Home Educating the Puddle Girls…

1994 was the summer that Max and i got together; i have fond memories of curling up on his bed, beers in hand and watching the football, something that was a complete mystery to me because despite having grown up with a sports journalist for a dad, it had never really been on while i was at home. We weren’t a family who ever sat together, so if dad did watch matches then he watched alone in his office at home, or perhaps with my brother, I have no idea. He gave up being a football reporter before i went to senior school, having come home shaken from one too many games where the supporters drank and fought and did thoughtful things like rain burning chairs down on the press box. It did mean that many of the football tragedies struck a particular chord with me, the Bradford fire, Hillsborough, because there was always the sense that dad could have been either caught up in it or found himself in the unenviable position of going from sports reporter to news reporter as the disaster unfolded before him. Luckily for all of us, he was never witness to worse than mob stupidity.

1996, Max and i were living together in my parents house but i was working and i think Max and my brother probably bonded over that one; i have a vague memory of watching some of it curled up on his gran’s sofa after our dramatic “lost in thunder, rain and fog with a broken compass in the middle of Dartmoor” experience. Yes, that’s right in fact, so another special summer, one i remember anyway.

1998 was the year that Frances was born and the summer of our wedding. In fact, had we progressed to the next round the match would have been during my wedding day, so i was rather glad we didn’t! I have great memories of that tournament though, a new baby asleep on my lap, giving her a bath while we cheered England on, my sister and my friend Anne living with us and helping to make bridesmaids dresses while we looked after Fran. Burnt toast, burnt dinners, breast pumps, wedding dress fittings and football noise in the background. And then a new husband who didn’t complain about missing the final during our honeymoon in Wales. Putting my wedding bouquet gently into the bin on the way home after it had sat on the kitchen table in the cottage we stayed in for a week.

2000, i had Maddy and i spent another football tournament with a baby on my lap, getting used to having 2, grateful for a good reason to just sit and feed her and cuddle her. Coming home from running my classes to find Max had cooked me dinner while he watched the football. Big Brother being on for the first time and a new baby who was perfect in every way and fixed so many things for me.

2002, another tournament and another baby, Amelie this time, born just in time to sit on my lap and feed and feed and feed; a student to help me, getting ready to move house, Max coming home for the odd England match and watching a few before going to work.

2004 was a little different; i was pregnant with Josie so i snoozed through that one, asleep on Max’s lap in the evening, girls playing around us during the daytime matches, the sound of cheering crowds a soundtrack again to a new baby, just an impending one this time.

So 2006, the first even year i wasn’t going to have a baby since 1998, the first football tournament i wasn’t going to have a baby for, was always going to be sad for me and i have dreaded it. The two things have become oddly wrapped up in one another, sleepy new baby smells, sleepy pregnant snoozing, summer silliness over something as unimportant as a game. And as almost everyone who reads this knows, i wanted another, at least i thought i did, though where in my life i thought i was going to fit another person, i really don’t know. But it had been our only ever great unresolved disagreement, Max much more sensibly not wanting to stretch us any further, me still wanting the joy of doing it all again. Not wanting to say goodbye to this phase of my life, not wanting to acknowledge that this bit of being young is over and that here on lies getting older and watching my children become the focus and the achievers.

2006, football or not, was always going to be the gateway for me, a year where i left behind one part of my life and moved on to something new and undefined and frankly unwelcomed by me. What i’ve discovered in 2006, via traumatic and life changing circumstances, is that the gate hasn’t just closed, it has slammed shut and there isn’t a handle on the side i’m on. I can’t go back.

So i’m celebrating by taking no notice of the whole darn shooting match. If move on i must, then i’ll move on without putting myself through the hell of listening to a tournament that has meant fun and silliness and happiness during every other bit of mine and Max’s life together. And if that means sinking into Big Brother, or Animal Crossing or any other form of escapism, then that works for me. I don’t begrudge anyone their forms of entertainment, and goodness knows i’ve got no reason to gripe if my husband wants to watch a 3 week football tournament every other year, but this year i’m giving it a miss. It has way, way, way to many memories wrapped up in it.

I feel like our days don’t blog well at the moment; i don’t get time to pontificate the way i’d like to, or write meaningful posts about what we do, or why, or how and how it relates to my parenting, or my view of HE and how it has changed over 4, nearly 5 years. But i’d like to, because it is all there in my head.

