Bonfires and music

There's nothing like a good bonfire, is there? Thought it was about time we got rid of the pile of bramble cuttings left from my early Spring garden purging. Not sure that the neighbours appreciated it as much as we did lol...

And here's one of my nice neat raised beds after the clear up, with lettuce, rocket and some onions. The hoops are so that I can pull over some polythene if we get a frost.

The music sessions at the local Montessori school have inspired ds1. One morning I came downstairs to see him playing this: (he'd worked out the riff all on his own)

And dd1 joins in with musical popcorn...

Blog catchup..i.e. stuff we've done

So, what have we been doing?

Well lots of stuff, really. I'll start with an allotment update:

Rhubarb, up and happy.

Strawberry plants looking chirpy after a bit of TLC

Jack the dog, providing musical accompaniment to our allotment work...

...and being pacified (or smothered with a hug?) by dd

Blackcurrant bushes with lots of flower buds.

Digging progressing well...

...But not so well on the kids patch. I think we're going for the 'wild' look lol.

We visit a local museum:

And ds2 tries on a costume

Dd finds something to examine under the microscope
And the kids pose in the museum garden

And continuing on the Darwin and Evolution theme, we make fake fossils:

And guess who forgot to soak the bowl afterwards.

I'm still chipping the plaster of paris out...

And ds1 finds something else to do with the plasticine!

I've had a splurge on the internet and bought in some maths stuff for ds2 (yeah, I know, the autonomous educator in me is having a big blip):

The kids get to grips with the base ten set

Er..actually I don't think they're meant to be used like Lego

And we went to a party:

Ds2 makes a 'train' from a cardboard box

Mind Mapping for Morons (in the bath)

I've been reading - or trying to read - Tony Buzan's book 'The Mind Map Book:Radiant Thinking'.

I once saw Tony Buzan on a tv programme, working with some children who had been labelled as thick and unteachable (though of course they said it in a more politically correct way than that). He was fantastic with them and worked wonders, as they always do in these sorts of programmes, and I remember at the time I tried to read one of his books on mind mapping. I say tried, because I didn't get much further than the first chapter, scanned the rest of the book and then put it back on my shelf, where it still sits and fills the gap between the 'Meditation for beginners' cassettes (unused) and the extra strength ibuprofen (frequently used).

This book, however, isn't quite so daunting. It's more like Mind Mapping for morons (I should probably say beginners, but Morons goes better with the alliteration).

Anyway, I was reading this 'Mind Map' book in the bath this evening. I like the idea of reading books in the bath but it rarely happens because paperbacks just wont sit properly in the bath rack and I'm yet to work out how to hold the book, and turn pages without making the pages wet, or without flipping the entire book into the bath. What happens when you want to wash your hair? Or shave your legs? How do you manage to keep the book and bath separate entities during tricky multi-tasking like this? Or perhaps I have missed something...is there some secret to this that no-one has let me in on?

Fortunately this other mind mapping book is a hardback, so it fell open easily at the pages, and stayed open -at least for the first 4 chapters - without the need to hold it or get the pages soggy. All of which meant I could submerge and wash hair, and carry on reading very time I surfaced. Quite handy really and a totally new bath-book-reading experience.

Anyway, I'd got to an interesting bit about radiant thinking and was puzzling about why my brain seems so constantly fuzzy, busy, cluttered, scatty, distracted; full of stuff, but unable to recall the information I actually need when I need it. As I was pondering this I tried to settle the book into the bath rack and realised that the rack was full of other stuff preventing me from doing so. So I lifted the book and started removing the stuff...a dog brush, a playmobil bed (just the plastic bed top), a toothpaste lid encrusted with dried pink toothpaste, two toothbrushes, a nit comb, a flannel with a large hole in the middle, a plastic half-litre coke bottle, a large blue jug, a hockey ball, a piece of unidentifiable black plastic, a face paint stick, and a nail brush.

It was then that my little light bulb lit up. I thought to myself: this bath rack is symbolic of my brain. No wonder I struggle to function at any more than a fraction of my true ability. I am cluttered up with the mental equivalent of dog brushes, playmobil, dried toothpaste and hocky balls!

Will mind mapping free me and enable me to chuck the whole lot of bath rack extras on the bathroom floor? I suppose I'd better stop blogging and go and read the next chapter to find out...

