I think it's so difficult for families, especially from the UK, where we know this happens all the time, and you know, we know this the months that you have off over there, so we we time it right so that we can offer something and the chance for them to see their children in a better environment. And we've also seen families that have come and stayed here when they were their children were in the school system, and now they've been able to make the move to starting their businesses and being able to to live the lifestyle that suits their family more now, which is really nice to see.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, getting out of that system. I'm all about that. I was a government worker for 16 years, so it's yeah, like, you know, you gotta break the ties and then you'll see a whole world open up. But I do love what you had mentioned earlier because I remember somebody saying to me very early on when I started interviewing homeschooling families about homeschoolers, you're giving them the agency over their time. And like I didn't know what that meant. And I was like, oh, that sounds good. But as I've interviewed more and more and listening to you talk about, you know, then my son was able to do things that he loved. And I think that sounds so like you know, we think about like, oh, we got to ride his bike more, but it's like, well, but maybe that sparked something because maybe his bike broke, and then he had to learn how to fix it, and then he was like, Oh, I really like mechanics, or you know, it could go in any direction. So for him, he learned music, and that took him on a whole different path. And I love that that you were able to build a business, and then he's able to work in that. It is just something so wonderful. Students need strong male figures, you know, young, good male role models. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

So And he's not shy, he's not shy with telling other children as well. He will tell the junk younger generation that are finding things hard at the moment. He'll say, I used to be like this, or I couldn't cope with this before, but now look. And he said, You just need to think of the things you like to do and that you want to do, and you know, people will help you. So we have young artists that are already illustrators for books and things. We've just had, you know, so many talented children through here that if they were in the school system, they wouldn't have even been recognized now, especially with the creative side of things, arts, the music, you know, the drama and things like this. There's not much, not much space for it in the school system. And I think you know, it's it's amazing to see the growth in a child when they're somewhere where they feel happy. In the environment, they feel happy. And when you home it, you often have more time to be able to be with them, and so there's more guidance there, and you can see their strengths as well, you can recognize them yourself, and so you can then go, right, okay, they're picking up this really well, and so you can offer them extra things like sorry, we've got a kitten in the background. The kitten's blind, so he has no idea where he is.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Well, maybe now. So you took your first son out. That did you take the other ones out right at the same time, or did they all have sort of their downfall too?

When School Success Still Hurts

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah, so not at the same time. So then we took out our 13-year-old, and he's the one with autism and ADHD, and he was the one that was top of the class in like every subject. No one ever noticed that he pretty much had any issues as such because he was so intelligent, but his emotional um regulation was all over the place, and so he was the one that had previously been expelled in England. Um, and like I say, he did so well here, and we were really impressed with how he coped with everything and all the changes, and then it got to the point where they just didn't get him anymore, and they couldn't they couldn't almost provide him with what he needed, which was which was actually more education. He he was doing so well that when the kids were messing around in his class and things like that, he was getting upset that he couldn't learn things when it was too noisy and he didn't like the disrespectfulness, he didn't like the shouting when the teacher then had to shout at the other students. He was really sensitive to the noise, and it just became somewhere that he really didn't want to go. So we took him out without any thought. That didn't work as easy as when we took our first son out. So we received visits from the Guardia, social services, and I honestly think it was the difference being our other son had been taken out of high school, and they could see his problems a lot more because he was not so high functioning, maybe. And so, and then they could see his sensitivities and the way that he wasn't speaking and he was closing down. Whereas with my other son, they were like, Oh no, he's like top of the class, why are you taking him out? And I just said, Look, he's not happy at the moment, we need to sort this out. And so, yeah, they sort of followed it up a lot more.

Homeschooling Where It Is Illegal

SPEAKER_00 16:11

You said you were in Spain and it was illegal to homeschool there?

