Home Educating the Puddle Girls…

Hm. Must try not to repeat that particular brand of stupidness. In my (slim) defence, it was a CM book i’d been looking forward to getting as its being discussed on one of my lists at the moment and i was dipping into it as i had lunch. But it did strike me as perhaps not quite the point to be yelling at the kids while i read it. Ho hum.

The more i gradually slip into my natural HE style, the more i am convinced that it is the CM/Classical thing that draws me. I love the idea of my children growing up with a good supply of books suited to their level, stretching them, opening up new worlds to them, supplying fodder for imagination and creativity. I like the idea of an education that is free to be moulded by them and by me, that doesn’t limit them with busywork or dogma but that does actually give them the framework (oh lord, my mum used to say that) of good habits, good know-how and good knowledge to build on. Its important to me that they can write stories that aren’t criticised but that they learn good punctuation, spelling, handwriting and so on, in brief, to the point, accurate lessons than we don’t dwell on endlessly but that remain in their minds as pointers and guides in the future. My childhood CM schooling had the old-fashioned equipment of handwriting practise, narration, dictation, recitation, short lessons but it did work, largely anyway, and i don’t recall disliking it. I like it that if i need to, i can produce well spelled, well punctuated, flowing written work. I want them to have that skill equally if not better. I don’t believe the National Curriculum would supply it; i don’t believe it has to be laboured to get it either. (And no i haven’t proof-read this, blogging is not writing! ;~)) Its really important to me that my girls get to explore the world, its really important to me that i feel good about what i put on the table for them to use as starting points. For the last 7-8 months, i’ve really felt good about that. Everyone seems to be thriving on it.

My Lazy Bugger Credits are pretty low to start with i know, but i’ll just clear my account of any lurking ones by admitting to the copy of “1st language Lessons for The Well Trained Mind” that arrived today. There, i’ve said it. I’d never have bought it had i not read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. That was the final straw. My children HAVE to have most uses of the comma down pat. So there. I quite like what i’ve looked at anyway, so we shall see. The same parcel also had the 1st 3 Getty Dubay books in it which look like they will suit us absolutely down to the ground.

Anyway, apart from the dodgy start, today could have been worse. Trying not to think about the fact that its only a temporary filling (which i have to remember not to bite with!) so i’ll have to go through all that again but hey. At least i didn’t try to bleed to death. I really hate the fact that i’m stuck with flashbacks and stress over that sort of thing for the rest of my life. Its not fair. (STOMP) Amelie hasn’t been sick again anyway so that was okay. Button has PMT and is confined to barracks after eating one of Max’s car books and a wicker basket. Maddy never made it to nursery.

What was good? Oh, well i got everything done on todays schedule, discovered that the tax office won’t fine me as i don’t actually owe tax (they’d be cheeky to anyway as they have STILL failed to send me a form), the girls can now do creditable laps on Mario Kart. I did make them turn it off though and they have spent a happy day playing in their room, watching Joly Phonics videos and doing their boxes. Fran has nearly finished the Flying Boot set of books now, her writing seems to have come on a lot (although things seem to be progressively more backwards, its spreading into letters now as well as numbers), she did really well with maths and the reading for the maths today though.

Maddy is almost through her maths book, not that she is really proficient at any of it, in that format, but she enjoys whipping through it! She won’t do the sheets that Fran did though, as she says they are Fran’s, so i am hoping the Exeter stuff will appeal. She really likes doing it. Today is was basic multiplication - she was grouping objects and creating the sums flawlessly. She is on to JP2 now. I don’t think her reading is more than memory/guesswork really but at least she likes doing it. The change in her since we started this is amazing.

Finished up tonight with Canute and the Waves. I must get back to narration, shall see if i can fit it in tomorrow; i can’t see knitting occupying much time this week, i nearly stabbed Fran after 5 minutes today. I think there is a reason people get taught by their Granny, a generation gap is clearly required.

If ever there is an optimum time for having a large tooth filling that takes half an hour and the anesthetic doesn’t take, 3 months after a caesarean where the anesthetic doesn’t work is not it :~(

Wail.

