How you can tell you're a home educating family...

...when you're driving back from an activity with 3 teenage home ed boys (and one nearly teen) in the back of the car and they start playing 'I-spy'.

Teen boy1: "I-spy with my little eye, something beginning with 'C' "

Ds2: ...Car?

Teen boy2: ...Cup?

Ds1: ...Sign?

Everyone: Sign?!!! 


Oh dear.

JELLY JUGGLING (reasons to be absent, part 1)

I haven't blogged as much in 2013 as I had hoped to.

I had grand plans.

I wanted to write about our first steps into taking exams. I wanted to write about how we have moved from a very autonomous, eclectic style of home education to a far more structured way of life. I wanted to document it all, day by day, week by week.

But it hasn't happened. And the longer I left it, the harder it was to come back to blogging.

I've noticed that I'm not the only one to have had a quiet blogging year. Other regular blogs that I used to visit have been strangely silent. My guess is that many of those families have children about the same age as mine and, like us, have found that life gets in the way of documenting life.

If you thought life was busy home edding small children, just try starting on the whole GCSE/IGCSE route. It eats up your time, invades holidays, nags at the back of your mind whenever you think you might have a moment's peace and, yes, becomes all consuming.

It's rather like taking exams yourself, except that when it's you taking the exam, you know how hard you've been studying and how much (or little) you know. Dragging someone else through the exam process, when all you can do is spoonfeed information in one end and catch it as it falls out the other end is  somewhat like juggling jelly. All day. Every day.

I have spent the whole year thinking about jelly, wondering how I can improve jelly, Googling jelly-sites for improved jelly recipes, investing in jelly-is-us resources until there is no more room in the jelly cupboard.I have not wanted to post photos of jelly, or report our progress in jelly juggling all year.  My life has been consumed by jelly. I am totally jellied out.

But things will improve. They are improving. I will not ever, I think, enjoy jelly. But perhaps I will become accustomed to it. I may even grow to be a better jelly juggler.

Archive footage of Joy Baker - 1960s interview on home education

This came up on a home ed list (thanks to whoever posted it!) and I thought others might enjoy. The cameraman is obviously trying to make a critical comment with all the shots of Joy's washing lol.

"A European home-edder has found fascinating Anglia TV archive footage of Joy Baker being interviewed about her court cases."

http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/116621

http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/208166

Home educating the child who 'wont engage'

Do you have a child who goes along with whatever you do, home-ed-wise, but who never fully engages?

A child who can't wait to be somewhere else - anywhere else?

A child whose most common phrases are 'Are we finished?' and  'Can I go now?'

Would your child choose to socialise all day, every day? Or perhaps would sit playing computer games endlessly?

Do they appear to retain little, if any, of what you do together, and make no apparent connections between all the different things they see or read or experience?

Do they ask you 'What are we doing tomorrow?'
     and then five minutes later say 'So what was it we were doing tomorrow?'
                  and then ten minutes later 'So what day is tomorrow?'
                         and then 'Are we doing anything tomorrow?'
                                and then 'Can I have a sleepover (if we're not doing anything tomorrow).'

Do you spend 5 weeks on "shapes" only to find they don't even remember how many sides a triangle has, and don't actually care?

Do they tell friends that you are taking them on a boat holiday on the Nile, because somehow they've confused one of the longest rivers in the world with a local canal?

Do you give them instructions to do - or fetch - something, only to find them fishing tadpoles out the garden pond or decorating a cardboard box with marker pen. Even with several reminders, do they never quite get to the target (unless you actually follow them and prod them)?

Do they appear to have few noticeable observational skills, an absence of self-motivational urges to explore new things, no interest in anything you've organised, even if it involves a subject that you thought they were interested in.

Does self-directed learning not work because although they have the ability to poke holes in soil for an hour or generally noodle around for no apparent educational purpose, on the days when you have something urgent you need to get on with they hang limply to your ankles and declare that they are going to simply die of boredom.

Do you occasionally sneak a side-glance at them and wonder 'Are the lights on? Is there anyone at home?'

Does it frustrate the heck out of you...?

"Actually, my kids are amazing."

Imagine the scene.

*****

You bump into someone you haven't met for a while.

You engage in polite chit-chat. 

They ask how everything is going . 

"Fine," you say. 

They ask how the kids are.

"Fine." 

You move on.

*****

I've made a promise to myself. Next time anyone asks how the kids are, I'm not going to say "fine". No. Next time, I might say "Actually, my kids are amazing."

Because no matter how much we mumble and moan about our kids and focus on the 'issues' and 'problems', the day-to-day grind, AND ALL THAT STUFF, if we take the time to stop and look, our kids really are AMAZING.

Ds2's contribution for the group's Arts Award display, inspired by sessions with artist, Bethany Milam. He also completed a behind-the-scenes video of a children's performance and researched Michele Paver for his portfolio.

