Home days and birthdays

On Monday ds2 celebrated his twelfth birthday. Family members all clubbed together and he got exactly what he wanted - a tablet - lucky boy!

Today, we've been mostly pottering (interspersed with bouts of chemistry revision). We need to recharge and re-group and with half-term on this week there are fewer demands on time.

I finally got around to helping dd finish making  her beany dragon. This dragon has been ongoing for several months. Until now I've not really had the time or attention to give to projects. Sewing with a child requires as much patience as cooking,with a child. I have to be in a relaxed and generous frame of mind. It doesn't happen very often :)

Watching episodes of The Great British Sewing Bee has inspired me to get back to the crafts I once enjoyed (and often cursed over). But this sewing thing is a love-hate relationship.

Ds1 has been tinkering with his art homework this afternoon. This involves copying a piece of abstract art and writing about it. Not easy for a child who isn't actually interested in art and doesn't particularly enjoy writing.

Ds1 has spent much of the afternoon on his tablet, "researching" a writer for his Arts Award. Apparently Michel Paver has "unlimited ammo" ... ;)

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...

This morning I took the herd ice skating, and as usually happens at these things I came back with a few extra children.

I currently have 8 children in the house. Hence the reason why I'm up here, hiding with my laptop - sorry I mean supervising from a position of height.

Two children are digging a very large hole in the garden (possibly burying the dog).
Two are floating dried runner beans in jar lids in the pond.
One is waving a huge pair of tree loppers above his head.
Another is playing with the petrol strimmer (er, I wonder if he should be doing that).
And any that are left (I've lost count) are plugged into some sort of technology (Wii or computer most likely).

You know it's days like this that I want to invite around all those people who say 'what about socialisation?'. Cos these home educated children of mine are obviously so deprived.



So what have my sproglets been up to recently (apart from trying to maim each other with the strimmer).

Well there have been very educational activities going on, like, er information technology studies:

and more IT studies...

Some cross-curricular art and IT studies...

Some business studies combined with Design and Technology...

Scientific experimentation combined with IT (testing the hypothesis: can one use a keyboard at the same time one has a box on ones head)...

P.R training - ie how to deal with fame and publicity ('No comment')...



Design and technology and history (honest - it's Archimedes's Screw for the ignorant among you)...

Some archaelogy, though officially they're not suppose to study that until at least secondary age...

Home Economics (er, actually it's candle wax, but same principal - cook really hard until pan is ruined)...

Italian lessons (it's Cornetto, obviously Italian)...

More physical education (and a lesson in health and safety)...

Foundation stage education (taking turns at teddy bears' picnic)



Interpersonal relationships :
'Mummy, why are you taking a photo of a dead mouse?'
'Because I thought it could go on the blog.'
'Oh, ok.'

And something totally non-educational. Well we like to chill out and relax with those workbooks sometimes. A child's got to have SOME downtime, you know...

On Sunday the weather was fine so around lunchtime we headed off to a local garden centre where there is a playground and animals to look at. As usual we took a bag of carrots for the goats. Here's a photo of ds2 looking cool...


and dd1 with her favourite toy dog. We keep losing the darned thing and I'm started to get quite paranoid about taking it anywhere. Most of the following photos are taken by ds1 on his camera.





And a not very flattering photo of me and jack. I knew there was a good reason why I'm usually the person behind the camera, not the subject! I'm not quite sure what Jack is doing, but I'm obviously trying to stop him.


Mmm...here's a llama (or is it an alpaca?) with a very nice hairdo. Must have gone to the same hairdresser as my boys (yes, the memory is still raw).

This week at the sailing club we were making lanterns for the forthcoming bonfire night party. This is the grand version (made by a friend, not me). It has a willow frame covered with tissue paper (coated with diluted pva glue) and a candle suspended by wire in the middle. I was a bit concerned that the tissue paper might catch light, but apparently it doesn't (ok, I'm still a bit paranoid about it). It wasn't dark enough to show the full effect, but I think with a bit of refinement it will look fantastic.