And Amelie has just been sick everywhere. Anyone want my children? Or my life? I suppose a tooth swap is out of the question…

This is Maddy at the age Josie is now, in a babygrow Josie wore this week too (only filling it rather more fully!) I would be able to tell the difference, but only just. They are incredibly alike.

Josie is sat by me coo-ing and talking to me. She is amazingly dribbly, chews her fists constantly and i think her eyes are going brown after all. There are some little flecks of brown around the pupil. She is so very smily though, much more engaged than i remember Maddy was, much more like the other two were. And very strong, always pulling her head and body forward, desperate to be sat up. She is feeding less constantly now and happier to be sat looking about, adores Amelie who is very protective and likes to cuddle her and say “Jodie (Josie) my friend”. She regularly goes 8-9 hours at night now. She is right down to the twos of the 3-6 month baby gows too and not even 3 months yet. (Only just, but still:~)) And Josie, when you are older and giving us trouble, i promise to remember that today i overheard your daddy saying that having a 4th new baby in the house has been “really easy.”

EDIT: JOYCE!!!! I think i might have solved your photo issue. If the image is bigger than 96kb, it all appears to work but the image doesn’t show up. Might that help at all?

Does it count that i answered Maddy’s “why do we have chins?” question today? Because aside from that we’ve just karted all day… girls are getting good though!

Slightly horrified by the Pandora’s Cube i have unleashed, i have decreed that it has the same rules as the tv - not between 10am and 4pm monday to friday. (Unless the day is going very wrong!)

Right.

This week i will:-

Do a few of “How to draw funny people” with Fran and Maddy. over the week at CP we started drawing people and then on the last day i found that book in the shop. DWN is a bit thin on people (except for inuits and pilgrims) so i liked the look of this. We already have the monsters one and its very popular.

Do some DWN reptiles with Fran.

Read the rest of the Egypt Time Traveller book with Maddy.

Make the Egyptian necklaces.

Play time snap.

Do some bloody knitting with Fran. SHOULD NOT have sent her to Jax’s villa.

Do some french knitting with Maddy.

Think of something meaningful to do with Amelie.

Start my terrifying housework timetable.

Do addition maze and multiplication maps.

Try Eduss out again.

We like our game cube. Just to buck the trend a little, i got the Mario Kart bundle, so ours is silver. But that meant half price bongos.

Not a great deal else has happened aside from a spectacular row between Max and i. We do sulk occasionally but we rarely yell; today we yelled. Its quite funny in retrospect. Especially as it was only about who was last out of our villa. Max maintained it was me and i had locked up but it wasn’t as my last view of it was of the door open with a fair bit of stuff in the doorway which i assumed Max was packing into the car. I was struggling up the path with buggy, bike and 2 kids.

I can really lose my temper if someone repeatedly tells me i have done something that i haven’t. And as it turns out neither of us locked the door, or collected my bag, or Maddy’s coat or sundry other things. All of which we left in a wide open doorway and are now in a parcel in Lost Property….

Nevermind; i think it was better to row than to have not resolved the sulk. Besides, i was right…. :~D

I collected Button. She’s passed the incubation period. She didn’t die :~D

I must just blog my dream, if only because appearing in Jan and my dreams will probably make Alison feel, well, special ;~)

I had this odd dream that Alison Portico had appeared on the front cover of the Daily Mirror under the headline “Stop the Momma” ranting about lack of funding for home educators. Each of her comments went something like “Do we get free workbooks? Do we heck as like???!!!???!!!” or something similar. The whole thing had led to a riot with black clad mummies, including me, who was armed with a gun but was skulking in the back of an art shop vandalising art oil pastels because i knew if i went outside my arms (with new tattoo!) would get sliced off.

This doesn’t appear to go too well with my new forceful “in my thirties” image. So far this week i’ve shouted at a grandad for spraying water in mine and Josie’s face and yesterday i surpassed myself by accosting a family in the CP restaurant after their little boy picked up Fran’s £1 coin when she dropped it, stuck it in his pocket and slunk off. Now, fair enough it was only a quid and fair enough she had dropped it but it was in a restaurant play area and they were the only kids in there, so you might think a boy of 8 would think it right to ask if anyone had dropped it. But he didn’t and i saw him and Fran was crying, so i went and asked for it back. His mum was a bit mortified though. But i don’t see why Fran should lose a quid because i’m too British to go and ask for it back.