Dd wins bronze medal for her age group at the fencing England Youth Championships, having only been fencing in full kit since September. (Note the lovely apres-fencing-pink-crocs-with-socks look ;) ) 

The other competitors were a little taller :)

But perhaps even more of an achievement, dd, having only learned to read this year, writes her first list (unprompted) of essential things to take to the fencing competition. As you can see, ham sandwiches are far more important than fencing kit.

And on a family camping weekend ds1 (14) surprises us all by having a great time with a friend's teenage girls (14 and 18). It seems the gender divide isn't irreparable, even at his age.

It's all been leading up to this...

Tomorrow ds1 takes his first ever exam.

This morning I woke up feeling like I'd been booked to give a poetry reading to a group of 20 Hells Angels.

The two are not unconnected.



Since September, ds1 (age 14), has been studying Chemistry with a group of home ed teens in another county. Each week we've driven over an hour for his 2 hour class.

Before joining the group we'd done quite a bit of basic chemistry. Mostly we'd used the Ellen McHenry chemistry downloads (which, incidentally, are fab). When we moved on to IGCSE-level work at home we found out that doing stuff from a textbook with your mother is darn tedious.

If I'd had the energy to make it interesting and hands-on, I would've, but I didn't. And with the best will in the world I'm not going to. So the chemistry group has been a godsend. Ds1 has had plenty of larfs with kids his age, and along the way he's learned heaps too.

It's been a steep learning curve. Less than 3 years ago he was still writing his letters backwards, putting capitals in the middle of words, and had to concentrate just to spell his own name. He'd had some help with his 'dylexic' symptoms, but when we started chemistry he'd never written more than a short sentence. And very rarely ;)

When we started I knew ds1 would have to work harder to prove himself on paper than many other teens. If reading text is hard...and writing is hard...and spelling, punctuation, grammar - and just remembering what you were writing when you're halfway through your sentence - is hard...then however bright you are, exams are going to be hard.

When we started IGCSEs he didn't know how to title a page, where to put the question number, how to mark points on a graph, how to label a diagram or even how to draw a straight line with a ruler. Sure, he had lots of knowledge and skills, but unlike in school, where you have to do the tedious stuff every day until it is engraved on your brain forever, he'd found no need to learn this particular skill set.

And then there was content. CONTENT. (There was so much of it I have to write it in capitals.)

And learning how to apply that content.

And then, towards the end, there have been exam skills to learn -  jumping the hurdles of the mark schemes...the art of educated guessing...how to tick those exact boxes. It's been a long hard slog for him, and exhausting for me.
 
And the worst thing is that it feels as if everything we have done - everything we have ever done in our home education - has been leading up to this moment.

Ridiculous, of course, because there is so much more to life than exams. Exams are hoop-jumping. Box-ticking. They are not truly representative of  the worth of a human being and they do not demonstrate the extensive skills a person may have.

But exam results are visible proof that we (I) have done a good job. They are something the rest of society looks at and judges.

They are tangible things we can hold up and say 'There! See! I told all along we were doing fine!'

They are the equivalent of blowing a large fat raspberry at all the doubters who ever questioned our decision to home educate our children.

The pressure on home educators to do a good job - that responsibility not to screw up our children's lives through choosing an alternate route - is immense. Even when we don't think about it, we think about it. It becomes an integral part of us. The need to prove, to demonstrate, to defend our choice. However wonderful our home ed day is, however much we or our child achieves, however happy we are with our education choices and beliefs, there is no getting away from the fact that THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

And that's a biggie.

Since we started GCSEs I've had lots of doubts along the way. I loathe the box-ticking world of GCSEs. I know it doesn't *mean* anything. I have enough certificates to paper a wall, but I'm far from a "natural" in the workplace. And, last time I looked, no job description requires you to pass exams for a living.
 
I ummed and ahhhed for a long time. I swung this way and that. But in the end I wanted - I want - to give him choices. Doing a few exams gives him those choices. He may never use those bits of paper, but at least when he's 16 or 18 or whenever, he will have the chance to take some different paths. Along the way I've developed a nice thick skin ;) to the criticism and judgements of our more autonomous HE friends as we've moved towards more structure and parental direction in our HE style. It's not all been plain sailing and when this exam is over we will need to restore some balance :)




Tomorrow ds1 is taking his first exam.

Hopefully I wont be reading poetry to a group of Hells Angels.

What do your surfaces say about you?