Music Learning Without Parent Battles

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Yeah, yeah. So we knew we knew we were taking a risk taking him out of the system, but he was already yeah, well, it was it was tricky, it really was. It was very difficult for those first six months. Um, we actually had to um send him back to England to stay with family for a few months because we felt so it felt it felt like a tricky situation that could get like really bad. When we were in the school playground, and I said to the head teacher, she said, Holby, there's his name, but you know, she said, You must um you must attend school, otherwise your parents will be arrested and you will be in the Centro de Menores, which is the youth detention centre. And this is like with a child that had a diagnosis, he's been top of the class all the time, and she then told me he has nothing wrong with him. If he has something wrong with him, the class, the rest of the class, have something much worse. That's what she told me. And I'm like, no, you just really don't understand what this is about. It's about, you know, his well-being, his mental health, and things like that. So um, the minute she said that, I took him by the hand and I said to her, I said, We're not coming back here, you you know, and from that point, obviously, my other daughter was young uh 21 months younger than him, was also in this school. So you can imagine then when the social services came around, they were they were actually really lovely. I've got to be honest. They did check things out in the house, but I sort of think that's okay because they wanted to check that the children were safe and happy at home, and also they could see that we weren't just doing this on a whim because we'd left our daughter in school because she was at that point happy so and doing really well.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Quick pass to share something that's been a great fit for our homeschool. My son, he's seven, and we butt heads if I am teaching him directly. So his reading and math are done mostly independently, and I'm just there to support and correct when needed. I really wanted him to learn music too, especially knowing how closely music and reading are connected in the brain. That's why we started using Simply Piano. He's learning to read music and play piano on his own using songs he already knows and loves, and it feels more like a game than a lesson. It's been amazing to watch his confidence and skills grow. If you want to check it out, grab the link in the show description.

Returning For GCSEs And Prom

SPEAKER_01 18:38

And they saw that our other son finished that school and stuff like this, but it was it was tricky because essentially, yeah, we had to pop him back over to England and let him stay there for a few months until he'd finished that school year, and nobody then caused us a problem. But that was part of our family, a massive part of our family not here with us. We were fortunate in the sense that we had a lot of family, and his older two siblings were still in the UK, so he actually was staying with them anyway, but it still split the family in a way that we never wanted to. So at that point, it was very mixed, you know, it it was like bittersweet. He'd done so well in school, he was fluent in Spanish, the other two were doing great. We'd got one homeschooling with no issues at all, another that then we did have the issues with. Then my daughter finished at that school, all perfect, but she didn't want to do high school, so we home edit her as well, and we realized that once we'd got out of that school in the village to do the change point, we just didn't change her into the school, so we just kept her home, and this worked out perfectly. So she she was absolutely fine, did three years home ed, um, and then decided that she would like to do uh well, my daughter's quite headstrong, she's a little bit like me, and she got to 15 and she said, Mum, can I go back to the UK and do um GCSEs? And I was like, Well, could you wait until you go till you get to 16 and then you could go to college um and just join in at college and do the grades that you wanted and the subjects that you wanted. I said, if you go back at 15, you're in your last year of GCSEs, which usually are spread over two to three years, and I said you'll be putting yourself under immense pressure, firstly, language, because she's very dyslexic. So actually, in Spanish was easier for her to learn and read and write and everything because it's all phonetic, and then also the number of children that would be in each year. She went to a school with a thousand pupils. That's what she went back to. So she did it. She took five GCSEs, she passed them, and the biggest thing to her was to go to prom.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, that's I get that because I started out the podcast. Like, is my child gonna resent me because they're not gonna go to a prom? Right? And then you know what I just found out a couple weeks ago. I said something. My husband said something about before his prom his senior year, he like I don't know, waxed his truck all down and just drove it through the walk-in. And I said, All right, well then like you know, how was the rest of the prom? He goes, Oh, I didn't go. I didn't want to do that. I just wanted to show off my car or whatever. So I'm like, you didn't even go this whole time. I'm talking about like, should we homeschool our kids? They're gonna resent us from not going to prom and you didn't even go to your yeah. So just did a drive there, yeah. Yeah, but it's so funny. So she did want to go, and yeah, there's and there are other ways to do it when you homeschool, but that's so interesting. So she did it, she was happy.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Yeah, so she went back, she did her year at school. Well, it was actually eight months. So it just shows as well that she was, even though she'd been home edding for three years before that, she went over there, did five GCSEs and got those, and then she went straight into college.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

What does that stand for? Is that like a credit?