I've got plans to try one at home using chicken wire. I thought we could mold it into a shape (leaving a hole to place a night light in a jar inside) and then do the whole tissue-paper-with-pva-glue thing.

Here are some of the other lanterns we made. The 'punching holes in a tin can' ones were pretty tricky to make, partly because they rolled around so much and also because they tended to flatten out when hit with a hammer and nail. The solution, we found, was to fill them with sand from the sandpit and sit them in a pile of sand to stop them rolling. I marvelled at my ingenuity but then I was given an even better tip of filling them with water and freezing them overnight - apparently this works a treat. It was still difficult for the kids to manage, so most of them opted to make lanterns by decorating glass jars.
And no, I don't know why dd1 has blue stickers on her nose...

The painted glass jars...(still a bit sticky!)

We had a little birthday party at the sailing club for dd1 who will be 5 tomorrow. Even the bigguns were keen to join in pass the parcel! I managed to impress myself by actually making the birthday cake: it wasn't burnt and it even rose (a bit). I had a bit of an icing failure though; the icing was meant to be stiff enough to stand in peaks, but instead it sort of slopped and ran down the sides into a puddle. Still, by the time dd1 had covered it with artificial additive-laden, sugar-overdose sprinkles, then it didn't seem to matter. As I had loads of icing left I even slapped it on the home-made chocolate cookies. Remind me not to do that again...

The kids have been doing some science with dh at his work, while I go to my weekly writing class. Last week they took a CD player apart. Thankfully most of the bits stayed at his work (we already have too many boxes of bits of dismantled machinery).

This week they had a magnetic device thingy that made objects 'float'. Can't remember the name of it, but judging by the whiteboard on the wall dh had been trying to explain exactly how it worked. I'll be asking questions later children...

Anyway, here's a video of it working:

We haven't been doing our regular http://www.kramf.com/ experiments, so I need to get back in to the habit. I think it's also time to pick up on some history, maybe a museum visit, or perhaps going back to covering some of 'The Story of the World' book. We seem to have busy days just doing 'stuff' and sometimes it's hard to fit in anything more formal. Once dd1's birthday is sorted we'll have a chance to settle down to other things.

I had the 'usual questions' today at my writing class when a few people found out that I was home educating. I'm always happy to answer the questions because I know they were exactly the sort of questions I used to ask years ago. However, it's always quite difficult to explain to parents who are in 'the system' and who still have very 'schooled' brains without sounding defensive. I don't mean that in a derogatory way because having spent years in the school system most home edders I've known needed to deschool and rethink the whole concept of education, even more than their children. I know that when I first started out the idea of autonomous education - children learning without teaching! Shock horror! - would have just been too much for my brain to even contemplate. Now it seems so obvious, so self-evident, that I wonder how I couldn't see it earlier! I have a completely different mindset now. And if my kids blame me when they're older (as most kids blame their parents) I'll just say it was all the fault of that John Holt bloke.

To finish off the posting I thought I'd pop in a photo of dd1 enjoying her latest 'thing', colouring in. It's a fascinating time for me because neither of the boys showed any interest in any of the colouring books we had. In fact we got given so many I just got rid of all of them because it didn't seem worth taking up space. Now I've got to go out and buy some more. She draws lots too. Mostly dogs and hearts (with the boys it was always castles, knights and machinery). I did wonder if there is anything I could have done to lessen the gender difference and then I gave up thinking about it 'cause my brain ached.

Oh, and as a p.s. Ds1 seems to be doing fine on his ds lite. I'm not quite ready to ration it yet as I figure the novelty will wear off in a few weeks and he'll get into a more civilised routine of using the ****** thing. It seems that he got a good deal though. The deal included the ds lite and one game up to the value of £29.99. Gamestation have a general policy that if you don't like a game you can return it within 10 days. Ds1 returned the game the day after we bought the package (it wasn't quite what he expected) and they then said under their returns policy that he could choose any games (plural) up to £29.99. Because they had a sale on he got 2 games that he wanted and was also given a £5 credit voucher for the remaining money!