God knows what’s going to happen if i carry on like that. I’ll be verging on confrontational by 40 :~)

Mmmmmm….i LIKE Centerparcs. And just so all my holiday gatecrashers feel loved, Max decided he preferred it this year with lots of people around. Which i would say was quite a result :~)

We had a great week, easily as nice if not more so than last year. The girls had really come on in terms of swimming confidence, though i am quite glad i didn’t know till it was too late that they were wave jumping without float jackets. Better drowned than duffers… Amelie was fearless, down slides, over waves and in up to her neck and impressively the chlorine and a major steroid cream offensive seemed to clean up her eczema beautifully. She is as itch free as i have seen her in a long time. Josie was relaxed all week, only really had one huge feed day and enjoyed the water and the company. She did a bit of baby passing practise ready for the full cuddle attack at Melrose. Both the big girls enjoyed their flirtations with the gamecube and so did i - i’m going to indulge tomorrow :~D They also liked having their mates around a lot, though we did a small amount of preserving our “family holiday” status and tried to spend quite a lot of time just together. I don’t think anyone minded. Chris’s birthday party and our games night were definite highlights for me, as was sitting up waiting for Fran to come home: I found that deeply amusing :~D. Just being pop round for a pre-breakfast gossip is one of my favourite bits of camps/holidays etc and it was particularly nice to know we would all be back together in a week, with even more people added to the mix for value added fun ;~)

Particularly enjoyed the sensation of being momentarily better at this than Max, though only while he was drunk on wine… i got better when wine soaked, which says a lot for my logic skills…

Have hugely enjoyed seeing the girls crack the above game as well as partially crack “Set”, get fabulously better at drawing and cycle with far better road sense than last year.

Yes, it was a good week. Same time same place next year?

When it doubt, make sure lots of chocolate is available.

Today was pretty much okay actually. Josie had a little milestone of being put into her crib at midnight, “just to see what happened” and slept through to 8.30am in it!

So, today. Decided we needed a mini break and as we had our local mp group meeting at Activitry World (who redeemed themselves of their mistreatment of me btw!), we tootled off to that. Not only did the 12 or so kids who were there have a lovely time but we’ve sorted out (nearly, a few tweaks required) of using their party room as an activity venue once a month and a deal on playing on the alternate fortnight. its not a big room but if i can get the deal right we will be able to use it then go and play after, which i think will work nicely.

After that it was home for playing and a flop then some friends with 4 boys came to play. Which was delightful - board games, part tea and Hama beads. I did laugh when their 7 year old asked if Fran didn’t go to school because she had been sent home for being naughty!

Watched master and Commander last night. Odd film. Not often you can say the most dynamic acting was done by the sea. What was Russell doing with that “benevolent but slightly scary Anthony Hopkins character” thing? I liked the doctor though, who was he? And the wee small blonde boy. I’m sure i saw some of those pretty hobbit children in it though.

Oh yeah, i will just blog this. Fran did some maths book stuff again today and there seemed to be a big breakthrough in her thought processes. There was lots of word/number mixed up sums - several with quite a few different things to do within the sum - add this, double that and then tsake it away from - and she really got it - she was looking at it, working out the tings she could put together and then working it out as a simpler sum. I was really chuffed with that.

It’s (i suppose) the duty of a blogger to report the good, the bad and the ugly. And today was ugly.

I’m quite sure it was my fault; i’ve been ratty and snarly and hormonal most of the day and i’ve growled and grumbled like a pregnant person. It just felt as if all the needs of the kids colided at once; no one seemed to be able to agree, be nice, occupy themselves, help out at all and it drove me mad. It was like having a house full of 3 year olds. And that isn’t even complimentary to average 3 year olds. I really don’t know what was the matter but somehow i felt as if i had got out of step in one of those circular country dances where you swing round each others arms as you swap from inside to outside.

All of which was a real shame as if i was feeling positive, there is lots i could make much of from today. I really wanted to give Maddy some time, so she and i sat and read the I wonder Why…? book on Egypt. Fran wouldn’t listen because she wanted to learn about the Queen and for once her interest wasn’t coming first. So she was playing with the word blocks while i read with Maddy; which was probably good and i’m sure she absorbed something but i just got annoyed because she wasn’t using them to make words really, just playing some game.