SPEAKER_01 22:01

ECSEs is like a credit from when you're sixteen. The that's the national exam that you would do over there at the end of high school before you go on to college or sixth form. And then you would do A levels when you're 18, usually.

Turning A Renovation Into A Business

SPEAKER_00 22:15

So how did starting the school come about? Like had you and your husband been working? Did you have to quit your jobs to homeschool the kids? When how did the idea of school come up?

How Their Worldschool Months Work

SPEAKER_01 22:25

That's a good point. See, I'm a bit of a rambler and I go off in all these different directions. So I do apologize. You can literally back in. About this, Corey. So essentially, when we moved over here and we sold my house in the UK, and Joel and I had only been together three months before we moved here. Yeah, you know, we'd known each other and worked together for a year. So and we had loads of common interests and loads of um friends in common as well. So we knew each other well, but we got together, and he's quite a bit younger than me. So he was 25 and I was 38 when we got together, and I had five children and he had none, and I had a house, and he was living in like rented accommodation, like student accommodation. And then, yeah, one crazy day he decided to take on me and my family. And yeah, I'm very grateful for that, obviously. But yeah, with three of them being on the spectrum as well, it was no mean fee, you know. It was like he threw himself into it, he's been great at it, he's been a natural dad from day one and not a father, a dad, you know. He's he's really been there in all the sort of senses of being a parent and the difficult times, the fun times, everything. So that's been really awesome. And then yeah, we we sold up, came out, and we bought this house. It was a big it is a big house. It's like an eight-bedroom house with three apartments attached to it. Wow. But it needed doing up, so it's much cheaper to buy a property in Spain. So we sold up my house for like 300,000 in the UK, and then we bought this for like 58,000 euros or something like this. So we knew we had to spend a lot on it though. We've probably spent about 120 on it because it was the bones of a house. There was just a skeleton, that was it. There were windows, there was no electrics, no plumbing, no plaster on walls, no tiles on floors, no bathrooms, nothing. It was just empty. But it was 200 years old as well. So, yeah, so it had promise and possibilities. And Joel and I knew that we would have the time to work out what we were going to do, but also the main thing being it allowed us time with the children to settle them. So we the first year we did we did do stuff and like we were working on the house and getting moved in, really. And so we moved here June 2015, and then November 2016, we had Magnolia, so our youngest daughter. So, and we literally had our first bathroom fitted that day. The builders stayed late so that they could do that for us because I just had a cesarean and stuff, so they were so awesome. We, you know, we had like this great community of people around us straight away. It was so nice to be somewhere that felt like home straight away, really. And yeah, it's it's uh allowed us a lot of time to be with the children, and then once we thought of what we are going to do, what we knew we knew we wanted to be around the children, so we were thinking, right, well, we've got three apartments there, so we'll rent them out. Um, we put it on Airbnb, and yeah, that was fine. We were making a bit of money and everything. Then someone said, Would you be willing to run retreats? And um there was there was a TV show that's on in the UK called Um A New Life in the Sun. And there was a lady on there that had been on the year previous, and she wanted to run a retreat, but her venue had cancelled on her. So she contacted us just by chance and asked if she could run her retreat here. So we hosted it with her, did all the food and collections and that of people and loads of running around, and it was good fun. So we thought, right, okay, that was televised, and then so we got known a little bit from that, and then we got asked by the TV company if we wanted to be followed the next year, so as a new business. And so they did a whole show, like we were on the show for a week in 2019, that was, and it was right like it came out during COVID time, I remember. But well, everybody was watching TV then, exactly, exactly, and everyone was dreaming of being somewhere else as well in countryside and everything, so it was perfect, it worked really well, and it sort of well, it gave us a bit of recogni recognition, and although it still wasn't where we were finally going on our journey because we ended up doing yoga retreats, a few of those, but still realizing it wasn't quite what we wanted to do because it still didn't fit our children in as well as we wanted it to. So then we looked into sort of family holidays and things like that. Well, then we had this world schooling family turn up, and it was just out of the blue. It was an Airbnb booking, and she's quite a well, I feel she's quite well known in the world schooling community. Her name's Sarah Beale, um, and they're an Australian family, and came here with their four children. Erin Dylan came with the four children, and we were just chatting away, and we learnt so much, so much about homed, so much about world schooling, and definitely opened my eyes to a lot of different things. And to be honest, I was probably in some ways quite small-minded and ignorant about some of these things before, and I was really like overwhelmed by all these choices that are out there that we had no idea that were there, and I thought, wow, this just seems like the way we should be headed. It felt so much more, Joel and I, it felt like it fitted our lifestyle, and so then nothing seemed too difficult, and so we started advertising for family holidays through the world schooling pages, which before we never even knew existed, and we thought we've got big enough space for it to be like a little community, and our village is so community and family oriented anyway, it feels like a really nice, safe space to be, and like I'd said it offered so much for families anyway.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