You call THAT snow??!!

I've just noticed that I haven't posted any photos on the blog recently. Does that mean we haven't done anything worth photographing? Perhaps.

It did snow today, however. Did I take a photo of it? No.

We were sat watching rubbish morning tv in the lounge when ds1 tore down the stairs and shrieked 'it's snowing it's snowing!'. So we all rushed out the front door into the freezing cold front garden and stood there looking hopefully into the sky. And yes, with a bit of imagination, there were incy wincy teeny little dandruff flakes of something cold and icy. Not exactly snow, but near enough. A few schoolkids trudging past our house to school gave us a rather strange look. I suppose our ragged half-dressed bunch stood in their socks on the garden path running around trying to eat the non-existent snow flakes falling down, was probably a rather bizarre sight. At least it's a bizarre sight if you don't belong to our family. If you belong to our family then bizarre is relative.

A short while later on the way to get in the car for preschool, poor dd1 let out a sigh of disappointment, ' but I thought there'd be heaps and heaps of snow, where's it all gone?'.
Ah well. Life is full of little disappointments and snow in southern England is definitely one of them. The sky is grey, the wind is biting, we are all freezing our little wotsits off, and the only demonstration we have of exciting - or even slightly interesting - weather is a few pathetic flakes of vaguely cold stuff that disappear as quick as bubbles blown from a cheap pot of bubble mixture.

I suppose being a home educator I could have used it as the start of a discussion on the water cycle or global warming. In fact I should be full of guilt that we didn't go on to perform some scientific experiment freezing and thawing water, or look through an atlas at places in the world that have proper snow. But we were late, it was cold and I was grumpy (probably because we were late and it was cold). Besides, if I turn every conversation into an educational example my children will stop listening to me altogether. Methinks perhaps it's already too late.

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Anyway there has been progress in the household of a sort. Ds1 and 2 have been making a stopframe animation using their playmobil and an animation package that we've hooked up via my laptop to a basic webcam. We've had the package for some time, but only really used the drawing aspect of it. It took a bit of getting used to, and the kids had an annoying habit of keep clicking buttons and copying over frames that they'd already done (grrr), but I think the result was pretty good for a first attempt. Unfortunately it's meant that my laptop, my nice shiny all-for-me laptop, has now been touched by small people from the planet child. I'm not sure this is a path I wish to go down.

I suggested to the kids that they should send in their animation(s) to Blue Peter, with an accompanying film about how they made it, in an attempt to get a blue peter badge each. I'd like to say that this suggestion is entirely altruistic, but it isn't because there would be some rather good financial benefits for moi. Free entry for the kids to places like Legoland would be just one of the bonuses of being a Blue Peter Badge holder and seeing as last year I used up loads of Tesco vouchers to pay for their year's passes, I have an incentive to make sure that I don't have to do the same again this year. I might even be able to use the Tesco vouchers for something for me (whoa now that would be a novelty).

So, did they like my suggestion? Well, not much. It was met with what I can only describe as 'lukewarm' enthusiasm. In fact even the word enthusiasm is probably a bit strong. But, hey, I'm a mother and ve have vays of making zee little people do what ve vant them to.
So plan A is that I'll nag them in the hope that they might eventually they might give in (possibility it might work, but it might just make them even more resistant).
Plan B I could just send it in myself pretending that it was from them, but that would probably be morally wrong (if I had any morals left).
Or for plan C I could go for the non-coercive method , i.e. give in and just blow all my Tesco vouchers on this year's passes.

Ah, the difficult decisions forced upon us poor parents.

All quiet on the Home Ed Front...

Well, it's been a deliberately quiet few days wrt home education. After a visit from friends and their daughter 2 weeks ago and some rather intense socialising the previous few weeks (enough to put paid to all the 'what about socialisation' quesions!) we had a week of hiding at home during our local half term, avoiding the crowds.

