Home Educating the Puddle Girls…

Among many other things, yesterday Max and i talked a bit about how to manage 4 children and educating people in the style that suits us, when there is only one adult to do it. While i often do find it difficult, i think it is easy to forget that with the benefit of gradually upping the numbers and amounts of work required over 7 years of HEing, i’m quite well practised and, because i’m a dragon, the kids don’t play up particularly, or at least not all at once! Max, for all they are his kids, is not quite so practised at it and i think he finds the plate spinning side of it quite hard; the last 6 months of properly sharing the job has given him a very different perspective on it i think.

Personally i find that the trick is not to try and run a classroom, i can’t do it with everyone doing the same thing at once and i suppose this is a mindset i’ve had to achieve, having assumed that classroom and simultaneous subjects would be easiest. In fact, i rely on having someone reading, someone doing a computer activity, and no more than 2 (preferably one of them being a big child) doing something likely to need my input. We do topic type stuff together more, but i’m fairly fortunate that Josie (and often Amelie) will float off quite naturally during that time and play together. No one spends any time in front of the tv particularly, which i am pleased about as they were addicts as smaller children but they seem to have lost interest in it very naturally. We rarely even seem to play on the Wii, it is hardly ever out.

So anyway, having had that conversation, they seem to have had a very good day indeed. Josie apparently requested “education maffs” (she said this to me later too, very cute) and Max sat and did maths rods with her and showed her how to build numbers etc. She liked that a lot. Can’t remember what he said Amelie did, she’s acting up a lot at the moment, mainly because she is really only interested in reading which we fully support as a full time occupation, but it doesn’t quite scratch the whole itch for her, i don’t think. We need to come up with a plan for her somehow

Fran did reading, music, Meleto and some other things and Max and Maddy had a great time investigating Central America; the looked at an Atlas (one of those annotated ones for KS2-ish level) and Maddy was thrilled to be able to read it, DK Human which i got from the resident The Book People franchise at work and which is a completely FANTASTIC book and used the globe some more. All in all i think they discussed Volcanos, Hurricanes, the Caribbean, the Mayans and national costumes of the area and Maddy was particularly taken with the concept of the dangers of Cape Horn and thrilled by the idea of the Panama Canal; she re planned her paper boat route to suit her new route!

I was at work today; i’ve got a second part timer, which has some potential for interesting dynamics i think, but also allowed MF and i to do some proper “employer to employee” renegotiating of hours and then a genuine “teach you new skills to  move you forward to manager” training session. We badly needed this extra pair of hands, despite it being deathly quiet at the moment as we never quite get on top of things and there isn’t enough time for business development. Today felt really good, i felt like i was fully ably to make a plan and move forward with it and it was good to get MF away from some of the packing too. I also left at 3pm, which was great as i got time to come home and commune with family for a while. Annoyingly, new PTer also has a flower as her name, so i have no idea what to call her as a blog name, i might just be reduced to H.
Kids were very excited as Mark had been over and made a start on out new garden additions. We’re having a pagoda-type-thing built over the rabbit corner, partly to shade them and partly to cover us the fact that they are beginning to look a tad on the um…. untidy and sprawling rabbit metropolis side We’re also having one built across the back door so that the dining room gets a bit shaded from the very hot south facing-ness of the garden. I need to find some pretty things that grow very fast to grow up them.

Max had a work cricket match tonight so i took all the girls with me to cello; Fran had a really good lesson and is coming on so well, i am really proud of her. She practised 30 minutes a day at least and really works at it; it is paying off in the speed she is coming on. She’s using her 4th finger and bowing very competently now and her teacher is pleased with her. Unfortunately she is leaving at the end of term to go private However, Wednesday hasn’t been ideal for us, so i think it might be an opportunity to re-jig a bit and see what else we can do.

Home for tea, a film and more karaoke… which fool bought them a HSM karaoke disc?

Fran came across a story on Newsround about a boy who had left school at 11 and who was now running a business at the age of 16. Newsround didn’t say “home educated” but i suggested perhaps he was (she took some persuading!) and we Googled to find more about him and discovered his story on the Chokolit website.