The Kitchen

(lettuce seeds, black bananas, an empty film canister, dried dates, past-their-best plums, remains of a pack of salted peanuts, bar of chocolate)

(burnt toast, empty bowl of apple flapjack, tubes of mediteranean soup, glass of butternut squash seeds, recipe book holder containing everything except recipe books)

 

(3-day-old egg white from a recipe that required egg yolk, plate of bread crusts, unwashed cup, bottle of pepsi, empty bottle containing dried popcorn, a tuning fork, a burnt-down home-made candle in the shape of a dog, a piece of paper with bookshelf dimensions)

(ladle, carnations in a measuring cylinder, egg from our hens, marmalade jar with paintbrushes, plastic tub of unknown seeds)

The Conservatory

(black shoe polish, modelling foam, jam jar lid, roller, kids' paintings, on top of bank stuff that's been waiting a year to be filed)

(home-made camera obscura, aquarium bridge, jam jar with chrysalis, build-a-volcano box, modelled scenery, wire trees in a tupperware tub)

The Lounge

(globe, edible money, indian takeway pickle tub containing cardboard parts to a make-it-yourself siege tower, an Egyptian Mummy wordsearch, two camers and a video camera plus leads to connect to tv, a biscuit tin lid with magnetic calendar, a mug of squash that someone has forgotten)

(a smaller globe, an origami snapping crocodile, a jewelled egg bought at a carboot sale, a sewing machine foot that's not for our sewing machine, a fold-up clothes brush that doesn't work)

(two home-made felt penguins, a plasticine dragon, a wax sticks sculpture of a three-legged dog, pieces of a Christmas cracker jigsaw puzzle and a half-finished felt butterfly)

(Sherbert dip, a model of a heart and intestines, a painting on a mini-canvas, a Game gift card)

(potatoes, a plastic test-tube rack with iron filings)

(a home-made cardboard pyramid)

(stones and a stained-glass knight picture)

(Art mannekin and box of assorted 'stuff')

The Hallway

(Deodorising foot spray, tennis ball, door stop in the shape of a cow, a calendar notepad, tubs of pens, a light bulb, a carefully balanced filing system of 'probably important' stuff in a slightly-overwhelmed letter rack)


I think our surfaces say 'we've been busy' and 'there are more important things in life than housework'.

What do your surfaces say about you?

The various stages of panic when a home educated child becomes of 'secondary age'.

I think most of those who home educate can visualise themselves just about chugging along through the primary age. After all, anyone can do primary... [maths, english, science etc]. But I'm yet to meet a home educator who hasn't felt a teeny bit daunted when it comes to home educating a child of secondary age. 

My observations so far suggest there are several stages in the fear and realisation of having a child who is becoming of 'secondary age':

1. Your child reaches 11. A mildly-unsettling feeling begins to bubble. Your children's friends and peers are starting secondary school. They are getting homework that requires more than writing three sentences about what their pet dog did at the weekend. They are becoming children who study.
2. You shake off these initial niggles. You convince yourself that your child is a young 11. You tell yourself that the first year in secondary is when teachers try to find out what stage everyone is and get them to the same level. You've got another few years yet.
3. Your child reaches age 12 and grown-up panic sets in. 12 is far enough into double figures to feel real. You suspect that in school they would be doing proper work. You imagine rows of children competently writing essays. At this point you acknowledge that your cheery and confident child loves playing with lego, but can barely put a coherent sentence on paper.
4. Your child reaches age 12.5. Panic reaches maximum. You seek out reassurance. In times of a confidence crisis you can always rely on your home ed friends. They will, as always, tell you you are being silly. They will say that a child-led, happy, outdoorsy, hands-on education is the best thing in the whole wide world. They will reassure you that you are doing a great job.
5. You phone your HE friends. You text them. You drop by their house. They aren't responding. THEY AREN'T THERE. It dawns on you that their children have been missing from the usual 'run around the woods beating each other with a stick and yelling like a banshee' home ed activities. You phone again. But they are always out, or, if you manage to catch them at home, they are just about to go out.
6. You make further enquiries and find out that, secretly (although everyone else with a 12.5 yr old, except you, knows the secret), their child has joined numerous groups you've never been informed about and is doing IGCSE intellectualism on a Monday, IGCSE super-brain on a Wednesday and some sort of further maths-with-chess-genius on a Friday. Further digging reveals that in between getting their grade 8 for an instrument you didn't even know they played they've signed up for another 3 correspondence courses in subjects that the parent swore their child never studied. 
7. You cry.
8. You join the HE exams yahoo list and scare the pants off yourself.
9. You print out entire syllabuses of exams you can't even understand the title of and pore over them into the early hours wondering how to access the mysterious language they are so obviously written in.
10. You feed the syllabus sheets back through the printer to print out (on the reverse side) details of local colleges and their entry requirements.
11. You convince yourself that your child is sociable enough to get a job in McDonalds if worse comes to worse.
12. You imagine it will.
13. You eat chocolate, drink wine, insist on your child doing the workbook that has been sat on the shelf for the past 4 years. You swear to yourself you'll lose 20lbs and become teetotal, if only your child doesn't blame you for messing up their life.  
14. You blame your emotional rollercoaster on hormones. You eat more chocolate.
15. You start to get over yourself.
16. You gradually get your head together.
17. You find that the HE exams list starts to make some sense. In fact, you can almost face reading it every week. (You wouldn't actually dare post on it, and, whenever anyone on the list mentions that their genius child got A*s after only 6 weeks of study, you feel a strong urge to punch someone). But it is progress.
18. You get yourself connected with the people who are organised enough to be doing exam-type stuff. (Preferably someone with a super-human level of energy and the skin of a rhino. There are some in every county.)
19. You notice that your (now) 13 year old has matured. He may grunt, have B.O.,  and frequently makes innappropriate comments that only he thinks are funny. But he can actually hold a pen without groaning and sliding under the table. 
20. You start feeling guilty about not contacting your old friends who have slightly younger children.
21. You start dodging the resentful looks of those with 11-12 yr olds who thought you were an autonomous home educator and who now feel totally betrayed.  You never get to pick up their calls, because you are always out.