Then i got out paints (Baker Ross ones are really nice btw) and we painted pasta tubes ready to make Egyptian necklaces - and i got wound up with Fran for splatting everything. But Maddy did a nice job and actually Amelie did the best of all, plus i got really nice time with her just on our own. Although she has driven me nuts by getting hysterical every time Button has gone anywhere near her. Honestly, you’d think it was a rabid dog, not a mostly harmless rabbit.

Then they all did painting and Fran tried really hard at doing more realistic paintings. She would bring me a pic of the sun, or a rose, or a tree and i would ask her if she could make it more like a tree with branches, or a sun like ours really looks - and she would try again. So that was all very nice. But then she dropped a pot of red paint on the carpet and stood in it, so that REALLY wound me up.

Finally we did their boxes; Maddy asked for a sheet of sums and did additions up to 10 on her own and Fran did a whole mental maths page right, some really good mixtures of words and numbers stuff, all of which she could read, some lovely handwriting and read well too. Maddy finished her JP book and knew all its letters. So that was all good.

Finished up with Rainbows, which they loved (but trying to get all 4 out of the house makes me feel like a Boot Camp Officer) and found myself having one of those “oh you are so brave” HE conversations, fortunately with D there too, which was all faintly amazing and quite funny as all the standard questions came out to the point where we both just laughed…

Off to drink wine and read Aladdin to the girls. Tomorrow will be better.

Teacher suspended over “grooming” allegations.

This is the school that Fran would be going to next year, in time for year 3. She and Maddy would already be in its infants school if they were not HE.

Sigh… *must agree to HEers being on a database in order to protect our oh so vulnerable children from our abusive natures…*

Sigh. How come when you finally get a child using some letter blends, the first thing they do is creat a word you’d rather they didn’t use in front of Great Gran?

Along with the week so far, its been an odd, slightly nondescript day really, not unpleasant, just rather hard to get going. the girls have so many things they want to know about at the moment and somehow its all slightly overwhelming me. I just can’t quite get going. I think i’ve got orgo-planner burnout.

Started off today with skating, which was a combination of Snowbabies and HEgroup - apart from some truly awful behaviour from Fran, it was all very nice, Josie curled up on my chest in the sling and all the others were pretty much independent. Fran is getting very graceful now and is just that bit stronger, so the plan is to really go for a bit more training this year. Still, today she was moaning about it being cold so if she persists with that line of whingery, i shan’t bother taking her. Maddy was particularly good actually and Amelie not only had a nice time but knew when she had had enough and just came and sat down with me. It did start to feel like i had rather bigger girls all of a sudden. Fran and Maddy had ponytails in and Fran was looking very pretty in some new trousers that have a more grown up cut to them; you know when you get a glimpse of who the 16 year old will be? It was like that today.

We came home and everyone was worn out; so we watched Aladdin and flopped really. Fran played some Jump Ahead and eventually Maddy and i did her box, simple tables sums today which she loved and used a combination of the Leappad thing, maths rods and her fingers for them. I couldn’t motivate Fran into much at all really so she went off to her room to listen to a story and get some peace and came back with some rather amazing K’nex things. By that time Moo and i were playing with some word block things i bought a year ago - Maddy was loving them but when Fran arrived she really got into them too and spent ages creating and sounding out words that she would just blank at in a book. I do NOT understand that girl!

Apparently Max wants the telly from earlish tonight for some reason so the girls are getting snack teas and early bed (they really need it). Josie has been incredibly sicky and hungry today (having fed half the night, so hopefully i’ll get her off to bed and then i can attempt to do something meaningful. What, i have no idea…. in fact, perhaps someone should IM me and save me from myself.

MUST give Ammi some quality time tomorrow. And patch my new purple jeans which Button has nibbled a hole in. Grrrr…..

I just got books from Tanglewood, Our Island Story, the Blue and Red Fairy books, Burgess Bird Book, Robin Hood, King Arthur and George and the Dragon. They are lovely. Yumm yummm yummmm.

And totaly justifiable because it saves me printing things out too!!!!