This, the googling, reminded me of a conversation that occurred the other day. Fran asked some convoluted question and i said i didn’t know but that we could google for it (has ‘to google’ become a verb officially yet?) Fran, derisively (she’s reaching that age) said “You can’t ask Google questions!!!!!!” to which Maddy pointed out mildly that in fact you can and that we once asked Google “do Bananas have seeds?” and got a reply.

I asked her if she could remember the answer we found and she said “No, but i remember how i found it out, so i could find out other things too.”

And that, to me, is the point of home educating.

Got back to doing some “stuff” yesterday, but can’t actually remember what, mostly people lounging about reading improving stuff i think. Maddy is adoring her I Can Read books and now rates reading above drawing in the favourite stakes. I call that quite a result as she’s had a very hands off approach to learning, i doubt i’ve done even a quarter of the work with her that i did with Fran. Fran has made a start on a proper book study and Amelie and Josie were devouring Up,Up and Away books, though they did both reduce themselves to tears over a dead donkey. Cue considerable derision from their sisters who both picked up the book and pointed out her wasn’t dead at all. Josie tried to cheer Amelie up by saying “I’ve read it Am’ly, it doesn’t say donkey died, it says ‘conky kied…. actually, it says ‘tonky tied'’”

There was music, some spellings, so this and that and we popped out to work and did all the Jazz and Gym stuff in the evening. Worked okay.

Today was really good though.

Josie did ‘maffs’.

and Amelie procrastinated, read a bit, did some EC and generally did her best to duck under my radar. I forgave her, but won’t tomorrow Josie took herself off to play some little game that totally absorbed her for about 3 hours; she just sat on the 3rd step with a lap full of small toys and played and played.

Fran did a summary of the first 2 chapters of War Horse by Michael Morpurgo which is a kind of take on the Black Beauty idea and suits her current horse obsession as well as the history and reading one. I asked her to do each chapter in 5 sentences, written, then typed into her blog and properly punctuated. She did the first chapter very well, then lost it a bit so we did the second one together; i think doing that really helped her get the idea of a summary better and through up lots of ideas about how to use words and punctuation concisely. After that she read the first bit of a book called “Forgotten Voices of the First World War” and tried to unscramble how it all started then, inspired by what Maddy was doing, we found a 1914 map of Europe and she coloured in the Allies, Central Powers and Neutral countries.

Maddy had been reading a book called A Bear for Miguel and we’d been discussing guerilla warfare, government changes and the like as a result of it. I found her a map of Central America and she coloured sea, El Salvador and all the other countries, then i gave her one of the Americas to find El Salvador and then one of the World. She liked all that and now wants to do more geography which is good as i bought several of the more geographical ones of these this week.

Her particular bit of genius was to make a tiny paper boat (how very Maddy) and sail it from the UK to El Salvador on the globe. I do adore that girl.

Fran did decimals on Meleto, Maddy did multiplication sums using the 8x table as a base and then everyone did music and Maddy drew the front cover for the book she is going to write. AND the little girl from next door came round - and we popped into work - and they all played in the garden lots.

All in all, we did okay

We’ve been away, or at least most of them went away and i stayed, then i went too and we all came back. They had a nice ten days and i had a nice 4 days and all would have been perfect if life hadn’t reasserted itself right at the end and left us with a sour note back here that we haven’t yet shaken off. I’m feeling a bit churlish about that; i only had a short holiday and i’m a bit annoyed that i couldn’t be accommodated to spend one day of it with people i wanted to see without being subjected to tantrums. But there you go I’d like to say i don’t know what i did to deserve all this pain and angst, but i do, and its every bit as bad as i ever imagined it would be. Sometimes i wonder if enduring it is actually worth it?

