Monster & Teeny

Way,way, way,way,way back in the mists of time - well 2005 several people on what was at the time the MuddlePuddle blogring did a photoblog day of our ‘typical home ed day’. We joined in then in 2005, again in 2006 and 2007 and I’ve been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks but not been able to select a day that would be a fair representation of what we get up to really. I eventually decided we don’t have typical days here so instead I present to you for this year an atypical day of Home Education at the Monsterteenies .

The day started with breakfast - Monster sorts his own out most days.

Teeny can do her own too but is still at the stage where the time she saves me by pouring her own milk and cereal is doubled in the time it takes me to clear it up after her! She had toast this morning anyway. I had a large mug of tea.

I popped outside to let our chickens out and feed them. We currently have two hens and one very fiesty cockerel bantam living outside.

back in the house Teeny assisted with the first load of laundry

Breakfast over Monster watched a bit of TV. Some Bamzookis which is a current fave and some Ben 10 which is a current obsession!

Teeny and I had a bit of a mammoth makeover session. She needed her finger and toenails trimming which led to them being painted. Purple on her toes and alternate pink and purple sparkly on her fingers. She needed her hair brushing and also putting up securely ready for swimming later today so we decided on plaits. She likes plaits as she gets comments on them, she enjoys flicking them round her head and it means no hairbrushing for the duration of wearing them. She also likes the wigglyness they give to her usually pretty straight hair when we take them out again. Today she ended up with seven plaits:

At this point Monster insisted I take a picture of our cat, Candle. I explained the idea of the photoblog day was to record our Home Ed for the day. He patiently explained that having Candle as a pet has taught them loads about cats, pet ownership and responsibility and also stuff like food chains. Suitably ashamed at my failure to recognise her educational value I took a couple of snaps of the cat

Monster turned the TV off and headed off to the playroom. He returned with a puzzle we have of dinosaurs so we all looked at that for a while, then Teeny went and got a similar one we have of space. We did them both and then they went off to get the k’nex out. They both made something - Teeny’s was a structure big enough to fit her own body through, Monster’s was a ‘rollercoaster type thing’ which had moving parts.

I hung some washing out and made lunch for them. I came into the lounge to see them sitting at their tables eating it

I’m still not at all convinced about the supposed benefits of these tables you know

After lunch friends arrived for a couple of hours. Initially all the children disappeared upstairs to play. There was DSing and chocolate finger eating I believe. Me and L drank tea .

The children also played outside for a while.There was some Ben 10 game:

Teeny sat on the doorstep and dead headed a pot full of plants

Those readers who know our family a little better will be amused to learn those were as seen on TV flowers (our garden is heaving with them) and she was able to give a little commentary about why you should deadhead as she went. Wonder where she gets that from!

They also went into the chicken run and had a face off with the cockerel and checked for eggs.

It started to rain so they came in. There was some X boxing

some puzzle doing

some Polly Pocketing

and then some what is best described as general horseplay as Teeny attempted to get me to bite her nose or eat her toy dinosaur

while Monster did some screaming (as you do!)

We needed to clean out our chicks - we incubated some eggs and had seven hatch last weekend so we have some very noisy, very messy ten day old chicks who need daily attention of fresh newspaper, food and drink. We try to wait for Candle to be outside through choice rather than casting her out and then let the chicks have a bit of freedom for 10 minutes, the children have some cuddles and chick-worship time while I sort out their box. Some have wing feathers now and are starting to practise flapping about a bit so Teeny enjoyed playing Mummy-bird and helping them with flight practise

 There was some more DSing, Xboxing, tea drinking and chatting before it was time for A and L to leave us and us to get ready for swimming lessons. I obviously couldn’t take the camera to the pool and had intended to get a pic of Monster and Teeny outside the swimming baths but it was pouring with rain by then so I got a quick pic in the car instead - believe me we’re at the swimming pool and the bags you see them clutching out of frame contain their swimming stuff

It was a good lesson for Teeny who swam a few strokes, less good for Monster who is suddenly at the very end of the row of children and got sucked into some messing about with a couple of other lads. He still did well and they both enjoyed the lesson though. It was still raining when we came out again.

A was home when we arrived so he caught up with the children and their day while I made their tea

Whilst they ate tea and watched their final Ben 10 episode of the day our food shopping was delivered. We do a whole month’s shop at a time so it is always a massive delivery that fills the kitchen.

With that finally put away we cuddled up for the end of a Famous Five book we’ve been reading. It’s the 3rd we’ve read and Monster and Teeny are really enjoying them although they have raised many conversations and questions about some of the rather odd ideas they contain and have sparked chats about feminism, boarding school, freedom of children now and then and much more.

It was bedtime then although Monster did come back down with a magazine he was doing the puzzles in and read me a few words and Teeny was up and down for a while before falling asleep.

It is rare really for us to have days at home but aside from my regular days at work and the children’s evening groups and activities there is very little pattern to our days. A often works weekends and has weekdays off instead, we often go away for nights either to stay with friends or more recently to London to stay while A is working. We spend lots of time visiting friends, going on days out, walking, popping out and about to do various small tasks and so on. Yesterday we met up with friends in London for the day, tomorrow A is off, Thursday I am working and Monster and Teeny have friends visiting in the morning, Friday we are off with two sets of Home Ed friends to a local zoo park and at the weekend we’re off to a local National Trust property which has it’s underground tunnels open for the weekend. That all sounds very ’special’ ‘extraordinary’ or ‘busy’ but the truth is that while that is not what we do every week that level of activity, busyness and variety of very typical. It’s fun to read back the photoblog days from the previous years and see how things have changed for us and how they have stayed the same. 

