Now at school ... but all wishing they could stay home and learn!

I stumbled across our old home educating site today and thought readers might appreciate knowing what happened to stop me posting here, as the blog just finishes without explanation.

Basically, I wasn't very good at updating the site. One day I was sent an email from a home educating website 'ring' to the effect that my site was being dropped from their list because I didn't update regularly enough. I was quite upset by this, as I felt I was being judged as a home educator and found wanting. When I wrote back in some distress, and explained how much pressure I was under, my reply was published at the main ring website!

Later that day, I received some seriously unpleasant comments and emails from other ring members who disapproved of my complaint.

I was so upset by these exchanges, I immediately made the blog invisible - to avoid further comments by ring members - and never posted here again. One of the key reasons for us dropping out of formal education was to avoid the horror of rules, red tape, and one-size-fits-all policies, so I suppose I was taken aback by a home educating group whose rules were so inflexible.

The kids stopped home educating the following year. Both boys have now been diagnosed with Autism and both have severe ADHD which requires full-time medication to control it. I started work again once all three of my younger kids were in full time education. We still do plenty of 'home educating' style activities though, at weekends and in the holidays, and the kids still love all mucking in together on a learning experience.

Here's my youngest on a recent trip to Compton Verney Art Gallery in the Midlands, with a paper boat she made.



N.B. To avoid further unpleasantness, I am disabling comments here. I'm not interested in getting sucked back into an argument over an issue that's many years old now. I may not have shown to much advantage in that argument, but neither did some of the more experienced members who made me so unwelcome.

The lesson I learned that day was that all groups, even groups of non-conformists, eventually force you into bowing to rules and red tape ... so if those things drive you crazy, DON'T JOIN.

Caveat home educator!

Our Tadpoles are now Frogs!

Above, you can see our small collection of tadpoles a few months ago, which we liberated from an overcrowded pond near our home. We fed them every day on a tiny amount of shredded & heavily boiled spinach, plus some crushed protein tablets for loaches - following the advice we found on an Aussie website.

The biggest tadpoles then began to sprout back legs. A few weeks later, they had front legs too and were beginning to 'sunbathe' on floating leaves placed in their little bucket (kept topped up with rain water or 'aged' tap water, i.e. water that's been chemically aged with a solution you can get at most aquarium shops or that's simply been left to stand for a few days).

Once they had developed these strong front and back legs, I manually removed each tadpole from the bucket, one at a time, over a series of days, and placed them into our battered old fishtank ... now dry, except for a very shallow amount of water in the base to keep the air moist, but with the two shelves on either side dry and the base covered in leaves and branches to give the new froglets plenty of vantage points for climbing out if they got trapped in the water.




The biggest challenge since transferring them to the dry tank has been to feed the new frogs adequately. The old diet was clearly no longer right. So I've been scouring our garden for the tiniest possible bugs and flies with which to feed the babies. Caterpillar eggs laid on the back of nasturtium flowers and stems seem to have gone down particularly well with them. Also those tiny green and white flies which cling to the underside of sycamore leaves.

Every morning, I take the fresh leaf or stem and place it into the dry tank ... a day or so later, most of the 'snacks' on it will appear to have been eaten.

Certainly the frogs are growing apace ...





Soon the children and I will release these growing frogs back into the wild, at the site of the pond where we collected them as tadpoles, and then they'll have to fend for themselves.

Looking at Alliteration & Poems

Just a quick update to say that we are in the middle of packing up our books and belongings - we have several hundred books - and will be looking for somewhere new to live at some point within the next few weeks. [See earlier post on our notice of eviction!]

So nothing too exciting happening just now, except that the tadpoles have sprouted legs, the lettuces we sowed earlier this year are now big enough to eat in our salads, and Indi is rather sad that she will have to leave her little village nursery school. But it's clear that we'll be moving out of the immediate area of the nursery, so she might as well start home-schooling with her older brothers now, rather than have her go back into a new nursery for six months or a year, then have to leave again when she hits school age.

Today we talked about alliteration, as we've been doing a fair amount of poetry recently and I thought the boys could start thinking up their own little phrases in preparation for getting them to write their own poems! So today we wrote about and drew some mad monkeys, crazy cats, haunted houses and pink princesses. Nothing like a few good old cliches to kick them off into the wonderful world of poetry ...

We looked at some Tony Mitton poems, who's a great writer for younger children, especially under-sixes. I also read aloud to them some well-known and fun poems like Jabberwocky, Spike Milligan's Ning Nang Nong, The Owl and the Pussycat, Eliot's Macavity the Mystery Cat, and so on.

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!

Times Tables, Number Bonds and an Easter Egg Hunt!

We took it easy over the Easter break - and why not, the weather was marvellous! - but have since managed to start work on Number Bonds and some new times tables - 5x and 10x, most notably. This renewed emphasis on times tables have proved difficult for both boys (Indi rarely listens in, as she does with other topics, but usually reads comics or looks bored while we're reciting tables) but after some stressful moments, something of the inherent patterns of mathematics seems to be filtering through. These moments were also interspersed with more fun activities such as stencilling - good for improving pencil skills and coordination in young children - and counting with coins and buttons.