"Everyone couldn't stop laughing..."

(This was ds1's verdict today on his first 2-hour IGCSE chemisty lesson with a group of home educated children.)

His other comment was something along the lines of:

The tutor gave us bags of chocolates. There were so many. We stuffed them in our pencil cases. She said she's going to bring some more next week.

Yep.

I reckon that woman has teenage boys just about sussed.

Bring chocolates AND make 'em laugh.

Sorted.

Ds2 had his first Spanish session today. A thumbs up from him.

Next week more chemistry for ds1, and ds2 starts his Arts Award.


It's all rather strange. After years of very much a DIY approach (i.e. we bumble along through most subjects/topics, working it out for ourselves) I finally get to hand over the responsibility, temporarily, for educating two of my children for an hour or so. Apart from the occasional activity the kids have done, this is pretty much a first for us.

I wonder, is this what it's like to send your child to school? Probably not. After all, I'm hardly abandoning them at the school gate to do god-knows-what while I bake cakes and work off the 2 stone I've put on through childbearing by gym and yoga classes. I've never had that experience, and though I hankered for it once, I certainly wouldn't swap our lives for that now.

No. This seems like the next stage. Up to this point we've done everything on a shoestring budget and mother-and-child-fuelled energy. This is the right time to be buying in the experience/expertise/skills that I either don't have, or don't have energy or enthusiasm for.

And if our weeks consist of a mix of fencing sessions, Capoeira, swimming, home ed group, Spanish, Art class, film-making, archaeology club, computer programming, warhammer/model-making, chess, geography and chemistry, plus the projects we'll continue to do at home...Well, that seems a pretty decent spread to me. Let's hope we all have the stamina to keep up the pace!
 
Meanwhile we await news of whether ds1 will get a place on a training session at a local archaeological museum on 'object identification'. The aim, after the training session, is to help out at regular sessions via his (usual) local archaeological group, classifying and photographing and cataloguing objects in the museum. And this is a big, very important museum.

We've been unable to find him volunteer work at the local museums, primarily because of his age (child protection, supervision, blah blah), but also because he is competing against the students from two universities in the city who naturally want CV-boosting experience. Given the choice between a 19-yr-old university archaeology/classics student and a 13 yr-old enthusiastic amateur in a hoodie it's obvious which the museum staff would choose.

So perhaps something will come of this. As long as nobody starts getting picky about his age, this could be just the ticket for him :)

And if not, hopefully ds1 will get a place on the 'big' dig they'll be doing in October - he's done test pits, but not a full scale dig yet, so if it comes together, this will be very exciting for him...

Fingers crossed.

My plans! All my beautiful plans!

Plans. How easily they go belly-up when you home educate :)

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded the Harmony Fine Arts Course. I thought it would be an interesting way to guide us through learning about art and classical music. I'm not a huge fan of
classical music, and know very little about it, so I thought we could learn to appreciate it (or not) together. The children have an interest in art, but none of us know anything about artists. This course looked like it would fill the gaps in a flexible way, offering us a broad spectrum introduction and then allowing us to then follow our individual interests if anything caught our eye.

We ordered the couple of books that were needed, including The Usborne Art Treasury (from the library) and Oxford First Book of Art (from Amazon), and made a start. My daughter liked one art book in particular. As seen in this post, she proceeded to work through the art book at break-neck pace, doing the parts that interested her.

Today, I get out the folder of The Harmony Fine Arts Course.

Dd says: "Oh. I don't want to do art today. I've done everything that interests me."




In the early days of home edding I would have taken this very personally. I might have been badly behaved enough to rant a little. I'd certainly have bemoaned the time and energy I'd invested in my 'plan', even if I didn't vocalise it out loud. I expect I would have dragged the kids kicking and screaming through the schedule for another few weeks, until we gave up in a fit of resentment.

But I've learned heaps since home educating.

I've learned that plans are flexible. I've learned that plans and projects and schemes, or whatever you want to call them, are just ways of offering something to your kids, of exposing them to something they (and you) may not have experienced before. The child may follow your neatly set out plan. Or by offering something different this might plant a small seed in their mind, (but they'd rather come back to it later). Or they may take the initiative and run with their own ideas. Or, as has happened on occasions, they may reject your offering altogether.