I’ve spent today mostly being a very successful home school mom and also managing to fix our internet connection, which is provided courtesy of people whose name might suggest they want people to communicate (twice) but don’t appear to have the means to facilitate that *growl* It first began to go wrong a while back, dropping intermittently in the evenings. I had the fortune to get through to someone within 500 miles of me, who helped me twiddle with some settings and fixed it. Unfortunately it has been getting worse and from about 3pm to midnight, we’ve not been able to do more than 3 clicks between us before it drops (literally, 3, that was all you got, if you were lucky.) So today i had to go through 90 minutes of palaver with people reading from set paragraphs, who insisted it was

a) because our bt extensions were probably old and faulty (2 year old house).

b) we had the wrong cable

c) we weren’t using our computer next to the main bt socket (which would involve having it in front of the front door)

d) we had our router connected to an extension cable and plugged in near other electrical devices (yuh huh, the COMPUTER!!!!)

e) maybe we had Sky or Freeview and that was affecting it, or maybe our neighbours did

f) we didn’t know how to put our computer togethyer properly

I was made to unplug it all, move things about, wait for calls back, switch on and off etc, all of which i had done, while they assured me nothing was wrong with my connection and it must be our hardware (oh, and i also have a faulty phone that will only ring out one time in 4 but the people on the other end can hear me, do i) because it definitely isn’t their fault (my hardware being so pissy that it only cuts out between 3pm and 12am you understand.

Eventually, i answered no to enough questions about flashing lights and was given a new number which i was “only allowed to use for the next 5 days” (!) which got me through to a person without a checklist. He, bless him, said “yeah, you are on a cruddy profile and you need to have some new ADSL settings” - we did that and in 5 minutes i had a connection back again.

Having no connection sure stymies a house like this these days… no one could do ANYTHING this morning!

Today seemed to work very well; i’ve got out of the habit of going to work on a Monday as it just doesn’t seem to kick the week off very well. Instead, we made a plan of how we wanted the day to work, figured out what each of us needed to do in that time and then set about doing it.

TV went off early, before 9am and everyone was dressed then i gave everyone a spelling list; Fran uses Year 6 ones from a school site, Maddy Year 3 ones from a different school site (less per list, not so scary!) and i found some basic literacy ones for Ams. Josie ended up with some letter copying stuff from the never ending pile of workbooks i bought for Fran, about 7 years ago! She loved doing that though

We’ve got into this habit of spelling lists being writing practice, then Fran writes a story using the words and then types it up. She spent ages on hers today and got very into it, so much so that when it got to typing, she decided the beginning wasn’t good enough so she is rewriting it. As a structured bit of “English” it works quite well; the typing up is a good opportunity to try and tighten up the grammar and punctuation, she writes the lists in joined up and the story in print if she gets tired hands.

Today Maddy joined in too; lately she has said she hates writing (she always adored it when she was younger) but the idea grabbed her and she managed a whole A4 side of story too. It was very encouraging As a ‘reward’ i set up a new blog for her We also ordered some new “I Can Read” books - she picked Level 4 as she thought Level 3 was getting too easy now.

Amelie read; she was faking illness, so i made her lie on the sofa with books as a film would be “too tiring” i felt She miraculously recovered, until asked to do ETC, then felt achey, till i mentioned she’d be too poorly for gym, then did everything i asked her too at once!

Lunch, then we settled down to watch Ballet Shoes (2007 version with Emma Watson and Victoria Wood). Really good adaptation i thought, very little altered in the plot at all and no dumbing down to appease the political correctness of the 2000’s either. My children went into fits of horror when Sylvia lit up a fag!

Much discussion about who will be which Fossil; Fran wants to be Posy, but so does Amelie, Maddy wants to be Pauline and Petrova, Josie wants to be Petrova. Did point out i actually quite liked them as they were… but it fell on deaf ears….

After that we had just a little time to work on the first scene of The BlueBird before going out.

As an aside, if i ran a drama week at a youth hostel, would anyone be interested? It would probably be aimed mostly at 7+ ish, i suppose but could be flexible and be “as normal” for most of the time but i’d rehearse a small play with them for a couple of hours morning and afternoon. What do you think?

Went to Jazz… girls very excited that belonging to this class means they’ll be in all 3 shows in November, picked up our embroidered BM/PM polo shirts, then dropped them at gym. Maddy has been moved up to the Gold group, so she is thrilled.

And now i have to go and do some work…. see you later

Max had planned to go classic car racing with his dad yesterday, but in the end his dad (who has recently started dialysis and was feeling much better) wasn’t so good again, so he decided to go but take Maddy instead. The rest of us planned to spend the day with my parents and the NutTrees. When we got there, Maddy had a crisis of indecision and really wanted to stay with us and the cousins, but was worried about upsetting Max. She stayed with us in the end and Max went alone; i think, where once a day off would have been bliss, he missed her rather a lot. Still the rain held off for him and he got a peaceful day, which will no doubt stand him in good stead for the new experience he is going to have over the next 10 days or so! (More anon.)