2008 looks set to be a big year for the MonsterTeenies. As a family we’ve been doing lots of talking about our lives, how we want them to be and how to go about getting there. That’s the thing about stepping outside of the norm in one area of your life - it gets you questionning all the other things that you’ve previously accepted! Hopefully over time our MasterPlan may involved a house move, career changes and more.

But, to education! Although of course in debating all these hopes and dreams we are all learning a great deal at the same time. Monster, Teeny and I spent a happy few hours last week talking about all the things we’d like to do this year and making some plans for days out, holidays and other adventures.

Both Monster and Teeny are loving the various group activities they do - they get lots out of both the group environment, the activities on offer and the time away from me. We have started to be more active with local Home Ed meet ups again having dipped out of those for a while. Local Home Ed communities seem to be funny old things really, often with some sort of semi-political undercurrent, different people having very different needs and expectations of the people within them and sometimes the different parenting style not to mention educational approaches bringing about clashes of personalities. They are also rather incestuous with lots of links of friendships, common membership to other things and people finding their way to the Home Ed path by different methods. I often find the seven degrees of seperation is more like two degrees in HE circles with everyone knowing someone who knows someone .I find the much younger children with parents who are Home Educating their 17 month old quite trying at times and much though I am happy to talk to people there are only so many times you can tell your HE story and explain your approach before it starts to feel tired even to your own ears. I think after a year or so out of the loop we are ready to go back in again for a while at least and have made some new friends and contacts just in the last couple of months and found my own passion for what we do reignited from talking with passion, committment (and finally experience ) - it helps that now Monster and Teeny are also passionate and vocal about our path and how we do things and like to join in with discussions about the pros and cons.

I am finding that Monster and Teeny are starting to develop more sophisticated interests and wanting to take them to greater depths. I have always considered my role in our Home Education partnership to be facilitator and am starting to fill that role to a greater extent as I am able to step away more from the supervisor role. Probably a good example of how this is working, and how I anticipate it working even more moving forward is Monster’s art work project. He has always been pretty artistic, turning out very good drawings from a very early age. It is how he expresses himself and his emotions very often, how he plays and a real part of who he is - we have always had loads of pens, paper, colours around and in the summer he will chalk drawings on the paths in our garden, in winter he will rip open cardboard loo rolls to draw on the insides and nothing gives him greater pleasure on a car journey than the blank canvas of a misted up car window. Attempting to steer away from the pushy mum / over enthusiasm killing his interest I have always given his efforts due recognition, given advise and assistance when asked and introduced the ideas of different art techniques over time. At Christmas having spent some time looking at books about watercolours we got Monster various art materials including watercolours, nice brushes and lovely watercolour paper to use. Monster had noticed the display area at our local library (where I happen to work part time so they are very familiar with) and asked me about it as there was a display of someone’s artwork up at the time. I explained that it is free for people to book and display their work and he expressed a desire to do just that. I booked the space for him, a good few weeks in advance and explained that he would need to have a coherant set of work to display but left the rest to him.

Monster took it upon himself to come up with an initial idea which built into a theme of ‘library through the ages’. He has long had an interest in buildings and architecture and is currently quite interested in history so the whole thing seemed to come together beautifully. With A’s help he found an illustrated encyclopedia with some costumes and buildings through various ages so he created a set of drawings from cave men through to the present day. With the idea fully developed we went together to the library again to view the available space and then to the art shop to purchase the card Monster decided would be best for his art. He then worked, admittedly with some support in terms of suggestion of techniques and timescales but all the work was his own to complete the project, culminating with going to the shop to buy fixing pads and putting the display up.

This to me perfectly illustrates every aspect of our Home Education. The techniques of art, purchasing the materials, booking the display space and answering all his questions along the way naturally fell to me. The interest in art, wishing to learn more and better his technique, idea of displaying his work and planning and execution of the whole thing fell 100% to Monster. If at any point he had decided to not continue then that would have been fine - as such he was able to take full credit for it. To me it doesn’t seem any big achievement really. I am, of course, extremely proud of him - he demonstrated all sorts of admirable character traits throughout aswell as oodles of artistic talent and ability to see a tricky project through all the way but mostly this seems utterly logical to me in HE terms - he shows an interest, I give him more information to learn more, offer opportunities to take it further if he wishes, he puts in the effort and sets the bar with support and cheering along the way provided by me where necessary.

We’ve been going along to a monthly meet up of HE folk at the local RSPB site and as a result have joined the RSPB which will hopefully open the gateway to other nature-based stuff - one of the things on both Monster and Teeny’s list of things they want to do more of. We’re already planning to go there twice next week for various events. Another thing on their lists was pony riding, inspired by a trip to the pony my SIL has a part share of. A first go at riding and both of them were hooked! We have a monthly trip there with more pony riding leading to off the lead and possibly even jumping all of which my SIL is more than able to facilitate for them . This of course includes the grooming, feeding and mucking out .

Monster’s fascination with history and architecture has been the catalyst for some local museum trips which have helped with things like costume and culture discussions too. We have a visit to another local museum planned for later this week and I would like to make a trip to the British Museum sometime soon to help take this interest to another level. We have looked at books and often spot buildings of different ages just as we go about. We have also just joined the National Trust and plan to make the very most of every penny of that outlay by visiting as many places as we can, all of which will no doubt be the catalyst for yet more interest in history, buildings and culture. We’ve also been watching lots of Horrible Histories on dvd which has been helping to get his mental timeline of history all in order (not to mention mine!).

