Hi Everyone,
I’m Cam and I am the homeschool mentor. Since 2012 I have been writing and sharing my homeschool journey on our blog Cam and Jaidens excellent adventure. By sharing our own experiences over the years I have been able to help many people along their homeschool journey which has been something I have loved.
I have decided to expand upon this by offering 1 on 1 mentoring for families. Using my experience as an early childhood educator, parent, and a homeschooler of 10+ years I’ve decided to move beyond my writing, into creating, individualised solutions to help families thrive in their own homeschool journey.
I embarked on my own home educating journey back in 2013, however my love of children’s development and child psychology started when I was just 17 and got my first job in childcare. Whilst I loved working with kids by 21 I was an assistant director and I quickly realised that any further career progression would result in me becoming a director, which on my eyes was a glorified, receptionist with little hands on time with children, or to become a teacher. As someone who did not enjoy school myself, this little appeal to me.
Fast forward 8 years, and I was working corporate IT and was a single father to my own child, Jaiden. He was diagnosed with Autism at 2.5 years of age after he began showing all many of the typical signs of from 18 months of age. 6 months later Jaiden was struggling terribly at kindy, and as a solo dad with a corporate IT job I was a stressed out mess and probably only a few months from a total mental breakdown. I had somewhat of a life epiphany one day on my train ride into work and 6 months later I’d quit my job, sold everything I owned, bought a caravan and took off into the unknown with 3 year old Jaiden.
Using nature as a classroom on the road, and my previous experience in childcare I was able to help Jaiden improve his emotion regulation, communication, social skills and need for strict-OCD type routines. By now Jaiden was approaching school age but he was making so much progress that putting him into school felt like a big risk to take, as he still very much lacked the communication and emotion regulation required to integrate happily into school, thus I decided to homeschool him for a year.
Our homeschool journey started like many others, I bought a pile of workbooks, stationary, a whiteboard and put on my metaphorical teacher hat. I would sit Jaiden down each day and start the lessons at about 9am, and finish by about 11. The problem was, he had absolutely zero interest in what I was teaching him so I had to re-hash concepts over and over again. It started to take its toll on our relationship as I tried to be a teacher, parent, authoritarian and somewhat of a friend, and do all those things before midday. Jaiden was seeing a Speech therapist and she had pushed me to focus on Jaiden’s reading as a way to help his communication, this made things even worse until I eventually threw in the towel on December of our first year of homeschooling and decided to have a break until Feb the next year.
Throughout the next couple of months Jaiden started randomly reading words he would encounter, street signs, cereal boxes, anything. I pushed back against his speech therapists wishes of forcing him to read and instead bought a pile of books and let him look through them at his own pace. 6 months from when I first “gave up”, Jaiden randomly asked me to read a book before bed, I looked through the book and the entire book was on vowel blends, the exact thing that had caused him so much frustration due to his black and white mindset, common with children on the spectrum.
Much to my amazement he sat and read the book from cover to cover with almost no assistance, I sat there in utter amazement with tears streaming down my face. I literally grabbed him by the shoulders and started yelling “JAIDEN, YOU ARE READING, OH MY GOSH JAIDEN!” and that is the moment where our child-lead learning journey started..
Over the 8 years since, I have continued to use Jaiden’s interests and passions, our travels, and everyday life as a way to facilitate his academic and personal growth. There are 200+ articles detailing out journey on our blog
In 2022 at 13, Jaiden launched his own clothing brand, Adventures Await clothing co. This brand was foundered to encourage kids to get out into the world, and seek adventure, but also move him towards his goal of owning his very own race car. 6 months after launching, that dream became a reality when he purchased his very first car, a 1989 R31 Skyline.
I understand how difficult it can be to let go of what we believe parenting, and education should look like as my approaches have evolved massively over the years to ensure that Jaiden and I can both live happy, and fulfilling lives together, by working as a team.
If you would like to learn more about how I can help your family, feel free to contact me and book in your free call!