We all had a nice day; i tried (in that “old people determined to make the toddler sit on them” type of way), to win Ella over but she is holding out on me Rowan tolerates me though, so if all else fails i shall just pile them with presents and win their hearts with retail

Greer taught my sister the 12 bar blues and Fran and my mum did some cello; BN did some rather fab bits of mirror writing for us which i will photograph and much playing, tigging and gardening occurred.

Nice day

I’ve been perusing the links suggested for science and geography and have found a couple of things i think might suit us, even Max agrees, so i’ll let you know

One of the things that i find intrinsically interesting about running a retail business, is trying to second guess what is going on in peoples minds and what it is that influences people. Having had BM for a good few years now, i’ve got plenty of stuff to look back on and the things that alter and even more the things that stay the same, completely fascinate me.

For example, May is always utterly awful on BM; i assume that people are either outside, if it is nice or trying to make their kids concentrate on exams and SATS. It normally picks up at the end, for half term, but the bit between normally excellent April (rubbish this year as Easter was early) and the end are extremely unpleasant and this year has felt even gloopier than normal. I’ve had uncomfortable moments.

But i find these graphs just amazing….

These are the weekly sales levels for the weeks in May 2007

And these are the same weeks for May 2008

I mean, is it me, or is that frankly weird? How can several 100 peoples shopping habits add up to something that similar over 2 months in a year?????

I am very chuffed that PM has met my sales level (outside Xmas months) that i wanted it to be achieving when it had been going for a year, 3 months early. It hardly takes any sales from BM either, it doesn’t seem to impact on it, so i’m very pleased about that. I love it when i manage to predict something realistically and then exceed it.

In home stuff…..

I’m thinking about getting a science and geography curriculum for the big 2 girls… we aren’t quite getting it with Sonlight somehow, the book bit is fine, the science bit is not so much for us. Any suggestions?

Maddy learned to do handstands into forward rolls in the garden today; she is funny, when i described it, she just couldn’t do it but after i got her to stand up and slowly roll forward into a ball so she could feel how her back needed to go, she was perfect and did some great ones. Fran is getting to be very good at round offs, which she showed off royally at R and E’s party (DAMN, i KNEW i forgot something in the blog below!) but it is good to see Maddy getting into doing some things that need some control.

Maddy and Fran have started learning the parts from “The Bluebird” the play that is quoted in Ballet Shoes and which Pauline and Petrova act the main parts of. They rather like it

I swear i didn’t make them pose

Amelie insists a put a pic of her Beedibie “on blog” as she calls it.

And this is the family challenge dinner. If there had been Liver for me, and a glass of milk for Fran, it would have been even more threatening. Who knew a grill up could have so many hated components for one family??!?!!?!?

Can’t really think where i was. I don’t think we did much the rest of Bank Holiday (though i could be woefully wrong.)

EDIT: *blush* Oh yes, i remember, we were invited to R and E’s gym party and had a lovely time there, once we found it. Damn aaroutemaster for having the wrong postcode in it and taking me, very accurately, to a completely different business park carpark over the other side of the city. PAH! Very nice to see lots of people i hadn’t seen for ages and the girls had a great time. I rather enjoyed being able to gossip all afternoon while my 3 big girls were off doing their thing. Josie stayed at home all day and played wall-to-wall NickJr.

Now, that feels familiar… did i blog this already????

I took Fran to work with me on Monday (darn these staff who are entitled to Bank Holidays!) and she played Sims until they got taken into care, which made her little heart pound with horror. We employed the “quit without saving” technique, something which provokes outrage from the Animal Crossing: Resetti trained generation of gamers, but she was relieved to get them back and subsequently managed to make them do their homework and not get taken away again. Tricky concept for the HE’d child!