Teeny has been asking lots of questions on a more philosophical level - as I recall Monster did around the same age (5) when her mind is getting slightly less focused on Teeny and slightly more on the rest of the world around her. We have talked lots about evolution, creation and other theories, all of which seemed to lead to our world and some of the geographical details about it. Very loosely related and something of an ongoing interest in space and beyond we had a trip to a planetarium where we saw a film in their ’star theatre’ about what to look for this time of year in frosty night skies. This has spun off straight into two nights star gazing, looking at a night sky atlas book we’ve had kicking around a while and tonight we saw the international space station go over before coming in and finding youtube videos to tell us precisely what the ISS is all about anyway. We’ve got some books on the way to help with talking about evolution and will probably dip into a Bible for a bit of help with the creationists side of the story.

Monster has been doing lots of playing with the concept of numbers lately. It’s all in relation to the world around him but along the way we’ve introduced the concepts of ratios, percentages, fractions, multiplication into his world. A lot of it is to do with time or money (lol, isn’t everything!) but things like DS and X box games have helped and he talks about measurements of things - weight, height, length, time (from seconds, minutes and hours to days, weeks and months). It’s quite extraordinary to see the fusing together of bits of number knowledge as it happens with him, he enjoys playing with numbers, sometimes asking for ‘if you had £x and something cost £Y how much change would you have?’ type questions, but always mentally. We haven’t looked at writing anything mathematical down yet although I am sure it will come getting the idea of numbers straight in his head first seems key. As ever Teeny follows not long behind her big brother .

Other things high on our agenda include some camping trips as soon as the weather is warm enough. We finally got our own tent which actually seems suitable for UK camping in and are looking forward to our virgin trip in that. We have various camps and trips away with friends planned as well as some hopeful places to stay if everything pans out for the rest of the year according to plan. We also have plenty of day trips we’d like to do, which again will depend on finances and will be prioritised accordingly. 

During our planning and plotting of what we want to do more of we also talked about what we want to do less of! Top of Monster’s list is going to the supermarket! As part of a move towards a more frugal lifestyle we started to do one big monthly shop 2 years ago which does indeed save us lots of money. Moving towards a more ethical lifestyle over recent months we have started to shop more at the butchers and greengrocers and cherish the notion of one day being more self sufficient. Until then the supermarket remains a necessary evil for basic food stuffs but having ascertained that some food shopping is not just a plain fact of life but can also be enjoyable and educational I am forced to concede that there is little to be gained from dragging two children round Sainsburys! Our plan is to try an online shop next month instead but this will too be something Monster and Teeny can get something from and can assist me in the IT based end of it and again when it arrives and needs putting away!

So we have plans . We’ve had a very good start to the year with some exciting happenings, some promising starts and have plenty more things lined up to look forward to. We have big hopes for 2008 and alongside that I am hoping to try and get more of what we do blogged here too. 

There was a thread on the EarlyYearsHomeEd list recently about the differences in definitions of approaches. I have posted what I would consider the definitions to be over there but it’s set me thinking a bit about autonomy, child-led, unschooling and all the other labels we hear used in relation to Home Education.

In real life I’ve met some new Home Ed contacts lately and spent time with different Home Educators to usual aswell as finding myself talking about Home Education generally to other people. This sometimes makes me all the more evangelical about the idea, sometimes it makes me feel judged and defensive. I guess which way I feel probably depends on how well I’ve put across what we do and how much the person I’m talking to has ‘got it’.

The older Monster and Teeny get and the further down our chosen path we tread the greater my confidence in it is. I’ve been thinking about how we are doing almost exactly what people think couldn’t possibly work by not limited any activities and how just as I hoped the children are self limiting on them when left to their own devices. They have free access to ‘bad’ stuff like TV, DVDs, DSs, X box yet tend to move seamlessly from such pursuits to getting out pens and paper, lego, geomags, toy animals and other toys which require imagination, creativity. I never find time to worry about what they’re not learning as I’m far too busy thinking about how to answer all the questions that they ask anyway and follow up all the ideas they present to me. I never plan anything obviously educational but often things will just arise and it’s only afterwards I realise how much ‘educational value’ there was in them.

Our weeks pass in a flurry of activities; Mondays is Beavers for Monster; where alongside all the obvious Scounting Association agenda he is also getting valuable lessons in just how rowdy a big group of 6-8 year old boys are and how 3 women really struggle to manage them, how best to stay under the radar of the bully without joining him, who Monster himself is when he is not defined by me, his Dad or his sister. He needs to look after his own Beaver uniform ensuring it ends up in the wash when it is dirty and that he puts is away where he can find it again ready for next week.

Tuesdays is swimming lessons for Monster and Teeny. This is mostly about the physical act of learning to swim but they are also getting to grips with taking instruction in something specific, listening in a group situation with the handicap of being in water in a noisy pool.

Wednesdays they both go to Badgers where their Home Ed status is something of a novelty so they are learning to answer questions about ‘what its all about’ in their own words to their own peers. Monster is an old hand at Badgers where Teeny is the new girl so they are getting lessons in being the one with all the information and sharing it and the one with no information who needs to get it. This is in addtion to all the many varied activities St Johns Ambulance are putting on for them too.

One and a half days a week I am out at work so they are both learning how to cope without me and work with other adults and children on their territory. They are watching me work and enjoy it and hopefully getting the idea that there are rewards other than financial to being out of the house trading skills for a salary.

The rest of our time is a mix of being at home where we get on with our own things really - that could be watching tv or films, listening to music, reading books, painting pictures, baking, playing, drawing, chatting. In various combinations of one, two, three or all four of us depending on who is around and who wants to do what. Or we are out and about; there are necessary trips to places like the butchers, supermarket, town, post office, petrol station and so on. We spend lots of time visiting or being with friends - either at their houses, having them to visit us or meeting at various places. We have a bank of places we like to visit regularly - parks, woods, beach, soft play, zoo, gardens. We also travel about to places like farms, museums, sealife centres. We go on at least 4 holidays a year, often with friends, always on a budget.

