Golf and the world of home education

I think the world would be a better place if everyone played golf like this. Those tedious golf championships on tv would take a fraction of the time and we could have some good ole sleepy Sunday films on instead.

[By the way, in the world of Home Education this is not called 'cheating'. No, it is called 'using your initiative', or 'thinking outside of the box'...or 'doing it quick so you can get to the ice cream van'. ]

I've been thinking recently about the concepts people have of home education. So many seem to think that home education equates with 'school at home'. Of course there are a number of home edders who do home educate like this, particularly in the US where it seems there are two sorts of home edders: the structured home schoolers, and the autonomous unschoolers.

But in the UK there are many, if not more so, of home edders who do not do 'school at home'. And there are many who have a sort of eclectic mix of home education methods, constantly in flux, somewhere between 'school at home' and a totally child-led education.

For the record, we do not do school at home. We tried. We failed. We didn't conquer. (We chose another path).

But, what you might ask, do we do?

Well, there are days when I do not know what we do.

There are weeks when all I remember is the mounds of washing in and out and in and out, and the muddy footprints, piles of sand and dog hair down my hallway. There are weeks when I can't see beyond the boot rack and I despair over flat fruit cake and cry over lumpy mash.


There are weeks when my children whizz through the kitchen on a mission to something or somewhere, grabbing food on the hoof, hardly stopping for breath (and certainly not to grunt anything as civilised as 'hi') before they disappear off to something 'important'.

There are weeks when learning just happens, in its own wonky unpredictable way, without me teaching, interferring, guiding, enthusing or doing any of those things that are supposedly 'essential' for children's education:

And there are weeks when I am needed, on hand, that very minute, every minute of the day. 'Now Mummy!' they yell alternately from the bottom of our twenty million metre long garden and the highest point of our roof

'Come here!'

'Watch me!'

' Help me with this!'

' Look at this!'

and I'm pulled back and forth like a tired overstretched bit of knicker elastic.

And there are weeks when we play around with experiments from http://www.thehappyscientist.com/ and make sparks out of plain old aluminium foil:

And there are weeks when we go pond dipping

(It was this big, honest)

(no it wasn't, he's a liar)

(who cares, I have a great hat)

And there are weeks when we have fun at museums:

or listen to stories, or play with friends

There are days (not often weeks) when we (I) get the maths books out, encourage the kids to copy out poems to improve their handwriting, use 'Sequential spelling' in some desperate attempt to instil some sort of spelling sense into them.

What will happen to you little children if you can't spell? I wail.

How will you survive in the world without knowing your nine times tables? I wail.

We'll use spellchecker and a calculator, they wail in return.

And I say, fair point, and decide we should instead go out and do important things.

Like flying kites:

and playing golf (our own way):

and seeing the world with fresh eyes:

Straw into gold (or sheep into thread)

"To-day do I bake, to-morrow I brew,
The day after that the queen's child comes in;
And oh! I am glad that nobody knew
That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!"

Today we had a go at spinning.

We got together at a friend's house where a very capable friend of hers showed us how to use a spinning wheel.

The hardest part for me was the multitasking, i.e. concentrating on keeping the wheel spinning, while dealing with feeding the fleece in at the other end. You wouldn't think with years of home educating experience that multitasking would be a problem...welllll...One foot is supposed to be peddling while the hands tease out the fleece, feed it into the spool, and make sure that the twist doesn't work its way back into the bundle of fleece and tangle it all up! Easy, eh?

Ds2 had a go and was a right little Rumpelstiltskin, even managing to join in the fleece again when the thread broke. My attempts were, well, let's just say that I need the practice.

Rumpelstiltskin in action

I also had a go on our drop spindles which have been kicking around the house for some time now. One was borrowed from preschool when ds2 was there (about 4 years ago); I've never got quite got around to returning it (oops!). We were given a sack full of fleece at the same time which has been residing in the garage ever since because it smells - quite naturally - of sheep. [mental note to self: must do something with that fleece]. Anyway, the resulting thread from today's drop-spindling is what we generally refer to in our house as 'rustic' or 'full of character'.