But this isn't failure.

I can step back and look at this experience, look at the positive things that have happened by offering this plan:

• We now know about and own two lovely imaginative art books with activities in, that we would never have discovered otherwise.

• My dd, who has barely drawn or painted for 2 years, has in the past 3 days produced a stack of inventive artwork. Not because I instructed her, but because she wanted to. And I let her.

• Our long-untouched stack of art and craft materials has come back into use. The children have fresh ideas of how to use them.

• I've had further thoughts about taking the kids to art museums and workshops, and come to the conclusion that this might be something they'd like to do. I've booked a workshop at an art museum.

• My dd has realised she is able to independently use a book and to follow pictorial instructions, even though she struggles to read. This new-found confidence will most likely spread to other activities.

• I've learned to let go of my fixed ideas, to go with the flow, to trust my children. I've also learned that plans aren't a bad thing, as long as you don't stick rigidly to them :)

We don't do it. But it's looming.

Term time.

It shouldn't make a difference.

It doesn't make a difference.

Except that it does. Because the whole mad English world is geared up to that structure of 6 weeks on, one week off. 6 weeks of ferrying small people around like Kentucky Fried on skates, and then one week when you breathe ready to do it all over again.

It is a choice.

Of course it is a choice.

When I first started home educating I signed up for any HE activity or workshop on offer. Being at home with small (very small) inconveniently-boisterous children was like sensory deprivation torture. Or sensory overload. Either way, torture.

[Note: Just because I home educate doesn't mean I have to *like* children. I am not a I love nurturing little people type of  mum. No. I am a please, someone, tell me they can go to bed now because the day needed to end four hours ago and it still hasn't yet mum.]

Then as the kids got bigger and I actually really wanted to see the kitchen occasionally instead of living on jam sandwiches and hula hoops in parks and play centres, I chose to opt out of the many many and increasingly available activities.

I still try to keep the whole out-the-house-doing-stuff thing to a manageable load. I do.

But the age gap is widening. A teen and an eight-year-old are worlds apart.  One is just starting to learn to read; the other interacts with adults as, well, an adult. This demands that they are driven a billion miles in different directions at the same time on the same day to meet their particular social needs.

Ok, exaggeration. But seeing as my children have just learnt the word hyperbole, I feel permitted to demonstrate the point. Truth is, once term time comes, there will be few days when we are not supposed to be somewhere at some time. Regular commitment. It's like being married to home ed, without the bonus of a free toaster and a set of crystal champagne flutes and videoing your best mate do her drunk-at-wedding dance.

So. Catch me mid-term. Go on then.

Ask me whether my home ed children socialise with others.

I am likely to poke you in the eyeballs with index and middle finger.

Socialisation? Pah

When you stop doing educational things...

...education happens all on its own.



Matchstick problem solving (from "The Big Book of Puzzles and Games: over 200 Games Using Mumbers, Matches, Dominoes and Coins" by Treasure Press 1989)

Doing a Christmas wordsearch, (free from currclick here )

Fail to plan and plan to fail (or some other b******s)

Of course, having an assignment deadline, and a house that desperately needs pre-christmas attention, I am focusing on home education instead.

I like to have plans this time of year, just as I like to start after Summer with a sort of 'Autumn plan' (years of schooling have instilled strange seasonal behaviours into my neural networks - like the desire to buy stationery in September). We never stick to these plans. They just give me some reassurance that we are organised and have direction. And they give me a damn good excuse to spend money on Amazon.

So my plans are...

To 'do' Story of the World Vol 1 with ds2 and dd. In my enthusiasm I have already written out a schedule for the first three months of 2012 with lists of weekly SOTW activities and possible outings...let's see if we get past the first fortnight, shall we?

Attempt the Intel Design and Discovery curriculum with ds1 and ds2. As always, when I discover a new resource on the internet, one that is free and comprehensive and hands-on I cannot resist. I give this one 3-4 weeks. That's if we get past 'design a new paperclip' without rolling eyes and groans. It could all fall at the first hurdle. If so that rainforest may have been pulped in vain.

Something Shakespearian or Tudorian (yeah, I know that's not a word). There's a Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum from summer 2012. It's a possible. Or I could just drag the kids to Stratford point at a few 'Ye Olde Barde livede here-e' and be done with it. But if we're doing ancient history with SOTW, then jumping into the Tudors might confuse things. But then again...do we EVER do anything in chronological order? Dinosaurs next then.

I downloaded this biochemistry module which we might start. Or we might not. We should, because I paid for it. But that's not always a good enough reason. I'm not sure how much it crosses over with Ellen McHenry's Carbon Chemistry. Perhaps we've already done too much chemistry and there will be mutiny among the troops. It'll be one of those 'suck it and see' things I think. Or a 'can I be bothered?' thing. Jury out.

And apart from that...