It doesn't help this process that I was excruciatingly bad at maths myself as a child, dreading my maths lessons and barely scraping a basic qualification in the subject. Since then I have realised that my grasp of maths is far more advanced than I ever dreamt could be possible, probably because I have gradually learnt to apply it to everyday life over several decades. But I am nevertheless trying to instill a sense of enthusiasm for mathematical patterns in the kids ... no reason for them to suffer as I did, since I'm sure that consistently poor teaching, especially in a relentless system which takes no notice of those who struggle, must have been responsible for my own horror when it came to maths, as I am now able to cope quite well with daily maths. Indeed, only the other day I managed to add up a whole stream of numbers in my head and make a quick percentage deduction while the young girl behind the counter, whose machine had broken down, struggled to keep up!

So my plan is for the boys to enjoy some of these early maths activities and hopefully never feel the way I did about sums!

To this end, the boys' understanding of Number Bonds is coming along nicely. For those unsure of the terminology - as I was, initially - a Number Bond simply means those basic addition and subtraction sums which help us do mental arithmetic. Like knowing instantly, for example, when making any sort of calculation, that 5+5=10 or 3+4=7 or 2+3=5 etc. These basic sums are like the building blocks of mathematics. Knowing that 3+4=7, for example, automatically implies an understanding on the minus scale that 7-3=4 or 7-4=3. This pattern can then extends to all numbers, large or small, such as the obvious £7000-£4000=£3000 and so on, ad infinitum.




On a more exciting level, 3 chocolate Easter eggs for 3 small children adds up to a great Sunday morning.

As always, following a long-held family tradition, I organised a domestic Easter Egg Hunt. This involves deciding on a series of places round the house and garden for clues to be left, plus a final resting-place for the chocolate eggs themselves, then devising the clues which will lead the children eventually to the eggs. In previous years I have been forced to read the clues out loud to the children as they were found. This year, however, their literacy skills are such that both boys were able to decipher the clues - kept short and very basic, for obvious reasons! - and dash off to find the next clue without much help from the watching adults.



The chocolate eggs themselves had been hidden next to the shed. Which is also where our nesting duck currently resides, who was not best pleased by the sudden, very noisy intrusion of three over-excited small children. But her hissing fit was shortlived, as they quickly grabbed their eggs and departed to eat them in the kitchen ... another successful Easter Egg Hunt had been concluded!

Spring in a Warwickshire Garden

Apart from the last 48 hours, the weather has been glorious here this past week - that’s for the benefit of browsers from the US, and I know you often read this blog because my stats tell me so - and we have all been out in the garden, dibbing and hoeing. Or more specifically, mowing the lawn, getting rid of nettles from amongst the daffodils, tidying up fallen leaves and branches after winter, plus of course sowing some new seeds and watching them grow.

We are very lucky to have a fairly large garden here. But no greenhouse, which is a constant disappointment. Unfortunately, our house is only rented, so putting in a new greenhouse would be pointless extravagance, as we would have to leave it here when we eventually move on. Instead, this year I’ve purchased a small plastic zip-up ‘tent’ greenhouse to house tender plants and new seeds. And we have wasted no time in getting the first seeds of spring into seed trays and buying in a few small plants for later pot displays!


Sowing the Seeds

I’m more of a veg. and herb gardener than a flower person, though I do love some of the more lush and colourful perennials. For vegetables, we sowed Spinach and Little Gem lettuces this year, since space is limited. Here you can see a tray of lettuces about one week to ten days after sowing. The warm weather seemed to bring them out in no time!



We also sowed nasturtiums, which have done nothing, and parsley, which has also done nothing. In past years I’ve had no trouble getting parsley to germinate, probably because I have always been, as the old saying about germinating parsley goes, the one ‘wearing the trousers’ in my household! But I must have become a bit weak-wristed and girly in recent years, because the parsley seed tray is still blank and bare three weeks after sowing.

But never mind. I went out at the weekend and bought a large pot of curly-leafed parsley which is now spreading happily in its new terracotta pot outside the back door.

Here’s the spinach, three weeks after sowing. We thinned them out and will just use baby leaves from the big tray, growing a few of the others on in large pots. The spinach seeds had been treated with some chemical nasty so only I handled them, but the kids each had a turn distributing parsley, nasturtium and lettuce seed over the trays, watering them, and covering them with a thin layer of compost.



Most of the garden is laid to lawn or taken up with spring bulbs and perennials, so planting vegetables in open ground is impractical while we are still renting.



New Broom, Old Leaves

This is the first year that the kids have been big enough to help out substantially in the garden. They loved it, eagerly sweeping and digging and collecting leaves, weeds and fallen branches from trees. Even three year old I. joined in, using her brand-new set of pink plastic gardening tools.



M. had one of his ‘moments’ when he splashed a tiny - and I mean tiny! - amount of water from a watering can onto his jeans. He then insisted on rolling his trouser leg up -- and doing all his jobs with his trouser leg rolled up for the next hour, just in case he could still feel that tiny spot of moisture. Sometimes he’s so sensitive about things like that, he reminds me of the Princess and the Pea story about feeling the tiny pea through twenty feather mattresses!