So, okay, so is it a school that you run where there's classes, or is it like when if I wanted to be a world schooler, you would just be one of my stops in my journey?

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Yeah. So if you if you're on a world schooling page or something like this, you might see an advert for us that says self-directed months or event months. And so six of our months are self-directed, and that is when families come here, they know there are going to be other world schoolers here as well. There's no one else, like we don't advertise on Airbnb, it's families only. So it's like a community of families, it's a one-month minimum stay, and we do it from the first of the month till the end of the month, and so you're there as a small community for the whole time together. We set up a WhatsApp group on the day you arrive, and then everyone's on it, and we all like say, Oh, we're heading off to the market in the morning. Does anyone else like to join? And they'll do a little tour of the village. We pop into all the shops so they know where everything is. Then maybe in the winter we might have Lego Club or Art Club twice a week, something like that. Then another parent will pop on and say, Oh, I'm heading into town. Did anyone need any shopping? Um, I'm going at three o'clock or something, and they would be like, Oh yeah, that's perfect. Pop down with them, and then we'll come back and we'll do some gardening. Today there's been, I think, 20 of us doing gardening. So there's no classes this month, although we're running art month, so we've got art workshops three times a week, and it's so it's not fully self-directed this month, but it's just three art workshops in the afternoons, four till six o'clock. It's usually working out. So the children and the parents join this, so it's like gets the family together working as a unit, having fun. Um, and they were outside and they were spray painting their own t-shirts, so like graffiti, finding natural bits from around the garden, flowers and leaves and stuff, and using them as templates. So, yeah, and we've done all sorts, we've done collage, mosaic, paper mache, and yeah, so that's like March, is that? And then next month we have Month in the Mountains Junior, which is a week of musical theatre, a week of circus skills and clowning, a week of rock band, so they get to learn all different instruments with all different professionals, and they're all fully trained working with children and young adults, and then we do a week of art, and with the younger ones, we do den building as well because we all love the creativity. Who doesn't love to build a den, even adults, you know? Yeah, and then we have community meals throughout the year every Sunday. So we do bring and share meals, and so then again, you get to taste all this lovely food from everywhere, and it's just a big mix of everything. The children and the parents get to sit and chat and communicate and just connect, really, and they can talk about all their different lifestyles. So we have people that are world schooling full-time, we have people that are just taking a month out of their normal life, we have people that the children have never been to school, others that have taken them out of school and probably wouldn't have chosen to home ed, but felt like they were pushed into it, maybe a little bit like us to start with. It was like you felt like, oh well, we're not doing that, so this is our only choice, you know.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

After three years of interviewing homeschooling families, I realized how overwhelming it can be to piece everything together. So I took the best advice, tips, questions, and resources that I've learned along the way and put them into one practical ebook. If you're looking for a clear starting point, you'll find the link in this show's description.