Yesterday we exercised the kids at a local nature reserve, taking a picnic and a few bags for anything they happened to collect en route (they always come back with something, don't they?). We found some complete shell fossils that had come loose from the sides of the quarry, and a dried up (slightly crunchy) beetle, which I think is a female stag beetle. There were loads of butterflies, some photos below. (For some reason my camera is having trouble focusing close up at the moment, well focusing on anything other than faces, so apologies if they look a bit fuzzy).

Poking in the water. I'm not sure what for, but there were some pretty big fish jumping around.

Posing under the 'lightning tree'

We're such fungis to be with (groan)

Crispy stag beetle (yum)

Layers of fossilized shells

Painted Lady butterfly

Peacock Butterfly on a scabious flower

Some sort of moth I think. Not big enough to be a tiger moth, so I'll need to look it up.

And what does the canine member of our family think about all our recent goings on..?

I could have been a movie star...this is just so degrading.

Bare Butt-erfly Sandwiches topped with Beagle Beans

Today, carrying on with our Darwin and Evolution theme, we - or should I say ds2 - made South American Comida. What has this to do with Darwin? Well seeing as the Darwin geezer popped off around South America in The Beagle, there is a tentative link to this dish of beans, tomatoes and squash. Honest. Well that's what the book said and I'm sticking to it.

Are you impressed that we are still working on our P -P - P ..ok I can't say the P word.
Our P word that has 'ject' at the end, which from now on I'll call our THEME. Does theme sound better? I can't remember what I decided last time I wrote about this.

[I've just noticed something interesting about the P word: If you take away the P and replace the 'O' with an 'E', you get another interesting word: a word that best explains what my kids usually do when I say to them we are doing a 'P' word.]

Anyway, are you impressed that we're still doing Darwin? So am I. I'm not sure what it does for our autonomous education status, but I guess we got to a point when something had to give. And whatever it was has left some space for Darwin.

Chopping butternut squash (all fingers intact)

Cooking (no fingers burnt)

The finished result!

Anyway, The Beagle has officially now got as far as The Galapagos Islands, and the sticker is about to go on the map (when we find where The Galapagos Islands actually are - yeah I know, somewhere near South America...). So here I am, with baited breath, preparing my mind, body, and what's left of my soul, to grab the Galapagos DVD and shove it in the player. Ok, so it was the cheapest dvd I could find about the Galapagos Islands, so I'm hoping it isn't so incredibly boring that the kids will hate watching it. I must confess that David Attenborough and his fossils DVD was starting to grate on all of us after a week of viewing the series. Though I guess it was interesting to see how Mr Attenborough looked back in the late 80s...he seems to be ageing much better than this mother of 3. Hmm...I suppose never having been pregnant or given birth gives him a significant advantage.

So what else have we been up to? Oh the usual. We visited the sailing club during the week and as it was too blustery to sail we spent some time 'butterfly hunting' instead. We're joining in with the Great British Butterfly Hunt of The Independent newspaper. See:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/uk-butterflies/
I've just added our sightings to the map. The best one I saw was the Speckled Wood butterfly, really pretty (unfortunately this isn't on the list to add to their map). We saw loads of Peacock butterflies too, more than I've seen for ages and ages. I didn't tell the kids to do it, or even ask them, but once they saw me looking at the poster and filling in a chart with the butterflies, they joined in too. I'm sure that's something John Holt talks about in his books (not the bit about butterflies).

We've also been doing the usual fire-lighting, storm-kettling, and marshmallow melting.

Hmm..my touch-typing is a bit skew-whiff today. Having twice replaced the 't' s in the word 'butterfly' with 'g' s (which puts a whole new slant on the word!), as well as just typing 'tough-typing' instead of 'touch-typing', I'd probably better finish off now...

[Before I go, I must let you know that I've just this minute Googled the word 'comida' thinking it would be some specialised word for a particular type of stew. NO! It appears to be the Spanish word for food! Ho hum. I knew there was a reason why I didn't like this 'Evolution for kids' book that we're using. Why don't they tell you things like that? There I was thinking we were making some exotic dish and all we've made is South American FOOD!]

Oh and if you're wondering why I have put such a strange title for my blog post, I have no idea. I just got fed up of trying to think of wonderfully creative titles and thought this one sounded interesting, even if it bears only a slight resemblance to the blog post.