Er well of course my children will be knuckling down to their daily regime of hours of literacy and numeracy and latin and French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Swahili, while studying for IGCSE's in performance arts and political history, and winning awards for essay writing, spelling, ice skating, dance and gymnastics. And then after breakfast...

Educating the kids is the easy bit

When I tell people I home educate, often the response is 'Wow, you're brave' or 'That must be hard work' or 'I could never do that'. And what I want to say in reply (but rarely do) is that educating my kids (or facilitating their learning, which is more our style), is actually the easy bit. It's all the other stuff that is hard.

This term I have been doing three courses. On Thursday evenings I'm doing a 2-year part-time diploma course, on alternate Monday evenings I'm doing an online course and on Friday mornings I'm doing another course. This equates to five 'homeworks' every fortnight, and one 2-3000 word assignment every term, plus working towards a larger portfolio and an exam. That's without actually making uninterrupted space for thinking time. I belong to a writing group, which meet every fortnight. It's my turn to lead the session tomorrow.

Two evenings a week during term-time I work from 7-10pm. The money isn't just handy, it's pretty much essential.

I try to home cook. I try to home bake. (Though at the moment the kids are living on Cream Crackers and Pot Noodle). I grow our own veg and I ignore our almost-abandoned allotment plot and feel guilty about it and continue to ignore it. I sell stuff on Ebay and Amazon to pay my late-payment credit card fines.

I do housework. I clean. I wash. I mend. I tidy. I cook. I shop. I cut grass and hedges. I scoop poop. I nag. I do it all over again. And still this place looks like something out of the series 'How Clean is Your House.'

Agreed, there are no dead mice in the wardrobe or cat pee stains on the carpet (there is no room in the wardrobe even for mice and we don't have a carpet). But it is a good demonstration of why hoarding stuff is A BAD THING and why pretty much everyone I know, except me, has a cleaner or an obliging mother who lives nearby and who cleans and babysits their kids every week, and why there are moments when I hate stay-at-home women whose kids are in school all day and who moan that they can't fit everything in. What I actually want to say is 'What the **** have you been doing all day? Writing a bestseller using alphabetti spaghetti?!' But of course I don't.

So, where does this leave us? Well, the crockery cupboards are full of dog hair and crud, the fridge has something growing in it, and the leaning tower of art and craft materials is now topped by a leaning tower of tablemats and books and clothes to mend and clothes beyond mending and weird things that the kids want to keep that I can no longer be bothered to resist, and one day it will topple down and bury us all and no-one will find us until the council break down the door to investigate the bad smell.

So when I start thinking about the home ed side of things, that is actually the easy bit. Or it would be if I had nothing else to do. One evening a week the boys have home ed fencing club, and middle child has cub scouts. This has to be juggled between work and courses. And then there is the kids' daytime activities - weekly fencing, monthly home ed group, monthly geography group, weekly/fortnightly Explorers Group for the younger ones. (We keep the activities to a tolerable level, but when you top up with play-dates and inpromptu meet-ups it all adds up.) And there's the time we spend on projects, research, library visits, outings, workshops.

But really, if someone - anyone - would step in and do the rest of the c**p, the boring, menial, essential stuff that is truly hard work, the home educating would be a doddle.

Woodland activities, polar craft, jelly, peacocks and leaf preservation

Last week (was it last week?) we managed to get some fresh air with friends in the woods.
Some of the kids tramped down stream and came to a mini waterfall



where the minerals in the water had solidified on branches and twigs and stones, giving them a hard casing. We concluded that it might be calcium carbonate (like the stuff that gunks up the kettle), but haven't looked into it yet. I'm thinking of putting some vinegar on it to see if it dissolves, but at the moment the mummified branch is sticking out of my jar of oversized kitchen implements. (We don't do houseproud.)

Of course a fire and marshmallows were compulsory. Ds1 had seen on Ray Mears that in survival cases where it was difficult to light a fire because of damp kindling it was possible to use plastic. So he took apart a blue connector rod pokey stick thing that for some wierd reason ds2 had brought along and set fire to it. Result.

Roasting marshmallows in molten plastic fumes...must be a bit like smoking bacon I assume.

More woodland activities on Monday this week, as we ventured to a local arboretum with a bunch of sweet little mostly-interested-in-what-we-were-doing girls and mildly thuggish feral boys (two of whom were mine). We discovered lots of clusters of hibernating ladybirds under the fern leaves (girls were interested; boys wanted to spear them)

Because I didn't want small child to fill my coat pockets with chunks of rotten wood and acorns, I'd supplied dd with a Tescos carrier. Thankfully the peacock was sensible enough to refuse to step into the bag.

and here she is with something she was determined to relocate to our garden.

After much negotiation I finally persuaded her that large unidentified fungi are probably more comfortable living in woods than in a back garden where a not-very-bright King Charles Spaniel will first pee on them and then eat them. And I definitely put my foot down when it came to taking the Fly Agaric home. Anything that looks like something a gnome would sit on it has got to be a BAD thing.