Sounds very simple doesn’t it? That’s probably because it is. And are they learning? Hell, yes! They are learning all about life, about people, about the world around them. I know this because I’m learning a lot of it alongside them. What else are they learning? Well they are of course learning those all important skills such as literacy and numeracy in much the same was as they learnt to walk and talk, by doing it, by spotting where it is relevant and picking up the skills as they go along. I have my wobbles, as do we all, whatever path we have chosen but usually my reassurance is simply to listen to Monster or Teeny talking, to watch them skipping along the path content that as soon as they need to know something they discover the way to find it out.

I’ve put this post together as a way of galvanising myself into keeping up a bit more with this blog. I like the idea of having a Home Ed blog that is open to general viewing and I know how much I was helped by reading blogs and talking to people. I know that our way is experimental, possibly more a leap of faith than buying into a curriculum or practising a school at home approach. It’s not for everyone but it certainly works for us.

It’s been a while since I was last here. I do keep another, far more regularly updated blog which is more of a diary type of account of stuff we get up to, I tend to keep this one for more HE specific ramblings, but is so often the case with HE I find it tricky to seperate it from the rest of life, so this blog gets neglected rather.

We had a good summer, with camps, camping, a few socialising with friends occassions and a break from the regular activities that we enjoy but hamper our freedom somewhat so it’s always nice to take a break from. Sadly the weather was far from on our side this summer, making me all the more thankful that we were able to enjoy a wonderful March and April with days on end spent on the beach, and are able to enjoy the clear crisp autumn days at the park in the sunshine when everyone else is back at school. The summer almost seemed to end the weekend of Monster’s birthday party really with the weather turning colder that very week. His party was a lovely celebration, very fitting for him and another memory to add to his catalogue of happy childhood times. It was blogged about elsewhere so I won’t go into great detail but it was planned mostly by Monster himself, with a Doctor Who theme. We had Doctor Who food, music, decor and games with a lifesize dalek and tardis adorning the party hall, plenty of dressed up party attendees, a tardis and a dalek cake and tardis goody bags for all the guests. We had a houseful that night too, with 24 of us sitting down on the lounge floor (as you know we don’t have a table, but if we did we still wouldn’t have accomodated that sort of number ) for fish and chips. For Monster it was a wonderful weekend surrounded by friends, loving being the host and the centre of attention, enjoying the payoff of his creative planning and ideas, facilitated by me.

We’re now back into our weekly ‘regime’ of Magical Monday’s Home Ed group followed by Beavers for Monster on a Monday, Swimming lessons for Monster on a Tuesday and Badgers for Monster on a Wednesday. Teeny will start Badgers alongside Monster when she turns 5 in December and will also start Rainbows on a Friday after Christmas too, leaving Thursday as the only evening we don’t have someplace to be around 5pm.

I’ve been doing lots of thinking and reading and researching followed by a bit more thinking and just checking in with myself really that I am happy with the path we are following, both in terms of being right for our family as a whole and all the members of the family individually and in terms of educational provision and holistic wellbeing. Teeny would have started school this month and we are in a very different place to when Monster would have started school with all sorts of life changes happening in the last couple of years. I’ve been reading widely, the most important in terms of Home Education has to have been And The Skylark Sings With Me, which I mentioned i a previous blogpost and have since finished reading and exchange emails with the author. I found it a thought provoking, challenging, inspiring and uplifting read, giving a boost to my confidence and renewed enthusiasm for what we do and how we do it. A period of talking to lots of people about Home Ed, which always seems to be a ‘hot topic’ at ‘back to school’ time each year coupled with the twin leaps of having a school age youngest child and a 7 year old oldest child (which just somehow seemed really rather grown up!) had me pondering all sorts of things. A bit of soul searching and chatting to friends put me back on track again and had me realising anew just how wonderful and individual Monster and Teeny are, and what great examples of autonomy and HE generally they are, and why it is totally right for us to be doing what we’re doing. I’m currently reading ‘Punished By Rewards’  which I’m finding equally enlightening and by coincidence am reading alongside The Female Eunuch which is managing to be equally startling and potentially life changing, albeit for different reasons. Also jostling for space on the bookshelves here currently are various books about self building, eco builds and self sufficiency. Having said earlier how much we’ve changed in the last two years I am very confident that the next two years will see yet more life changing stuff here.

I imagine I’ll be back sooner rather than later to blog further on some of my conclusions about various things, but for now we’re getting used to getting back in the swing of things and enjoying the changing of the season. 

When I fell pregnant with Monster I read a lot of parenting books. Actually, no that’s a lie, I bought a lot of parenting books, most of them sat, unread, on a bookshelf dedicated to self improvement alongside titles such as ‘make money from home- 100 tried and tested business ideas for making millions from your spare room in 20 minutes a day’ and ‘men are from mars, women are from venus, women cry, men don’t read maps, sod it let’s all go to the pub’ and ‘how to win friends, influence people and take over the world’. You know the sort of thing . Anyway, I had lots of parenting books and what I tended to do was read the blurb on the back, maybe read the index of chapter titles and then dip into them here and there. If I liked what I read and it was inline with what I was already doing I’d congratulate myself on my sound parenting techniques and recommend the book to others to read. If I didn’t like it or it made me feel inadequate or grated for whatever reason then I’d sell it on Amazon marketplace. You can probably guess where Gina Ford ended up That’s the same discipline I used when talking to other parents really, if something worked for me and Monster then we carried on doing it, if it didn’t then we discounted it as not right for us. This meant we had a fairly eclectic mix of parenting with fairly strict meal time and bed time routines but very little in the way of worrying about him staying asleep through the night in his own bed, I was fortunate that Monster was a big baby and remained fairly chubby so although I took him to baby clinic every week it was more through fear that he’d be the child on Jerry Springer as a toddler weighing as much as the average 10 year old rather than because I feared I was not feeding him enough, and because I was actually a very conscientious feeder back then, lovingly cooking, pureeing and freezing food in ice cube trays using the wisdom on Anabel Karmel I knew I was doing everything right there and he wasn’t big due to a diet of coke, burgers and icecream aged 9 months.