The Great Runner Bean Experiment

I recently splashed out on a £12 book of photocopiable Key Stage 1 science worksheets from an imprint called No Fuss. Some of the worksheets reminded me forcibly of experiments I did back in primary school myself, so it was amusing to try them out with my own children!

The first sheet we’ve done from the book is a Runner Bean growing experiment. As you can see, we filled plastic or glass pots with damp tissue or paper, then squeezed a runner bean seed between the paper and the wall of the pot. The worksheets - which I sadly can't reproduce here due to copyright restrictions! - allow the kids to record the progress of the beans at a few days’ interval each time, drawing what the growth looks like, measuring it with a ruler and recording that measurement, plus dating each examination of the bean -- presumably so we can draw a graph or represent the rate of growth another way later.

Here are the beans on the day of ‘planting’ them.



And here, photographed today, is the Best Bean in Show winner, which happens to belong to D., whose bean root measured 3 cm -- as compared to M.’s paltry 0.6cm and I.’s at a more respectable 1.8cm.



Needless to say, this difference in size has done nothing to improve M.’s temper today, which was irritable and defiant as soon as he rolled out of bed. After the runner bean shoots had been measured, he spent nearly an hour hiding under a large plastic bucket in the garden and refusing to come out.




Learning Al Fresco
Of course, one of the best things about this new-found sunshine is that we will once again be able to work outside for a substantial amount of time every week.

The kids’ desks and chairs are fully portable, which means we can shift them outside into the sun or shade at a moment’s notice where they will be able to paint or make models or play musical instruments for as long as they wish in the fresh air. Working with worksheets and pencils outside is rather trickier as our garden is a little exposed to sharp winds blowing across the fields - we’re deep in rural Warwickshire here and the low hedges round farming land are no use as windbreaks. There’s nothing more annoying when working outside than trying to write with paper flapping everywhere.

Still, if you stick to colouring and glitter-glueing a small paper plate, with your spring bonnet held firmly in place with a piece of elastic, you should be okay ...

This Week at the Kitchen Table

Back to Numbers
This week we returned to the topic of numeracy, having spent well over a month on nothing but literacy with the odd splash of science and play dough modelling thrown in for good measure! No, but seriously, we have been concentrating very hard on raising the boys' standard of literacy and I'm now satisfied enough with their progress - D. roughly a year ahead of what he would be doing in school right now, and M. working at a very satisfactory level considering his disabilities - to feel able to move on and change topic. So it's back to number work!

This move has not pleased the boys, who have grown perhaps a little too comfortable with their writing worksheets and daily reading tasks. The first few days back at the numberface has thrown them off balance; there's been the odd scene of outright rebellion, with occasional cries of 'I can't do this!' so that additional help and support from me has been required most days to complete their tasks.

This may not sound like much fun. And I know there's a lot of emphasis in home schooling circles on work being 'fun'. But, frankly, if I only ever gave the boys easy things to do, there wouldn't be much advantage in doing them. I think children - and adults, in fact - learn most when they feel the most challenged. Often, it's only in feeling uncomfortable and then slowly realising we can cope after all that we begin to make personal and educational strides. Too hard is counterproductive, of course. No argument there. But just tough enough to demand full concentration and the finding of new solutions sounds about right to me.

Besides which, after a week of numbers, they do seem to be enjoying themselves far more than when we started! I think they were just out of practice ...




Ideas for Maths-Related Home Activities
To complement the number sheets they've been doing - i.e. actual written sums, adding up to no more than 12 - the boys have also been using their maths skills in the following activities this week: baking bread, making chocolate rice crispy cakes, planting seeds in our new mini-greenhouse, playing 'shop' with a plastic till and assorted food tins and packets, and using a builder's measuring tape to measure various items around the house so we can talk about area, width and height -- plus which furniture will fit into a particular space, and which won't!

An added advantage of this was talking about shape and space: beds and doors as rectangles, windows and work-tables as squares, the relative scarcity of triangles, ovals etc. about the house and garden.



The task of drawing a garden windmill we bought on our trip to the seaside last month also came in handy, maths-wise, as each individual windmill on the stick was made up of a spiral inside a circle, so we were able to discuss those shapes as well! I think the boys also found it a relief just to relax and do some painting and drawing for a few hours after working hard at their maths.


A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body
We've also pushed on with our healthy eating regime. The boys are now always asking 'What's in this food?' when their dinner is served, demanding to know ratios of vitamins and minerals, calories, fat and fibre.

This has led us on to discuss percentages and how they work, as seen on the sides of many food packets now. So even lunch time can become maths time for a few minutes before they start tucking in!



This quick and easy-to-make lunch consists of a warmed wholemeal pitta bread, stuffed with cheddar cheese, baby spinach, lollo rosso & rocket, and served with a helping of fresh banana & strawberry fruit salad sprinkled with walnuts and sunflower seeds.