Teen Month For Independence Skills

SPEAKER_01 32:14

But now we've we're completely different. We're completely switched round and feel like if only I'd known that and had more confidence, I would have done that from the start, you know? Wow. But yeah, and then so yeah, we do Month in the Mountains Teens and Tweens as well. We do that two months a year, and the juniors two months a year, and then we've in November we've got our first month working with just teenagers, which I've I've done for a lot of my time anyway. I was a foreign student host in the UK, and I was a single mum to five at the time, and I would have four students, and I also had one of my daughter's friends living with us. So I had ten children most of the week anyway, and you know, did the whole lunchtime thing, you know, packed lunches, had to drop the students off in the morning, and I'd have a baby strapped on me, two in the double buggy, and a little train of students going behind me. But we loved it, it was great fun. And I've always I've always realised how mental health is so important to, I would say, 11 to 15 is a real key point, and it can become very difficult with all the peer pressure in senior schools and everything. And so it's always been very important to me to provide something that's a little bit more holistic, and I think the creative side of things really helps as well, and making children feel comfortable and allowing them to have fun with things, and so for November, we're running on from our October teens and tweens, we're doing this teen-only month where parents drop their children with us for the month, and we've got um, we're doing entrepreneurship, so a lot of them have already got ideas of what they want to do, or may already be working in a profession um at that capacity already, and so we're just there to grow their skills and push them forward to the next level or help them think and plan about things, but not only that, it's about independence, and it's a time we're gonna have a boy's house and a girl's house, and there'll be seven of each at each house, and they're both gonna have leaders in the house, and and then during the daytime they come together from 10 till 7. They're going to be learning everything from budgeting, going shopping, and buying their food, cooking their food, baking their food. That's where my son gets involved again, there because he's a baker, so he will be showing them how to bake bread, cakes, everything like this. A lot of homemade children have a lot of these skills anyway, but often they just need that little bit of independence, and it's a great space to try it out. It's a very safe village, and it's a safe environment with lots of support around them. So there'll be work with mental health practitioners, physical health, and well-being. So we're doing nutrition, we've got gym passes for all the children, so they all get to go. We do that on our teen and tween months anyway, so that they they work out their own routine and they add to it, and it's not just led by us. They'll they'll like meet up in the afternoons and go, Oh, do you fancy going to the gym? And like eight of the children will go off to the gym. Um, and it's yeah, it's about confidence building, working together, team building, and yeah, just giving them a little bit of a push in the right direction, a little bit of support when it's needed, but also helping them realise their own skills and their own strengths. And yeah, it will be a great.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Are you in Spain or are you back in the UK?

SPEAKER_01 35:43

No, we're in Spain, yeah. We're so we're in Spain full-time, so these people will be coming to stay with us. There is an option if parents would like to stay nearby. We are going to have an option that parents can rent nearby, you know, because again, this is open to neurodiverse children, and although I can't have one-to-ones because we haven't got that sort of capability with our staff, and they will be staff essentially, they're leaders, mentors, but essentially we need to think about the safety of everybody and you know, and what we're offering.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I find that you tend to get more. So explain the neuro what is neurodivergent for anyone new to the term.