When I fell pregnant again with Teeny I got lots of books about sibling relationships - ‘Sibling Rivalry, Sibling Love’, ‘Three shoes, one sock and no hairbrush’ and ‘Face it your toddler is going to loathe your new born on sight, you won’t want to be leaving them alone in the room anytime soon any more than you’d trust your pitbull to babysit!’. Again I read snippets, got the idea that my plan to focus more on Monster and his reaction to his world being turned upside down whilst meeting Teeny’s basic needs but not worrying too much about stimulating her with nursery rhymes and monochrome pictures for 6 hours a day was the way to go and carried on with that plan.

When we started looking into Home Education naturally one of the first things I purchased along with a laminator, hama beads and loads of box sets from The Book People was most of amazon’s catalogue of Home Ed titles. The only one I really read was Free Range Education, the rest ended up back on amazon marketplace having sat on that same shelf of the bookshelf marking me out as a proper educated home educator for a couple of years. But I work one and a half days a week at our local library and when I was still quite new there I checked out to see whether there were many HE titles available to borrow - more with the intention of making a fuss about not having a wide stock holding if there wasn’t to be honest, but I got in all we had in the subject to have a look at. Most of them were old and dusty having come out of our nonfiction reserve store but one of them looked fairly new and interesting, despite knowing I shouldn’t I still judge a book by it’s cover and this one looked pretty too so I kept it and kept renewing it while it sat in a corner of the bookcase waiting for me to have a proper look at it.

This week I have indeed had a proper look at it, and while I intended, in my normal ‘manual’ browsing manner to cast an eye on a few pages throughout I’ve found myself totally engaged and engrossed in it. I’m reading every single word and nodding a lot. It’s totally anecdotal, based solely on the personal experience of one family home educating their two daughters, written very personally and almost like reading someone’s blog, there is no ’science bit’ or pompous air of telling me how I should be doing anything, just a very frank account of their HE journey during a period of their lives, their feelings about education and family generally and how it all works for them. What I am enjoying most about it is that it is a celebration of their children as individuals, not being compared even to each other let alone the rest of the world, not fretting about what they can’t do, but cheering what they can, finding ways to facilitate their learning, accepting that they are very different people even from their parents and accepting that it is those individual children who know better than anybody else what they should be learning about next. The book is And The Skylark Sings With Me by David H. Albert . I’ve not read any of his other titles, although I will aim to do so once I’ve finished this one, but if there is one thing I’ve learnt about gurus it is that they will always fail you so I’m not about to start following his ideas to the letter but here are a few passages I’ve read in And The Skylark Sings With Me which have moved me to write this post:

About his 20 month old daughter who professed a desire to learn the violin: 

 "Nothing would have come of this except that every day, sometimes twice a day, for the next three months, Ali demanded that she wanted to learn to play the violin. This sounded absolutely crazy to us. Did they make violins that small? Could a teacher be found who would be willing to teach a toddler still in diapers? Would a bad experience turn her off from music-making for life? Would she learn anything that would be of value?

The answers to the foregoing questions are: Yes, Yes, No, and empathically Yes….Ali had now given us two of our most important homeschooling lessons, both of which carried over into all aspects of our learning adventures: first that we weren’t going to be able to do everything ourselves, and hence would have to learn how to find other resources; and second, that we were going to be experimental in approach rather than be governed by someone else’s narrow conception of "age- appropriateness…

We learned another lesson too which lead me to risk beginning this book with our family’s musical adventures. I am aware of course that music is not every child’s cup of tea, and our experience around it might be sufficiently foreign as to make it diffficult for some readers to relate to easily. But the point is that music turned out to be, regardless of our own expectations, something both our children are passionate about, something intimately entwined in their earliest notions of their unique identities. Our kids taught us that our task is to seek avenues for whatever inward leadings they exhibit to blossom, and to find ways for our children to become who they already are, or were meant to be"

About why this family homeschool when they are real supporters of public and community institutions otherwise:

"It is a marvel of American democracy to observe citizens tax themselves to support safe and adequate water supplies, to build adequate roads and sidewalks, to construct adequate sewage disposal facilities, and to maintain an adequate public health infrastructure.

But education, we are persuaded, needs to be viewed differently. While the public school mission of an adequate education for all children in a democracy is a noble one, especially when we recognize how far we as a society are from achieving even this, from my perspective as a parent, the goal of an "adequate" education for my children is by definition "inadequate." Children are not the same as sidewalks; entrusted with the total development of human beings - each with their own personalities, gifts, capacities, and ever-changing learning needs - responsible adults could not but come, I believe, to the conclusion that "adequate" simply isn’t good enough.

If we start from that premise, it soon becomes evident that what we have come to question about public education is not so much is actual practice, which varies quite widely from place to place and school to school, but it’s universally accepted mission. This has little to do with "good" versus "bad" teachers (I’ve known plenty of good ones in the conventional sense of the term, and, on balance, there are probably more who are well-intentioned than the other kind); educational "enrichment" (why would any parents suffer their children to undergo the "unenriched" variety?); curriculum reform (when hasn’t there been curriculum reform?): or funding for schools, computers, or teacher salaries….But on the whole, from our perspective, these considerations are beside the point. In challenging public education’s mission, at least for our children, we implicity call into question the entire administrative structure of school buildings, scheduled school days and hours and vacations, age bound grade bands, classrooms with prescribed numbers of children assigned, predetermined currciula, and arbitary though strictly defined schedules for testing and evaluation. Taken together these serve as the bureaucratic engine by which adequate educations are more of less efficiently produced; our experience indicates they have next to nothing to do with how children, how humans, optimally learn. Since "adequate" rather than "optimal" education is the public school mission, even given occasional protestations to the contrary, this shouldn’t seem particularly surprising."