So you’ll have to forgive the lists of facts that make it sound like i run a table orientated school here because really it isn’t like that. In fact, mostly when i blog that we’ve done x number of worksheets on fractions, or this or that, it is because i’m trying to remind myself that i’m doing a meaningful job here and that by and large the children are learning things, sometimes haphazardly but at least cheerfully, given i never force anyone. I remind myself that 5 years on we’ve achieved a measure of dilligence about HE that pleases me and the children thrive on and makes me feel that we are setting groundings for future years of application. It reminds me that with a bit of thought i can give 4 children and a thriving business enough time, just about, and that everyone is happy and employed and loved.

What i forget to blog is the conversations these days, though they happen all the time and are, in my opinion, the best thing about HE. That yesterday while reading the story of Augustine and the fair haired slave boys, we ended up talking about the worldwide gene pool and its effect on the number of blonde haired people, or that Amelie is fascinated by the how and why of everything and that i try to always answer. That she can manage her sister into a parcel processing production line, put a dvd on, watches Jolly Phonics, entertains herself happily for hours. I forget to write about the effort Fran puts into making my day easier, pouring drinks, tidying under the table, making cross sisters friends again, coming to give me a hug and a kiss. I forget to say again and again how far Maddy has come in life already and how impressed i am by the thoughtful and self motivated way she runs her life. Or that both big girls can finally get everyone including themselves and their gear, ready for one of their evening activities, without me asking 20 times. I forgot to mention they bought milk and cereal on their own every day at camp, forget to say that they can navigate across a school and get themselves to a class now while i follow more slowly with the others.

I forget to remember just how normal and ordinary everyday life is for these Home Educated children and how proud i am for the girls they are. How much i look at them in awe for being just “typical” and not flinchingly different because they don’t go to school. I’ve ceased to be awed by their friendship circle and the effortless way they all socialise; it is just so normal now to see them do that.

And when i list stuff we did at the table, or books we read, i’m actually just reminding myself that i’m bloody impressed that the most maths phobic person i ever met is competently teaching her children to like and be good at maths, that reading and writing is happening, that they have long or fleeting interests in all manner of things and that they are open to so much new and varied knowledge, whenever it is offered.

It took a long time to find my niche and be comfortable with how i wanted HE to be, but i know for absolute certain that even if it doesn’t have a name, i’m very happy with it, even if i know i’ll tweak it a million more times over the next 5 years.

But that is okay, because hopefully i’ve got plenty of 5 years’s to tweak in

Girls came home with Blue Rosette Awards for tap today. Again, utterly no idea what that means, but they were delighted with them and the silky banner they get to put them on Dance school managed to spell both their names wrong, so both need new ones making, *sigh* but nevermind. Roll:

After an absolutely dire weekend on BM with virtually no orders at all (shriek) yesterday and today picked up a good bit, so hopefully it was just the normal pre-payday lull. Must get on and add new products tonight, but i’ll save my other new stuff till July starts properly for me i think. So i had a good bundle to send out today, but we all did them together and it was all very enjoyable and easy. Fran and Maddy went off together and started on some handwriting practise, Fran doing a Wizard Whimstaff book that just needed the last page finishing and then some Getty Dubay, which she hasn’t done for ages. She quite liked the look of Book D though and was getting cross with the fact that Maddy was doing her one (Book C) so well, so started on that and burned through a load of it. So that kept them busy while i was busy and left us free for more interesting things after that.

More interesting initially consisted of maths again; Maddy doing some graphic multiplication which she loved and hopefully gave her a visual insight into what she was doing and Fran doing some pages of multiplication/division with related numbers just to sharpen up her manipulation of groups of numbers. That done she and i did a load of simplifying of fractions from various places and then finished off with some of the fraction pages from MEP Year 5, which were fun. If anyone still has the MEP password, could they let me have it, as i seem to have lost it and i’d like to download the B books

Plenty of Animal Crossing Wild World followed over lunch, (Caroline that is AC:WW, it is a Nintendo town building type game!) and Fran was delighted as the flowers that Sarah and I planted her during various wi-fi trips had yielded 2 hybrid flowers today Bless. *I* was not so fortunate

This afternoon we got back into Story of the World (SOTW) and read about Auguestine and the coming of Christianity to Britain. Have done this story before in Our Island Story i think, but not done any SOTW for ages so i was really pleased when Fran remembered the plot of Beowulf from the previous chapter with no prompting at all All 3 big girls listened, while Josie climbed on and off my lap demanding milk HOW did i end up still bfing a nearly 20 month old talking child?????????

Amelie asked me this morning if she could learn to read; no one else has really asked this before. I made Fran learn (lol) and Maddy is learning via writing, but Amelie really wanted to so this afternoon we sat down with some paper and wrote out letters and learned their names and wrote some simple words (cat, mat, sat, fat, hat, pat) and then she learned them with me and sounded out and drew pictures of them in a little book. She did very well too, far more with it than the other two have been. So that was good and we’ll hopefully keep it up.