Ds1's culinary experimentations this week stretched to raspberry jelly with overcooked chocolate topping. Like me, he got impatient with the microwave and found out that if you heat chocolate high enough and hard enough, after the melting stage comes the solidified gunk stage (fractionally before the setting off the smoke alarm stage). I thought the fresh raspberries from the garden were a nice touch. I didn't ask how much he'd touched them before he put them on the top...particularly when I looked at his black fingernails.

At our monthly home ed group last week we made plaster cast fossils (which tied in quite nicely with our polar project fossil craft). Incredibly my kids sat through the whole of a geology talk, although ds1 was doing a good impersonation of a teen (it was the slumped body and spaced-out look that gave it away). I only had to hiss at smallest child once. I did have to hiss at a few adults who were chatting away, oblivious to the fact that their chatter made it impossible to hear the poor woman at the front who was doing her best to educate us about - er - rocks and things (I was listening, honest).

Meanwhile here are the decoupaged natural history boxes that the kids finished off this week for our ongoing polar theme thingy. It should look a bit like this and ours look like this:

Which I think is pretty good, don't you? I thought only ds2 would participate, so wasn't expecting to make three boxes, but the results are great. We haven't blown the eggs to go inside yet. I'm waiting for a good time to be enthused about egg-blowing. But perhaps there never is a good time to be enthused about egg-blowing...

The past few days ds1 has been taking weather measurements for his geography group. He's testing for wind-speed using a home-made anemometer, and rainfall using a home-made rain gauge (an empty lemonade bottle with bottle funnel and jelly in the bottom to make the bottom level). It's taken him two days to realise his anemometer is so stiff it wont turn even if he blows it. Or even if there is a gale. And particularly if he stands with one foot in the conservatory while sticking his arm out with the apparatus and says 'maybe I'm a bit close to the building, but it'll do'.

I suspect an over-enthusiasm for gaffa tape may have contributed to the non-turning design fault. But hopefully fixed now. But, like most science, it's all about experimentation, isn't it?

And today, after two hours of fencing classes with other home edders (that's the sword-sport, not the activity of trying to sell on nicked stuff) I persuaded at least one of my children to the cluttered conservatory table to try preserving some of the junk - I mean leaves - that we'd collected in our Tescos carrier on Monday. Following the instructions here on the ordinarylifemagic blog we bought some glycerin from the chemist and had a go. It was at this point I was particularly glad we hadn't brought home

a) the enormous fungi and

b) the peacock

as the glycerin was about £2.90 a small bottle and it would have taken a good few gallons to cover a peacock and a giant mushroom.

Apparently the leaves have to sit in the glycerin for two days, so watch this space...

As you may have noticed among all these activities, there's not alot of writing going on.

Or alot of maths.

Funny how the two main subjects that most home edders worry about just happen to be the two that all my kids do their best to avoid.

But, hey, who needs times tables and good grammar when you can rampage through a woodland stream, overheat chocolate in a microwave, start fires in damp weather, and preserve leaves - and potentially peacocks - in glycerin.

Polaris Chronicles - reviewed by someone who owns a thesaurus

Progress so far on the Polaris Chronicles polar explorers box themed package that we downloaded here

We've started with the Natural History section and the kids have started to make and antique a box in which to put a blown egg (supposed to be a puffin egg but I suspect we'd get arrested climbing cliffs to steal puffin eggs, so an ordinary chicken egg will have to suffice).

The kids stick a mini cereal pack together for the box:


and paint it with acrylic paint



making fake fossils with air-drying clay:



'Antiqueing' pictures (which we'll later use to decoupage the boxes) with diluted cold tea. Actually we used a cat litter tray of barely diluted very hot teabags, but that was only because we were, as usual, impatient. Our impatience also stretched to drying our pieces of paper in the oven - a gas oven (naturally rather flamey). We managed not to set the house on fire, or even set off the smoke detector (must check the battery). A successful outcome methinks.


and finally finished, the Emperor Penguin, a cardboard cut-out downloaded for free from Canon Creative Park
He looks a little worse for wear. Probably something to do with small sticky hands, impatience, multiple clothes pegs and half a bottle of PVA.

So. The verdict so far on the currclick Polar Exploration thingimajig download?

Well, the art/craft activities are great. Quite inventive suggestions, reasonable instructions, and pictures supplied for activities such as decoupage (though I suspect most of these can be found online if I had half a lifetime to look).

However, the introductory info, the interesting background scientific information that is supposed to accompany the craft activities is appalling, I mean really badly written. It is as if someone has cut and pasted a few lines from Wikipedia and then thought 'Oh I'd better try and put it into my own words so I can't be accused of plagiarism' and has then randomly rearranged the words in the sentence without even a tiny thought to clarity or - perish the thought - grammar. The result, therefore, is not only weird, but incredibly repetitive [I think I counted the word numerous used 3 or 4 times in less than 2 sides of A4, and spelt incorrectly on one of those occasions. Hey, guys, what's wrong with the word many..? Are you guys too posh to say lots of..?].