There will be more, I am so far into chapter two and would happily sit and type all I’ve read so far out, such is my feeling of wanting to share this. Every so often I read a blog post, hear a Home Educating parent or child say something or witness something in my own home which makes me want to paint banners and march urging everyone to do what we do. I know most of the time that what we do suits us and that is all I need to consider but my current reading is giving me passion, enthusiasm and joy anew for this journey that we are also making. 

For some reason, although I obviously knew it to be the case, it has only really occured to me in the last week or two that Teeny would be about to start school in a couple of weeks time. Teeny has never been going to go to school, we started looking into the idea of Home Education while she was still a small baby and long before she reached 2 it was what we were going to do. With Monster the day that would have been his first day at school passed pretty much without note although I did have some feeling that now we were ‘proper’ ‘official’ home educators .

Teeny’s home education has been a truly autonomous one to date. She learnt how to write her name from me writing it out for her, upper case so she could type it into a barbie.com website to play the games. It was a small step from losing the piece of paper I write it on and her managing to type it without the paper to one day just writing it. She can now do it upper and lower case and knows the names of the letters in her name and what sound they make. She also knows Monster’s initial, M for Mummy, D for Daddy, N for Nic and a couple of others. Bu we’ve never done anything formal, unlike Monster who had a but of 100 easy lessons and sporadic workbooks back in the day when I worried about such things . That sounds flippant and of course a child learning to read is not something to be made light of but I am now firmly of the opinion that like potty training, sleeping through the night, being able to let me out of their sight and various other landmarks of development that some people feel the need to push children into by various means actually reading is yet another skill they will learn when they’re ready - I think it can be learnt, not taught.

All of the things I fretted about as potential issues with Monster have, over the years, shown themselves to be not issues at all. Worries about him struggling to socialise, having people to socialise with at all, talking to people, having interests and passions, wanting to know about stuff, engaging with people, asking questions, being motivated and so on have all proved unfounded. I know at not even seven there is plenty of time for future angst and I am sure it will not all be plain sailing but I regularly stand back and watch Monster from a distance, in various situations and not only feel proud that he is my son I also see him as walking, talking, living proof that Home Education, and specifically the brand of it we follow is utterly right for him. I am frequently complimented on what a lovely boy he is; a polite, happy, interested child. I think he’s a great advertisment for autonomous education.

So in the same way as we don’t have a picture of Monster on his first day at school and I’ve never sewn his name tapes into school uniform we will soon have passed the landmark date that would have marked Teeny heading off into a different world and simply have carried on doing what we already do. We’re hoping to mark the event with a meet up with other Home Educating friends on the actual day but other than that nothing will change here. I won’t feel the need to do anything different now we’re ‘official’ or fret about keeping records of work incase the LEA catch up with us. In short we will continue with our own personal tried and tested method for learning - living life.

So what am I wanting to thank you for? Well, it is mostly through reading blogs of other Home Educators that I gained the confidence to leave things alone. It was reading blogposts of people with 7, 8, 9 year olds who were struggling to read and suddenly it all clicked for them, knowing those children now at 9, 10, 11 and seeing them with their noses stuck in books. Reading stories about teenagers doing inspirational things, reading about how if you can only manage to ‘trust the process’. I have had the luxury of using those going before us as case studies. If someone had told me 3 years ago that my nearly 7 year old wouldnt be ‘reading’ Id be horrified - it would have been enough to send me headed straight for the nearest infant school signing him up straight away. But having read about other people’s children not reading at this age and then knowing that it was a mere matter of weeks from this point to happily reading chapter books when it all suddenly clicked gives me the confidence to remain hands off and let things take their natural course. I distinctly recall reading one of Joyce’s blogposts (on the blog before, the blog before this one!) about her daughter, how she clung to her still at 3 and later, and crying because she could have been describing my 3 year old Monster. I remember celebrating online with Merry when Fran clicked with reading, being thrilled for Jules when Joseph read the word ‘cash’ on an ATM cashpoint and being generally inspired by the older children of Alison, June, Sarah and Gill.

I remember struggling with Monster as a new born when I realised that actually life was never going to ‘get back to normal’, what was going to happen was that we were going to find a whole new normal. A friend told me, in calming, comforting tones that ‘it will get easier, it will get better’ - balm to my troubled, sleep deprived, shell shocked soul. I have since repeated that mantra to countless new mothers myself. I remember someone agreeing that having a toddler and a newborn baby was indeed bloody hard work but that it was for a finite period of time and then it all improved. And that is what the early incarnation of the early years blogring did for me. It gave me the luxury of sitting back and reading about the angst and trials of others, way before I needed to worry about such things myself and it meant that by the time I would have been revving up to start worrying about them I already knew I didn’t have to, because it had all come good already for the children of those people so I was safe in the knowledge that it would indeed come good for me in due course too. And you know what, slowly but surely it is. So forgive me if I don’t give the passing of Teeny’s first day not at school a second thought but thanks to all of those who’ve gone before and come out the other side, it really doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything other than getting on with our lives.

Three Kessinglands, two Melroses, two NicCamps, a HESFes and an Okehampton. The core group of all of the Home Ed camps we’ve attended have been roughly the same people although there have been omissions and additions along the way. Last week we went to our third Kessingland, our fifth Muddlepuddle camp. It’s over 3 years since we went to our first camp - Melrose 2005 but a lot of the faces were the same.

