How Children Learn

Amidst my turmoil about workbooks and curriculum, about what my children know compared with other children, there are times when I have to just stop and see what is in front of me. Oh yes, it's LEARNING! And this learning is happening now: like a secret underground volcano, all this stuff all bubbles to the surface. And I'm gobsmacked. How did the child know that? Where did that come from?

Of course we never get to see much of the learning that happens: a child can go from apparently knowing nothing, to knowing lots; from not understanding, to full comprehension.

Perhaps in a school environment, under a routine of externally-imposed one-size-fits-all learning, many of these moments get lost, drowned, smothered or distracted. Perhaps they happen and nobody but the child is there to notice. But in home education, especially when children are left to learn without interference or well-intentioned teaching, these teeny bits of magic are revealed. And if you're still enough and resist interfering, you can tiptoe up and witness wonderful things happening.

The biologist in me would say it's those neurons firing off, making connections, links, mapping the world of information and making sense of it when nothing much appears to be happening on the surface.

When learning happens and I can't see where it has come from I realise what John Holt was saying about autonomous learning. I see how learning is not a direct route from a to z, or a series of routes a to b, b to c, and so on. Often it is a random, higgledy-piggledy, unplanned journey. It is like one huge 3-dimensional jigsaw that doesn't always need all the pieces to make sense, and you don't have to start at the corners or the sides to make out the picture. And, besides, your picture will be different to everyone elses.

Today, I've been watching my 6 year old make sense of maths. I've never taught her maths. She has doodled her way through a few sticker maths books because she begged to, but I do no formal, schooly learning with her. I don't sit and count with her. I don't read counting books to her. We don't have posters of numbers on the walls. We've never practised adding up. I have no idea where her mathematical knowledge comes from, except that it has somehow evolved from her personal experience of the world and the problems she needs to solve. I find it difficult to step back. Maths makes me anxious. I hate people saying 'but maths will come naturally, in day-to-day activities'. I think ' Yes, but I dont' care what you say about your children, I need to see it happening, in MY children.' And it does happen. If I stop worrying and just be still for a moment.

Today dd wanted to find out how much money was in her money box. She emptied the piggy on the floor and spent an hour of counting out piles of tens and piles of pounds, coming to me with occasional questions:
'What comes after twenty?'
'How can I add these ones to these twos?'
'Do these make ten?'

She made a dog design on the floor with the piles of tens and pounds and, satisfied with her work, left them there for us all to trip over.

She never did find out how much was in her money box. By the time she'd got to that part, she'd built on whatever knowledge and experience she already had: her curiosity was satiated. The journey had been far more important than the end result.

Therein lies a lesson for all of us.

Doggy visitors, scrapstore visit, and that darn machine again!

Over the past few days we've had a large, but very friendly, lodger staying with us. His name is Arlo.

Arlo is a lurcher crossbreed and one of Jack's friends. He's the one dog we've found that truly puts Jack in his place (usually on his back in 'submissive' pose) and who tolerates his 'puppiness'. No matter what Jack does to annoy, Arlo can bite his ears (quite a large surface area to get hold of there) and literally squash him into submission. It all makes for a fairly good relationship.

Arlo does have the distinct advantage that he can easily outrun Jack. A few gentle strides for Arlo is equivalent to a 100-metre sprint for Jack. Poor chap, no wonder he's been so exhausted since his friend arrived!

Jack 'discovers' Arlo's bone. Nope, not giving that up.

Jack 'discovers' Arlo's food. "Mmm...tripe...yum.

Much better than that dried dog food I get fed."

"Ok, ok, I'll share it. Darn it! Got my ears in it now!"

We took a visit to the local scrapstore on Thursday and I bought 3 carrier bags of material with the intention of making some new cushion covers (cushion covers currently in use are pretty scuzzy, even by my not-very-high standards). Of course, I'm totally ignoring the boxes and boxes of material we already have in the loft and which I also bought under the guise of making cushion covers/curtains/clothes for the kids/bags to sell. As dh says, reassuringly, 'It all makes for very good loft insulation'.

S0, while the kids were quiet and otherwise occupied I thought I'd sneak into the conservatory and start making a cushion cover. Bad idea. Or perhaps a good idea. John Holt says in one of his books (I forget which one) that the best way to encourage kids to learn is by doing the things you love. Not doing these things with the intention of 'teaching' your children, but purely because you enjoy doing them. Holt predicts that if you do this children will see what you are doing and try to emulate it. Or...in my case they will spot that I'm no longer focusing on them, but that I've sneaked off to focus on something that I want to do. They will immediately want to interfere/destroy/ sabotage the activity or - if I'm fortunate - want to do it too!

So, I got as far as measuring and cutting some material and that was it. Then they were begging me to get the hand sewing machine out and I was cursing it, trying to thread the darn thing, untangle the bobbin and master it's stubborn, antiquated personality. The neat pile of material on top of the newly-tidied art cupboard, was pulled down, cupboards opened, and my finally-clear-after-3-weeks table was once more full of stuff. Home education and a tidy house just don't go together.