That's not to say that the kids haven't been occupied. Ds1 and 2 spent a couple of saturdays at a local free animation class. I'd seen the poster the day before the first session and on finding there were hardly any children attending (why?) I phoned round some of our local home educators who soon filled the group with their kids. As always, the boys' animation had a rather violent theme - there's usually a killer mutant 'something' trying to take over the world - but having seen a quick draft version of their mutant killer rabbits (in plasticine) it looked fantastic for 8 hours of teamwork. There's still the sound to be edited on, apparently one of the adults does this, and then we will get to see the finished result plus other children's efforts during a screening this Saturday.

I need to get my head around the couple of animation programmes we have on our pc at home. the kids use two drawing ones (from http://www.2simple.com/). There is also the facility to do stopframe animation using one of our basic windows packages, but I'm yet to work out how. They're all fairly clunky programmes and our pc seems to struggle with anything at the moment, so it may be a case of having to buy a new pc for the kids before we can get anything to work. As I have a new laptop my personal urge to buy a new efficient pc is rather diminished, but I think there will come a point when the kids are totally fed up with it's constant misbehaviour and refusal to play their favourite games.

After a long period of little structured 'work' I'm hoping to start up 'The story of the world' again soon, a really good children's history book/curriculum. Although I've been progressively getting rid of workbooks off the shelves, and we're mostly autonomous in our educational style, I think the kids are missing a bit of structure and direct adult interaction. Ds1 even asked when we were going to do some more history, so I think that's probably a good sign (there are obviously some positive advantages to leaving them to their own devices for a few months). Japan during the middle ages was our last theme that we were working on and there's still plenty of scope for doing more on this. I've plans to look at Japanese art and also try out some Haiku (have I got the spelling correct?) with the kids. We might even get to do some reading about Samurai. Then I have ambitions for the kids to go sketching in a local museum, an anthropological museum that has literally thousands of little and large artefacts from all over the world and I'm sure they have a Samurai 'outfit'. Is 'outfit' the right word? - uniform?- oh I dunno. At least if they have weapons of some sort it will please the boys. Of course these are all possible plans and in the world of home educating very little goes according to plan. FLEXIBILITY and the patience of a Saint seems to be the key to a calm home educating life.

Instruction leaflet for schools: 'How to be Creative'

The children had been asked by a member of staff at our local Scrapstore if they could do an instruction sheet to give to schools. The instruction leaflet was for making stampers out of 'sticky pads'. The idea was received with (mild) enthusiasm, so yesterday I figured I'd start off making some stampers and see if the children were interested enough to join me (a John Holt approach of course...)

Here are some photos of our morning, some of which we used to illustrate the instruction leaflet.

I decided to start with a fish shape (nice easy one I thought, though it took me a few attempts to stop it looking like a shark). Once we had peeled off the backing and stuck it to cardboard it was easy for dd1 to paint. Uh oh! No apron. Just as well the jumper is already stripey!

Success!Though dd1 was a bit disatisfied with the missing patches on the fish and proceded to paint them in. (Groan! Just what I need, another perfectionist in the household)

Dd1 made a 'seaweed' stamper by drawing around her hand with chalk. As expected, she needed a little help with cutting it out, but managed the rest fine.

At this point ds1 and ds2 decided to join in too and added to the picture with stampers of 'rocks' and blue 'bubbles' from the fishes' mouths. The rock shape was made by drawing around ds2's fist, though I think it would also have done well as a shell.

Then this morning we started choosing which photos were best to use on the leaflet and the boys helped to think up some essential points that needed to be on it. We used children's cookbooks as a starter for our research on layout and content and these were surprisingly helpful. Titles such as 'you will need' were applicable to our project and it helped the boys to see a way of making the leaflet simple to follow.