I took two very shy and quiet children to that first Melrose, and a nervous and not at all sure about all this Home Education malarkey husband. Last week I took two children who were happily at the centre of the group of children, their friends and a husband who not only could happily talk to anyone and everyone about Home Education but also has a household appliance named in his honour in at least two other households

It wasn’t my finest week, camp-wise. In the first 24 hours I found myself homeless having taken an uncampable-in tent with us, a single parent having sent A home to get a more suitable tent and severely visually impaired having sent him off without first taking my contact lenses out of the car! Whilst it was nice to feel I was doing massive amounts in making us a very politically correct camp I was not great at needing help from other people, much though I was touched at the amount that was offered and given.

However I have come home and read other people’s accounts of the week, looked at my own and others’ pictures of the week and talked to my children about how they found it and realised that weather, other issues both minor and major aside it was still a good week. The children got to run wild and free with their best friends in the world, mixing and mingling playmates effortlessly, crossing age, gender and happily welcoming new faces into their games. For them tenting in wild extremes of weather is an adventure and the addition of muddy puddles to jump in and encourage ducks is just an added bonus. Monster and Teeny enjoyed new levels of independance, loved playing on beaches, slipping on the muddy path to the toilets and waking up each morning for a whole week knowing all that stretched infront of them was another day of playing with their mates and not having to go to bed until really late having worn themselves out running around and spending the evening at the on site entertainment.

A and I got to spend lots of time chatting to friends too. True it wasn’t sitting outside tents while the sun set on yet another glorious June day, it was huddled inside tents while the rain lashed and the wind howled, or unpitching and walking across the field with yet another tent that had flooded out ready to re-pitch in a better spot. But there were still plenty of chances to socialise.

We had a Cabaret event - it was planned to be an evening event in a marquee but the marquee got blown down earlier in the week so it was moved to an afternoon event inside instead. The variety of children (and one grown up ) standing up to perform infront of the group was wonderful - we were treated to well over an hour of singing, dancing, joke telling, musical instrument playing, poetry, acting and collaborative efforts. From the teeniest toddler singing from behind their mother’s legs to the more polished and confident performances of the older children, every one was a triumph of achievement.

Within that camping field we had most sorts of home educators represented, from the curriculum followers to the automomous and everywhere inbetween but what the children all had in common was that magnificent sense of individuality, of self, of being their own person, defined only by themselves. I don’t think I had the ’so why do you home educate?’ conversation once all week, which I take as a sign of how we’ve moved on. I once considered us to be considering home education, then we were doing it ‘for now’, now we simply just do it and I couldn’t really envisage doing anything else. But weeks like that, where you are one of many rather than one out of many are good for the soul, good for confidence, good for feeling smug. Thanks to all who were there.  

I’ve been tagged by Shukr who’s blog I’ve just been catching up on (Hi, btw, nice to ‘meet’ you ) for this meme which is rather similar to one I was tagged for a while back so rather than recreate similar answers for that one I thought I’d give 8 facts about this blog and the people who feature in it instead. To quote Shukr ‘ to get to know the really interesting stuff you’d need to actually get to know me!’ also been tagged by Allie at Green House by the Sea too

The rules are simple…Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1. Monster & Teeny aren’t really called Monster & Teeny! I’m not going to ‘out’ them here as one of the reasons they are refered to that way on blog is to protect their anonymity. I do have a passworded blog elsewhere which names them and gives more details about us than I am happy to show on a public blog to the whole world! Monster’s real name is my maiden name though and Teeny’s real name is what I knew I’d call my daughter for many, many years before I actually had one. Monster was Monster’s nickname from before he was actually born and Teeny was one of the many names we gave Teeny as a nickname when she was born. They both occassionally get called Monster or Teeny in real life and ‘MonsterTeenies’ or ‘The MT’s’ have become our reference within the Muddlepuddle group. This always reminds me of The Ovalteenies and I often think we should really have a theme tune sung to that music.
2. We don’t have a table
3. We have one cat, three fish and five chicks currently as pets in our house. The cat is here til she dies, the fish are here until they grow too big for their bowls whereupon they get moved to my Dad’s pond and replacements with the same names purchased. Teeny’s fish are only 6 months old (to us) and are still the originals. Monster currently only has one fish as we’re waiting for it to be moved to Grandad’s pond before replacing both the fish - that will be Fred mark 3 and Albert mark 2. Any of our chicks which are hens will be taking up permanent residence here chez MonsterTeeny, we may keep one cockerel.
4. My favourite word is receptacle.
5. Teeny has never had a hair cut. She has had her fringe trimmed. Monster had his first hair cut when he was 8 months old. I have hair cuts as and when I decide I need one. A has very little hair but shaves what he does have on a pretty regular basis. Quite ironic that the most haircutted member of the MTs is the one with the least hair.
6. Monster’s favourite colour is red, Teeny’s is pink, her second favourite colour is yellow, mine is purple and A’s is blue.
7. Chez MonsterTeeny an affectionate nickname for any one of the family is ‘Snotface’ as used in the film Drop Dead Fred.
8. We have, more than once, had screaming contests while travelling by car on long journeys. Teeny is probably almost always the winner as she has better pitch.

And I tag:

Lucy from Beyond my wildest

Em at Title for life 

Bob at In at the deep end 

Katy at In at the deep end 

Anni at T Bird Anni Rides Again

Joyce at Moving at the speed of light

Gill at Sometimes its peaceful 

and because I know how she adores this sort of meme;

Alison at The Portico 

Some chick pics at 2.5 weeks

Wobble

Freddie

Punzel:

Feathers:

and Rhonda:

They continue to be very entertaining and amusing additions to the household. The cat hates them, Teeny has a scratch on her knee and one on her shoulder where she’s gotten in the way of their flappy flying and both children are very proficient at holding and dealing with them. Still no idea on what breed or gender they are but they’re a lot of fun and still cute if rather less fluffy by the day!

