BBC Programmes for Schools, Teaching Literacy, and Being Evicted!

No photographs this time, I'm afraid, as the weather has been rubbish for the past ten days - rain, rain, and yet more rain - and we've been mainly working indoors, which doesn't make for exciting photographs. So instead I shall give you my own personal favourite ... words!

Two or three mornings per week, the BBC shows Programmes for Schools that provide useful resources for my (nearly) five year old boys. Generally, these programmes tend to be for Key Stage 1 children, which is the school year above them, but since they've been doing so much concentrated literacy work over the past six months, they do seem to be taking KS1 work in their stride. So why not?

Today, as an example of what I mean, it was Look and Read, followed later by English Express (for slightly older children). They loved the Captain Crimson cartoon character in Look and Read, and it was good to see so many words flashed up on the screen as they were used, but oddly enough, I think they took more away from watching English Express, which was exploring adverbs and adjectives today. It was a more carefully structured programme, using lists of adjectives and showing how they turn into adverbs when we add 'ly' to the end. Look and Read is fun, but I think even 5 - 7 year old kids would need a lot of support to actually take away something useful from watching it, as it takes the form of a story and there is less emphasis on formal knowledge.

Although I love things that are fun, as do my boys, I don't subscribe to the current belief that young children can somehow learn by osmosis - not formal things like how to turn an adjective into an adverb, anyway. But I wouldn't be without the BBC Programmes for Schools series, so I shouldn't gripe. They really are useful resources to use alongside more formal teaching with a whiteboard or worksheets. But obviously, their greatest use only comes if you prepare for the programme beforehand, and then afterwards discuss it with the kids or do some worksheets or other written activities based on what we saw.

I know many - if not most, perhaps - homeschooling parents will groan at that schoolteacherish attitude. But I have yet to be persuaded that the softly-softly, laissez-faire approach to literacy works. At least, not unless you are prepared to stay calm and wait several years before your kids can read or write with any fluency. And being a writer by profession, I am most definitely not content to wait. Being able to read and write is absolutely vital in my everyday life. So formal activities are what we do, and that 'worksheet and book' approach is certainly working, as both boys - even Morris, with his 'Special Needs' - appear to be working above the national average for their age in terms of literacy.

On a more personal note, we heard recently that we are being evicted from our lovely home in the countryside and will probably end up living in the nearest town now, due to financial pressures. The landlord has decided to sell up, and we have only about five or six weeks to find a new place to live. A difficult and trying time for us all here, as you can imagine. Particularly for the youngest children, perhaps, who have never really known another home.

But never fear, we should still be based within the borders of Warwickshire, so the blog name will not have to change!

Spring into Summer with some brand-new projects!

Learning French: parts of the body

Some people think small children shouldn't be burdened with the extra weight of learning a second language: others believe that the early years of our lives are the optimum time for learning and remembering new words, regardless of the language in which they are presented. I'm of the latter opinion, so my kids get to learn a little French every few weeks. What we learn officially is then repeated unofficially most days, in odd snatches of 'Ca va?' instead of 'Okay?' or 'ta jambe' instead of 'your leg', for instance. Above you can see one of my great artistic renditions of the human form, with French parts of the body labelled for them to read and repeat with me, with the additional help of a CD that uses French words and music aimed at small children.

I don't expect them to learn them in the same way that we learn a language as adults or even as teenagers, with books and plenty of written work. Instead I expect them to learn in the same way that they are learning English every day, by repeating and hearing the words repeated, working them gradually into the fabric of their everyday expectations of language.

The Romans

We are lucky enough to live in an area where Romans were plentiful back in the days of the Empire. Accordingly we have a local museum (Rugby) which houses a collection of pottery shards, bones and other artifacts found locally, along with various displays and activities for children, to help them find out about how the Romans lived and worked in our area. They also arrange for a Roman soldier (hmmm) to visit during half-terms and other holidays, so kids can have a chance to see what a soldier would have looked like and even try on various bits of Roman armour. All this goes hand in hand, of course, with our recent discussions of Roman life in Britain, the structure of the legions, the baths at Aquae Sulis as a Roman cultural centre, and the rise of Boudicca of the Iceni tribe in or around 60AD.



Here you can see my kids, looking slightly bemused, getting to try on chainmail - enormously heavy on them - and replica Roman helmets, also extremely heavy. I would have taken more photographs but one of my teenage daughters, seen in the background here looking sheepish, managed to turn the digital camera on in the car whilst handling it, and by the time we reached the museum the battery was almost flat. Hence these two rather sad and lonesome photographs ...

Science: the humble tadpole

We have a small kettle-hole a few hundred yards from our house, apparently left over from glacial depressions during the Ice Age, where the occasional frog lurks ... and deposits spawn in great numbers every spring.



Here you can see a few tadpoles liberated from the murky waters of the pond, living cheerfully in this plastic tank, recently vacated by an elderly goldfish who started swimming upside-down a few weeks ago and then died. I hope it was nothing contagious, though I did clean the tank out vigorously before sloshing this bucketload of pond water and handful of tadpoles into it last week.

We are feeding them boiled and mushed-up baby spinach, grown organically in our own miniature greenhouse (see earlier entries on our gardening activities!) and prepared to a process we found at an Australian site about looking after tadpoles. Apparently I can also give them protein in the form of crushed-up bottom-feeder food pellets, to be purchased from a pet shop.

So why tadpoles? I was feeling a bit guilty because one of our garden frogs managed to drown itself in a bucket of rainwater last autumn, and ever since then the garden has felt a little devoid of croaking in the evenings. We have some lovely little frog holes and dens, now empty, and if any of these tadpoles survive, they will find some snug little homes nearby - or can always hop back across the field to the kettle-hole if they prefer.

Good science for the kids though, not only talking about the life-cycle of the frog but actually being able to watch these little fellas develop into frogs at first-hand ... if they get that far. Apparently it can be quite a tricky business, keeping tadpoles alive long enough for them to develop into frogs!