Neurodivergence And The Right Environment

Teaching Reading With Poetry

SPEAKER_01 36:23

So, neurodivergence is when you're not classed as neurotypical, I suppose. So maybe you would have some ADHD, so hyperactivity, and you might find certain situations difficult, or you might find it difficult to be calm in a certain situation, you might suffer with anxiety or autism, or you know, there's many different levels of it, and there's so many different things that be can be classed as neurodiverse, but essentially a lot of the neurodiversity does not fit the system of the schools, and so we find so many children come to us with their parents and they feel like I don't know how to put it really, it's like they've been pushed out of one system and they've not had a choice. So the parents might be thinking, Oh, I'm not able to teach them, I'm not qualified for this. But what we're here to do is just give them the confidence and say, Don't worry, your child will do better as long as they're in the right environment. It doesn't matter about the sit-down classes, it's more about how they feel. Do they feel safe? Are they in a good environment? Do they get time outside? Do they get to meet others? It doesn't matter about ages either. We've realized that quite a long time ago. And we our children mix with all different ages, partly because we've got a nine and a 29-year-old, you know, with the others in between. We we realize that, you know, a lot of people will phone us and say or message us and say, Oh, do you have any other eight-year-olds there? Well, maybe one eight-year-old, but two ten-year-olds, a twelve-year-old, and that. And you'll often find that the eight-year-old's off with the twelve-year-old doing something because mentally they are more into the same thing, you know, or practically, you know, they might both love art or both love climbing trees or anything. But essentially, we've got to stop grouping children together just by ages and by, you know, sets as such as they do at school. Oh, you're good at this, you're good at that, let's put you in that box, you know. It's not about that, it's finding this wider range of where at what makes our children happy. It's not about grading and things like that, it's finding their happy place and finding your family's happy place. And that's not often for me. I've definitely found that it's not within that school system. So I agree. With with that in mind, we um home edited Magnolia pretty much since the beginning. We did want her to learn Spanish, well, we do, and we put her into the like a nursery sort of style thing because we thought that's socialization, and then she's learning the language in a gentle way through play in a small group situation as well. But it was just too much for her. She's an incredibly sensitive, quiet child who doesn't need again, doesn't need raised voices and things like this. And there was just so much in the end that we just thought, you know what, she's learnt the basics of Spanish, we can continue that at home. And so the pretty much most of the last four years she's been at home. So and she she is doing great. It's like, I mean, we all know if you're home editing your children, you all know that you get a lot of questions from family, from friends. What are you gonna do about this? How are you gonna teach them this? How are they gonna socialize? How will they ever be able to follow rules? There's so many things that you get questioned over, and essentially, I'm so confident in all of it now. I just like tell everyone, you don't need to worry about this, you don't need to worry about that. Find what they're good at, find what they enjoy, start with that, start always go back to the basics. And when my parents, I remember them saying, So can she read yet? And I think she was six and a half, and she was just getting she was interested in words but not reading. And then we had some other children here who she became really good friends with, and they were reading all the time, and they were a year and a half older. And we've got a little library and we've got a playroom at both properties. Um, and they were sitting out the front with her, and she said, I heard her say, Are you reading all those books? and they were like, Yeah. And so she came into me that afternoon and she was like, Mummy, I want to learn to read. So I was like, So then at that point, we're like, Right, okay, you're ready for it. And so within, I think within three weeks, she was reading. Wow, and yeah, because the want was there, you know. She she'd been she was driven to do something, she saw something, thought, wow, they're learning, they're having fun, they're reading funny stories, you know, poetry. We started with a lot of poetry actually, and I find that really helpful. Anything rhyming is great for kids' confidence when they're learning to read because you I think repetitive stuff is really good if it's rhyming and fun and engaging. There's a lot of the school books that you get given when they're in school to read that are um repetitive but in a different way. They're not very engaging, there's not much of a story there, there's no rhyming or anything like this, it's not much fun, and they're reading the same five words on each page in a different order. But with the poetry, as you read it through with them, you can put feeling and fun into it, and you can guide them and leave off like a word here and there because they can hear the rhythm of it as well. So they're listening out for the pattern, and then they can guess the word. So then when they're guessing and you're holding, you know, you're sort of guiding them with the reading, they're then picking up on, oh wow, I I've remembered this word, and then they're looking at it as well, and so they're not only hearing that it fits, they're seeing that they've got the word right as well. I find that poetry is such a great, such a great thing. Um for learning to read. So amazing.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

As we're running up on the end of the hour here, I just want to make sure people know where they can find you, and I'll link everything in the show's description too. But can you let people know that are listening? Like if they want to come visit you, what does your weight look like? You know, are you booked out for three years?

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Well, yeah, we're we're booked up all through the summer, um, and which is great. June, July, August, and we actually take on extra properties during some months. So when we're fully booked early on, we'll take on properties in the village and rent those out as well. So the community is often larger than average in those summer months, which is great. So we've got Shepherd's Rest and Cortijo Serendipia, and it's at www.shepherdsrest.org, and there you will find everything that you need to know about us and how to book. And you can feel free to message us anytime. We've got Shepherd's Rest is our page on Facebook as well. And yeah, just get in touch, ask us anything.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Um, I will link all of that so people can just click right on it and check you guys out. This has been super cool to learn about. I love this.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

It's got pictures of the apartments, it's got um a diary of what's going on each month with prices there. So all the information's there.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Corey, thank you so much for talking to us today and opening our minds about all the different possibilities for homeschooling. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Homeschool How To podcast. If today's episode helped you, please be sure to follow the show and leave a review. It's the best way to support the podcast. And if you're just getting started or need a reset, head to thehomeschoolhowtu.com and grab my free 30 day homeschool quick start guide. Until next time, keep learning, keep questioning, and thank you for your love of the next generation.