Home Education

With more and more families turning to home education options for their children, we’ve set aside special sessions to allow individual families to learn in a welcoming and engaging environment.

Our Home Education Courses started Autumn 2021 and were a massive success over the winter months. As the weather improved, we ran stand-alone sessions, to cover a variety of topics in more depth.

To see what dates and topics we have coming up, please click here.

Sessions are run by our experienced Education Team, with occasional assistance from Falconers and Keepers. Our Education Officer has worked with young people with a variety of Special Education Needs and is happy to work with parents and young people to ensure they gain the most they possibly can out of our sessions.

Most sessions are split into ability level (KS1, KS2 and KS3/4), with young people booked into the appropriate ability rather than what age they are. This allows everyone to be comfortable with the session content, without too much pressure to learn new things which may be beyond their individual capabilities.

Our small group size (limited to 8 participants per session) means that young people with anxieties are able to get to know the others in their session, and parents are welcome to stay to support their children throughout the sessions.

We combine a mixture of discussions, hands on activities, games and group work to facilitate learning for all. Some weeks, we may also utilise worksheets, or make these available for homework if desired. Learning is led by the young people, which often leads to unexpected discussions as a group - a session on food chains resulted in quite a lot of dinosaur talk!

Sessions covered so far have included Habitats, Food Chains, Owl Pellet dissection, Supersenses, Conservation, Life Cycles, Adaptations, Flight, Rescue and Owls in Art, Writing and Poetry.

Here’s what some of the participants of previous courses said…

“My children looked forward to the sessions every week. We all learnt a lot! Thank you.”

“Thank you to all the staff that put these sessions on. We really enjoyed taking part. I look forward to hearing your plans for the future and hopefully we will be able to do some more learning with you.”

“My son loved attending and thoroughly enjoyed the course. Even mum learnt new things. Thankyou.”

“Thank you for being very clear and understandable so my son was able to take things in a lot easier”

“What made it a success for my son was the combination of material he found really interesting with a no pressure approach.”

“My son absolutely loved the sessions! He was so nervous to start with after having a terrible time at school but the team were so engaging and he learnt so much. He even made a friend! He’s desperate to do more sessions. And now the Owl Sanctuary is his favourite place… ever!! Thank you.”

Session details will be emailed to those on our mailing list in the first instance before being advertised more generally if there are still spaces available.

For more information or to be added to our mailing list, please contact our Education Officer Susan on susan@owlhelp.org.uk