Hopefully tomorrow we'll get a chance to print out a draft copy of our ideas and show the Scrapstore staff to see what improvements could be made. It's sad to think that teachers in school lack so much creativity that they can't work out how to make stampers themselves. Still, I guess when they've got limited time to tick all the curriculum 'boxes', then it doesn't leave alot of time for creative thinking.


Today and yesterday's activities have left me inspired to think up more ways of using the scrap and marketing it for schools and nurseries. Curriculum packs and projects would be a good money-earner for the scrapstore.

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The afternoon was spent at our regular meet up with other home edders at a local adventure playground. Not content with the ample supply of sticks at the playground the boys decided to bring their own from our back garden (cuttings from when our apple tree was pruned). As usual there was lots of play fighting, occasionally getting out of hand, but mostly good humoured.

I discussed with another home educator how well all the children get on with each other when they play fight and how different it is when other children (particularly school children) join in. We concluded that the group have formed their own unwritten 'rules' about what sort of fighting is acceptable or not and that the group appears to educate newcomers and enforce the 'rules'. It's difficult to see how this happens in practice, or exactly what the rules are, but it is very noticeable how the group dynamics change from their usual state, into a slightly disruptive, excited state of having newcomer(s) enter the group and then again return to normal once the newcomers have been integrated and have accepted these group 'rules'.

The fighting can look very violent, but mostly it is staged and choreographed and so looks worse than it really is. Occasionally things don't go to plan and there are a few tears, but it seems, in most cases at least, to arise from misunderstandings between the home ed children rather than malice. For example a childd (often my ds1) will like to be the victim, being repeatedly captured and taken prisoner, or always succumbing to the bottom of the scrum! But there are times when he doesn't want to be this role anymore and it's not easy for him to communicate this to the others. Fortunately these sorts of problems are quickly rectified, sometimes needing the intervention of a parent, but mostly sorted out among the children themselves. The children have remarkable interpersonal skills which, unless you observe them for long periods of time and avoid adult intervention, would probably go unnoticed

My toy arrived

p.s. I forgot to say in the last post that my new toy has arrived - I now have a laptop. It's all shiny and untouched by small sticky hands.

Celtic axes, the snow and return of the machine

Well the Celtic business lasted a few more days and the boys made double-headed axes. Well, to be accurate, ds1 made his. Ds2 and dd1 just watched while I cursed and hacked at bits of cardboard and tore off bits of silver foil.

These axes were, apparently, the 'in thing' for Celts in, er, Celtic days. So, I guess, they went off on their Celtic pub crawls with their essential fashion item, the double-headed axe, making sure they didn't leave it on the bus on the way home. (Probably alot of axes in the 'lost and found' cupboard at the bus depot, would have made identification very difficult, maybe they had to postcode them with one of those uv highlighters).

Anyway, one thing's for sure, theirs weren't made with the inner tubes of wrapping paper, silver foil and cardboard. Would have been a bit ineffective during your average British downpour, don't you think? Instructions for making these things were a bit vague, or I was being a bit thick (probable) and we couldn't find any pictures of Celtic axe-murders to confirm the weapon's description, so we had to 'wing it' a bit. Still, the kids were impressed by my handiwork for a few minutes before they started trying to kill each other with the things.

Talking of British weather, it has been decidedly un-British today, with a heavy fall of snow during the night. Kids loved it and as soon as they were dressed they had a snowball fight with the neighbours' kids over the fence for about half an hour. The schools must have been closed as there seemed a lot of school kids around. Still, it makes ds1 appreciate being home educated - a few weeks back when we had our first heavy snowfall of the year and all the kids had to go to school he was really chuffed that he could stay out and play in it. The home education group was cancelled today, so we walked to the park and met up with some other kids to play in the snow.

ds2's life support machine has returned. The computer, which had a faulty motherboard, was whisked away to G's work for a week to be rebuilt by an IT guy. Ds2 has been pining for his soulmate ever since, but at last it has returned. And he, in true form, has returned to the grumbling sulky computer-obsessed boy we all know and love.