Ds2 decided he was going to make a sleeping bag for dd1's toy dog. As you can see, it all went fairly smoothly (thank you scrapstore for felt! I don't think I can cope with stubborn sewing machine AND trying to show a short-tempered child how to hem fraying material in one lifetime).

Just had to take a film of it doing what sewing machines are meant to do, cos usually it's angrily chewing up thread and rucking up material.

Dd1 helps

Finding your work

I've currently found myself in the situation where I am reading around 4 or 5 books at the same time. No this isn't my usual scatty 'where-did-I-put-that-book-nevermind-I'll-start-another-one' behaviour, but a pleasant side effect of ordering too many books from Amazon, them all arriving within days of each other, and me not being able to resist peeking into each new arrival.

There's something truly wonderful about receiving a book in the post. In my imagination the books are individually wrapped in brown parcel paper and tied with string, smelling of exotic libraries in foreign places.

In reality they appear in a dull-looking padded envelope sandwiched in between bills and junk mail, and mostly they smell of the sorting office floor where they've probably been kicked around a bit.

But at least our regular postman is considerate enough to knock on the door and pass them over in person, a huge improvement on the relief postman who will try and stuff anything forcibly through our rather narrow letterbox. If on the rare occasion we are actually out, our lovely postman will carefully place the packages in the porch behind our green recycling bin. Sometimes I don't notice them there and have the surprise of finding them a day or two later when I'm not expecting them. It's almost as good as finding a ten pound note in a pocket that you didn't know you had, except that the latter is such a rare occurence that I don't believe it has ever happened to me.

One of the books I've just finished is John Holt's Freedom and Beyond. I'd like to say it's a beautifully written, eloquent examination of educational philosophy, but I'm not that posh and actually it's not always that well written (but who am I to criticise the acclaimed Master?). It does however make some very interesting points (in between the grumpy-old-man-bemoaning-the-state-of-society ramblings) and there is certainly lots of food for thought. Some of the issues I'm sure have already been covered in his other books; I have no idea in which order his books were written, but there is a great deal of overlap between them in terms of subject matter. A large proportion of this book is devoted to discussing Schooling and Poverty (plus a further chapter on Deschooling and the Poor) which make some pretty damning accusations against the American education system. These accusations are a common theme in most of his books, though there are occasions when he strangely holds up aspects of the English Education System as an example of better practice. I'm not so sure this would apply today.

Here is a quote from the book in which Holt is agreeing with the arguments of James Herndon (How to Survive in Your Native Land) :

'...no one can find his work, what he really wants to put all of himself into, when everything he does he is made to do by others. This kind of searching must be done freely or not at all.'

Sometimes you find someone says something that says exactly what you would wish to say if you found the words to say it.

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

Learning all the time...

John Holt's book 'Learning all the time' arrived in the post today, and as if to reaffirm some of its content my children have been happily learning all day.

At least I assume they are learning. It's a difficult thing to quantify, but just from observing them (as discretely as I can) I can almost watch the cogs turning, each time leading to a new discovery or a new question.

dd1 (4) today discovered some magnetic letters and shapes that I'd acquired from our local 'Swap Shop'. They'd been in the footwell of our car for 3 weeks, first in a box with a lid, then in the box as the box lid got stood on(!), and then finally, when the box was used first as an impromtu plate and then a notebook, they just got left strewn across the footwell. Feeling diligent today (and aware of the rapidly deteriorating state of the inside of my car) I scooped them up into a perfumed 'nappy sack' and brought them indoors.

Dd1 showed some interest, so I left her with them, not sure exactly what she wanted them for. She picked out a few and quickly found something to stick them on - the metal cupboard door under our kitchen sink. I don't know if I've ever 'taught' her anything about magnets and magnetic things, but I guess she'd just absorbed the information somehow. With the bag (and another box of magnetic letters that we found) she started to make a tower up the cupboard of the magnetic animals/objects, swapping them around. First it was the house on top of the sheep on top of the ....and so on. She talked all the time, not for my benefit, just as if to explain to herself what she was doing and why. Next she made a tower up the cupboard door of the magnetic letters. Sometimes she stopped and asked me what a particular letter was (I was in the kitchen, making lunch). She was particularly fascinated with the 'i' and the 'j' letters because they had joining plastic between the 'dot' and the 'stick' part of the letter.
'Hmm...' she said about the letter j,'this one is the same, but it's got a curly bit on it'.
I said 'yes that's 'j' for jump'. We thought a little more about other words that began with 'j'. She suggested a word.' Yes, jug that's a good word.'
'No, not jug she replied junk' . I had misheard her.
'Ah like junkbot', I said. Junkbot is the name of a game on the Lego website, where the player has to move bricks to assist the 'junkbot' in completing his task. It's a popular game with her brothers.
'Yes, but it's not junkbox, not box like a box', she emphasised. 'It's bot. Junkbot.'
'That's right, Junkbot. Because it's a robot that carries junk', I said.
We laughed as at that moment the dog sneaked in and stole one of the letters. Look I said, ' he's stolen the letter that begins his name. 'He's got j for Jack. What a clever dog'.
It was true. I took the 'j' from his mouth and put it back in the box.