But perhaps I shouldn't be so hasty to judge. It is possible that I have stumbled across something rare and original. Reading it to my children yesterday there was a moment when I truly believed I had, in my hands, an attempt at an English translation of Japanese MFI instructions for an iceberg.

Let's get thematically seasonal. It's bloomin' cold 'ere.

Ok, well as the weather seems to be quickly heading towards south pole temperatures it seems only appropriate to tackle an icy theme.

I've already mentioned the free poster available from the OU here (while stocks last)
which accompanies the BBC series Frozen Planet currently available on bbc iplayer here (for the next few months.)

My fellow blogger and home educator at Just Life by the Sea also pointed out this antarctica game, which I'd forgotten about (thank you!). It's on one of my favourite websites for chemistry curricula. It had completely slipped my mind there were other freebie downloads available on the site. I recommend you check it out.

If anyone else has any other good resources they'd suggest for an icy-frozen-planet-arctic-themed project feel free to add them in the comments box below. We have a few books, ordered last time I attempted this theme. It didn't quite get off the ground last time...

I'm learning

from Shayoof Thayyil

Reading: The crapness of knowing 'the buck stops here'.

Ok, I need someone to tell me it is ok to have an 8 year old who can't read.

I am tired of people with children who taught themselves to read age 4 telling me that my child will get there in the end. Hey, oh parent of genius, what do YOU know?

I am tired of people who say 'Oh, I know how you feel. My daughter is only just reading too.' I look at their child who is a good two years younger than mine and think If you speak to me again I will impale your eyeballs on the ends of my fingernails.

I am also tired of the smug looks from home edders who structure their child's every moment and have rigorously taught (or perhaps forced?) their child to read every day since they were an infant and now have a gloating air every time their small child has their nose in the literary equivalent of war and peace. I so hope it costs you a fortune in therapy sessions years later when your child realises their life was ruined by a control freak.

I am tired of surprised looks from people when my daughter tells them she can't read. You don't believe her so you want to ask me as well? Or are you just hard of hearing? Perhaps you'd like me to shout it so EVERYONE can hear?

And I am really fed up with the way such people raise their eyebrows at me as if to say 'Really? Can't you EVEN teach your child to read?' If a monkey like you has managed to learn to speak then obviously I'm not hooked in to the right miracles.

And today I was tired of a small sprat of a boy who was laughing at my daughter when I was encouraging her to read a couple of words from a book in the library
'That is soooo easy!' I heard him snigger to his sister as they walked off.
Be thankful small evil one that I am self-controlled. Smacking a kid in the face may not be appropriate behaviour for an adult, but I am not known for my appropriate behaviour.

And I was cross with myself that his response then triggered me sit next to my 8 year old at home and make - yes make - her read a few words from a book that she simply wanted to enjoy listening to me read. Like this is going to help. Yeah. Go on mother, take a leaf out of the BAD book. You know you want to.


Ok. So most of the time I am alright about my daughter not being able to read and with my daughter not wanting to learn to read. And I'm even more alright about it if I'm careful about the company I keep (geniuses and prospective geniuses, hot-housing parents, and smug bastards, not invited to tea).

But today I am not ok with any of it and it makes me feel crap that it matters.


Yes, I can tell myself it is not unusual for home ed children to read at their own pace. I have heard many stories of home ed children not reading until they are 11 years old. But their child is not MY child and I am not that parent. Sure, dd can read a few words (at a push) when persuaded/bribed/skewered and roasted over a spit on a slow-turn. But that's not reading. At least not the sort of reading I want to encourage in my family. I don't want to be the sort of parent who makes their child read.

Yes, I can tell myself this is a momentary loss of HE confidence and that, as usual, it will pass.

Yes, I can tell myself she will get there in the end. But truth is, nobody knows whether any child will get there in the end. I have a 12-year-old who today was struggling to orientate himself around the automated library machine, because even after all my support over the years he still has problems processing text. A 12-yr-old who struggled to read out loud a short geography question today (and who because of the difficulty in processing what he was reading, hadn't got a clue what the question was, even after reading it three times).

Truth is, I know school would not have solved the problem. I know school most likely would have made the problem worse, or caused other problems. But being a home educator, sadly THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

And it aint pleasant.

Open University Frozen Planet (free poster)

Frozen Planet ' a 7-part BBC One series exploring the scenery and wildlife of the Arctic and Antarctic.'

Looks like it might be a good series. Order a free Frozen Planet poster here

I've been thinking of doing something polar-themed with the kids for a while. We started a while back, but didn't really get into the swing of things. I suspect, the reason was my over-keen approach (!)

Experience has told me that we need the softly softly approach in this house not the Oh-God-Mum's-found-a-new-project-and-has-bought-the-entire-stock-of-Amazon-books-on-the-subject approach.

There is a downside to parental enthusiasm.