On Tuesday we had a variety of small dramas; i had an agent from Wild Republic to see me in the morning and if you think having a serious business conversation with a man who has a bag full of cuddly toys is easy, you are wrong! Just as he left the neighbours found a small wild rabbit in their garage who appeared to be half choking on a water balloon he had chewed on. Managed to pull the bits i could see out of his mouth but either there was more, or that wasn’t the problem. He had blood round his mouth and kept arching back and kicking, so i wonder if perhaps he had eaten poison. He was a poor little thing anyway and i felt very bad, but we wrapped him in a towel and tried to keep him breathing till the RSPCA arrived. Dunno what happened in the end.

After that i had to take them all to work for a bit but they read, played etc quite happily and i made some space re4ady for my delivery of new and rather beautiful Rubens Barn soft dolls.

Wednesday i think Max took them into town and attempted to visit the Peterborough Green Festival but it appeared to have rolled off somewhere. I think they had a bit of a frustrating day and i wasn’t much better, i was NOT in the mood for work at all. Not quite sure what else happened.

Thursday we spent a lovely day with Chloe, Michelle and Marcus and all the kids played beautifully. We barely saw them really. Fran wasn’t 100% and read some of the time but the others were fully into games pretty much the whole time.

Friday the kids split between cookery and craft with Auntie Sue and time with Max. In the morning Max and i locked ourselves into the boardroom at work and tried to re-motivate me. I think they had some good stuff going on but i’m not sure what; i’ve been a bit disconnected this week, not helped by various children not wanting to spend any time with me, not loving me or just being a bit mean with their affections. I’ve felt rather low about it; i’ve got full on working mum guilt

Saturday - today we went sofa shopping together, bought camping stuff and then everyone got books in Waterstones. Fran got Michael Morpurgo books, Maddy was caught reading Magic Treehouse books on the floor of the bookshop and Amelie and Josie chose Alfie stories and a Polar Bear book. This afternoon we’ve inadvertently had a rabbit scrap; Smartie was on the lawn and Fiver snuck into his run. Smartie charged in to defend his territory and they really went for each other, full on “go for the jugular” scrapping. Fortunately Max got in and managed to separate them… they were GROWLING!!!!

This evening we’ve had the long awaited family challenge… were we all had to facefood demons. Max ate a spoonful of baked beans, Fran, Amelie, Josie and i ate black pudding and Maddy tried hot tomatos! Josie REALLY liked the black pudding; she ate a whole one!

Now it is time for recorded Doctor Who

The fimo blog has had a makeover, thanks to SuburbanMum. I love it - and am really looking forward to having the PoP makeover done!

Speaking of which, it is still broken, i’ve not found the nerve to try and upgrade it yet as none of the files seem to be in the same places as i am expecting!!!!

I’m finding this “working mum” thing a bit of a mixed blessing. I do like having the unit and i certainly love having it all out of my house, i do like having separate time for work and home and i can safely say that it works better for all of us. I do like having me time and a little domain of my own and i think the kids appreciate the delineation of our lives. And it goes without saying that i like the fact that our lives are more flexible, i can take a day off for a birthday and they all see more of Max, even if i probably don’t.

I have to say though i am having some difficulty adapting to having a “working life” and perhaps being, for the first time, a a person who really is “my own boss”. Working in a business environment for the first time in a very long time, i am beginning to see how hard i find it to focus. All sorts of things bother me and stop me concentrating on one thing but most of all i think i get there and it takes me a while for my mind to get into “work gear” and start formulating a plan for the day; i seem fritter away time on small things and not see a bigger picture. I’m struggling to be my own boss, especially now i have time to be it! I think i was better at shoe-horning it all into tiny spaces of time.

Part of it is that it is actually time off, i get to relax slightly and stop being Mummy. I’ve forgotten how to be a working person, how to have a plan for the day and a structure. If anyone has any ideas on how to make this work better, how to get into a more professional frame of mind, i’d be grateful for it.

Clockwise from left - mine, Fran’s and Amelie’s. Apparently mine wasn’t good enough (so said Maddy)

So i tried again. I like this one more but i must admit, the internet is an unforgiving place, i know how rubbish i am at this now, Flickr is not the friend of the amateur!

Couple of weeks ago i tried to make a model of a lying down wimpled lady. My test ones had different bits i liked and somehow i didn’t quite manage to pull all those bits together, but this one ended up the best of the bunch.