But then I guess you already knew that. In much the same way as politicians use spin to tell us what we want to hear, spin is used to sell you things you don’t actually want or need. I think one of the areas that spin is used the most is Education. And I utterly include Home Education in that sentence. I regularly use spin to convince people of the benefits of Home Education - it’s not that I don’t think what I am saying is true, or that I am trying to market Home Education to people particularly but a bit of spin does allow us to get on with what we want to do, how we want to do it while reassuring people enough that we are not members of some weird cult or abusing our children and glossing over some of the less traditional ideas we have.

We’re not known to the LEA and I would defend to great lengths our right to remain unknown, after that our right to educated Monster and Teeny in the way we see fit without visits to our home, meetings with the children, presentations or ‘proof’ of our educational provision. However, if I had to do it I know I could. I know I could fairly easily convince an LEA bod that we ticked all of their boxes and then some. I could spin what Monster and Teeny spend one morning a week doing, without any intervention or guidance from me, into encompassing every area of the National Curriculm. Yes, ladies and gentlemen without the aid of a single workbook, curriculum, lapbook or even time spent sitting round a table, let alone a safety net I could fit what we do into boxes, label it, colour code it, timetable-er-ize it and present it, neatly packaged into bite sized gift wrapped chunks of spin, satisfying anyone that we were providing that all important age, aptitude and ability appropriate education.

Long, long ago when I was still full of questions about Home Education worked, full of doubts about how I would possibly cover every ’subject’ let alone deal with issues like pythagorus someone gave me an example of how they spent their morning:

We decide to do some baking so we get out a recipe book and read the ingredients list, writing down our shopping list of items we need to buy. We walk to the local shop where we purchase the items on our list, having added up the total and worked out what change we will get. We stopped at the park on the way home for a play on the slide and swings to run off some energy playing with some other children we met there.

Once home we weighed out out the ingredients, followed the recipe and baked our cake. When it had cooled we iced and decorated it.

In just that brief exercise you have your literacy (reading, writing) numeracy (weighing out, paying) physical exercise (walking and playing in the park) socialisation (with other children in the park) science (baking - adding ingredients together to change form, adding heat from the oven to cook) and art (cake decoration). Add in all the conversations you’ll no doubt have along the way, maybe some observation about the weather, the wildlife you might happen across in the park, some discussion and negotiation about what recipe to use for your cake, what colour to ice it, some long words chucking in educational terms and a sprinkling of photographs of children doing the writing, baking, running in the park, icing the cake and there you have a near perfect example of activties that meet all the criteria of even the most picky of inspectors.

Even with our autonomous approach if I wanted to I could easily pick out examples of everything the children do which meet the ’standards’ required. This despite the fact everything they do is at their own volition with me occassionally suggesting or offering or introducing ideas and activities. I could spin so many of the things we do into ‘projects’ or ’studies’ along with supplying huge photographic evidence, reading lists of the many books we have, art inspired by it, supplemented with the many and varied conversations we have - a perfect example of this recently would be our chick hatching. Which has spawned all sorts of activities, knowledge about bird life cycles and development, chick inspired art, plenty of practical animal caring and rearing experience, learning about their needs, alternative ways in which chicks are reared and treated. Monster narrated a piece to go in our local HE newsletter about the chicks hatching and between them they came up with the idea of a competition to name our fifth chick which they judged and picked a winner for. In very traditional ‘which came first?’ mode clearly if we’d not introduced the eggs and the incubator into the house this would never have come about but that was all we did - all of the ensuing developments from the chicks hatching to the various inspired activities the children have done since happened without our direction or interferance. But if I needed to I could rewrite that to perfectly document our chicken and egg insprired curriculum for the Summer Term at MonsterTeeny Home School and present it with lesson plans, timetabled schedules of what we did when and have it all look very contrived and successful.

Whenever I talk to people about Home Education, which is pretty darn regularly, they start off with all sorts of concerns / questions / issues. Gradually by way of calm, contained utter belief in what we’re doing I am able to answer all of those questions. Yes, we socialise, yes the children are learning, they are happy, healthy, inquisitive, intelligent, articulate little people with passions, interests, plenty to talk about, excellent communication skills and questionning, challenging minds, we are providing them with an education - depending on how I choose to spin it which at will certainly not fall short of what they would receive in school, with the right spin I can demonstrate that we cover every topics taught in school, just in baking that cake and walking to the park. What I find myself frequently left with as the last resort question is ‘wouldn’t it be easier for you if they were in school?’ because once you remove the potential damage to the children either educationally or socially that is about all you are left with. Clearly I have my days when the idea of waving them off with a lunchbox for seven hours at 9am would be really quite attractive, but I know I’d be missing them dreadfully by about 930am. One of the best things about Home Education for me has been doing all the great stuff I’d have loved to have done as a child but couldn’t because I was in school. Keeping tadpoles, hatching chicks, going to Legoland during term time when you don’t queue for one hour for every ride but instead can manage 6 rides in one hour, walking through the same woods once a week watching the seasons change, sitting on the beach during a surprise hot spell in April, splashing in the puddles during a surprise wet spell in May, spending an entire afternoon making animated plasticine figures, curling up with bowls of popcorn and watching 4 films back to back, driving a 300 miles round trip to attend a birthday party for an afternoon. I’ve never been so free, I’ve never had so much fun - this to me is what childhood should be about and I am just so lucky to be getting to have another go at it as a grown up and spending it with the amazing, fascinating, interesting, wonderful people on the journey with me still enjoying their first crack at childhood. And with a little bit of creativity it is possible to make all this fit into the little boxes we are required to fit it into. Result!