[am just editing this to say that I forgot 2 of the items that I found on the bath rack: a lego Star Wars stormtrooper and a guitar pick. Why do I need to add these items? Well, just in case anyone was feeling competitive and was about to write a comment saying that they had more on their bath rack than I do. These things are important, you know.]

The art of digging...

Well, it's definitely Spring.

Today we spent the day at the allotment with my parents and made some inroads into the Spring digging.

I am ambivalent about digging. In some ways it is like cleaning; it's easy to put off, and when you get around to it it seems like hard work; but the end result can be beautiful, clean, pure.

There is nothing more wonderful than a freshly dug piece of soil: it is full of promise, heaving with potential, ready and waiting for all your ambitions and hopes. I love it.

But...it does take some hard work to get there, and just like cleaning the house there is a little part of you that knows, deep down, that this moment, the moment of clean, the moment of weed-free, the moment of pure is only going to be fleeting; you know that you have to capture that moment, before something pollutes it - the weeds, the dust, the grime, the children {g}. But...it is lovely just for that little moment...

Soil, glorious soil...

Contemplating compost bins

We promise we wont interrupt your soil moment, Mummy.

First signs of Spring in the beautiful soil:

my Welsh Siberian Bunching Onions and broad bean shoots.

Darwin does it for home education...

Have I mentioned before that we've been having a bit of a Darwin/Evolution theme recently?

Seeing as it's his 200th anniversary I thought we'd make the most of any workshops, tv programmes, books etc. Well we went to the Darwin exhibition at The Natural History Museum in London a few weekends back. There was huge amounts of stuff to be seen just in the museum, let alone at the exhibition, and the kids were really good. But it was a long day...a long weekend.

Watch out! There's a scary scorpion behind you!

The entrance hall of the National History Museum

Pose for your mother outside the museum then...

And again...

Ooh go on, humour me, just one more photo...

Alright then..last time.

Yep, that's the Darwin guy!

(Ok, we've seen him, can we go home now mum?)

We've also been working on a -shhh - 'project'. I kinda hate the P word, cos it sounds all big and important and, yes, so unachievable.

Well in reality it's not so much of a P thing, but more of a lapbook thing. I've resisted the lapbook stuff before, thinking that my kids would see past my attempts to make something 'educational' as something more palatable. But...I thought for this Darwin/Evolution theme that we'd give it a go. After all, I'd spent a fortune on books from Amazon, even bought a couple of DVDs. It seems a waste to just look at them sitting on the shelves. So this was my lounge on the first day of our lapbook thing:

I think on days like these you just have to grit your teeth, forget about the mess, and accept that you're going to have a lot of clearing up to do at the end of the day. And - most importantly - you have to accept that there might not be alot to show for all that mess. Why does so much mess equal so little product? Answers on a postcard...

Of course there are some home educators who do this sort of nice structured thing every day (in a more controlled, table sort of way). As you may have guessed from my blog entries so far, I'm not one of them...

So, how did we start these lapbooks on Darwin/Evolution? Well, first a large piece of stiff paper folded into a wallet/book shape. Then we photocopied bits and pieces out of books and then the kids started sticking in.

We're working our way round where Darwin travelled on The Beagle. Tuesday we looked at The Beagle and all the equipment and crew that went on it. Today we read a chapter about Ecuador and Uraguay, and Fossils, and then the kids watched a fossils DVD by David Attenborough. (Ok, big tick of box.).

Am I sounding smug? Oops sorry. Those who read my blog will know that our bursts of educational activity are just that - bursts - and when they happen I feel compelled to write about it. It's not smugness...it's giving myself a teeny tiny pat on the back (well if I don't, who will?)

What you mean I'm meant to enjoy this??!!

oh, ok then if you insist...

Quiet children! Now then, I'm going to point at the map with my nose.

Can any of you find Ecuador for me?

[Edited on 6 April to correct spelling of David Attenborough's surname]

Some thoughts on home education...

Some food for thought...

Each week:

450,000 children are bullied in school

Each year:

more than 360,000 children are injured in schools

at least 16 children commit suicide as a result of school bullying

an estimated 1 million children truant

more than 1 in 6 children leave school unable to read, write or add up

When I tell people that we home educate, they often say 'Wow! You're brave! '



When you look at statistics like this I wonder which parent is the braver - the one who keeps their child out of school or the one that doesn't?



As always, some interesting comments on this blog about the threat to home educators in the UK:

http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/2009/03/maintaining-status-quo-is-out-of.html