Now i need to find a campsite near good things to do in South Wales (recommendations pleeeease!) and about 85 other things… so erm… now, have i watered my flowers today?

tee hee hee…. not thick after all

Love the 20 calculations one, best today was 17 seconds and love the word memory one too; i’ve managed 23 but i’m sure i could do far better.

We’ve had a delightful weekend with the TRBs here and we’ve all done as people do when they get together with good friends; children surpassed themselves as only children can by playing fantastically with each other, rather more as kids who see each other weekly, than as ones who see each other a few times a year. Abbie and Joe fitted themselves neatly into our life and carved out a whole new category in my mind “home educated children who go to school” I think i may have my concepts confused They are just the same as ever anyway

And as HEers by mindset do when they get together, we hads a weekend packed for of social and educational activities. There was PE, Constructional Mathematics, Social Studies, Geography and Media Studies, IT and Communication Studies and Art and Craft.

(Oh all right then, Fran and Abbie and Maddy stood on their heads and turned cartwheels in the garden a lot, they played geomags, we had a barbecue, watched Madagascar, played 4 way Animal Crossing and did some playdoh and felting!)

Enjoyed getting the opportunity to talk and play silly games with a likeminded adult (who is something of a bad influence!) listen to children play fluidly and happily all weekend in every combination going, get Sarah to stay up till 3am and also add a very useful technique to my parenting approach, thanks to getting the opportunity to spend time with a parent whose approach and family i admire. I love having good friends like this, it has done so much for my style of parenting and given me so much opportunity for being the kind of parent i want to be. And on this occasion, watching Sarah handling the odd squabbly tell tale (from my kids ) made me realise i wade in a bit too much, out of habit really from the days when Maddy needed so much more support, for things that i don’t need to wade in on anymore.

Lovely weekend anyway, come back soon

Feel like we’ve had a really solid week this week, not the most attnetion grabbing i suppose, but good in its own way. I suppose it was outside of my mindset to imagine having fun with a maths project, but effectively that is what we’ve done and we’ve been enjoying it lots. I’ve loved their enthusiasm and their willingness to sit down and apply themselves to something tough; it’s probably the first time Fran has really been prepared for maths to stretch her so that is a big step forward.

Anyway, we ended the week by doing more simplifying of fractions, lots of comparisons between fraction sizes and amounts, ordering and right at the end some simple addition of fractions, including spotting when it had made 1 whole number and simplifying the answer where required. Job well done really. Maddy did less today but still had fun and had done loads else, so i wasn’t worried. My task for next week is to be sure Amelie knows her numbers and letters, which i think she does, but i’d like to give her that time.

Maddy and i spent ages on her ETC book and i was surprised to see she did the spelling section at the end from memory rather than referring back. All good then. The more i see of Maddy’s apparently very ‘typical’ approach to reading, the more i wonder what exactly is going on with Fran; she has cracked reading well enough now, but her concepts of word building and her word recall to write are way off the mark really. That said, she did send Violet an email today (hope it arrived?) without help, so i guess she’s okay really.

Fran did a load more EC english, Maddy did some GD writing and then we went into the garden to plant Fran’s strange plants kit, Maddy’s vegetable kit and pull up some weeds. Maddy planted carrots, rtomatoes and beans, which will hopefully still have time to grow, Fran a variety of giant pumpkins and bug eating plants. And we ended the day with a 5 strong water fight, which was just lovely (I had the hose, so i was okay )

This morning i grabbed a quick shower while the kids played. During that time i got asked…

“Mummy, if i do a poo, can you wipe my bottom?” (No, I’m in the shower.)
“Mummy, can we start fractions now?” (No, I’m in the shower.)
“Mummy…. you said you’d make me purple juice!” ( I’m in the shower!)
“Mummy, can you put Shrek on the gamecube?” (No, I’m in the shower.)
“Mummy!!!!! You said you’d wipe my bottom!” (No, I said ‘I’m in the shower.’)
“Mummy…. have you put Shrek on yet?” (Read my lips….)

I mean really, i know i’m good, but even i lack teleporting skills, whether wet and bubble covered or dry and dressed

Well anyway. Today Maddy learned her 2 times tables, as a precursor to doing more difficult fractions as her pissed-offness on not doing the MEP7 stuff has reached epic proportions She got it in 1 and just recited it to me flawlessly while going down the stairs. I gave her a couple of sheets of bizarre shapes to divide in half and she did them in about 10 seconds flat, which reduced Fran and i, who hadn’t even done one sum, to helpless giggles. I laughed even more when she said “This is called a line of symmetry, i saw it on CBBC.” So in despair i gave her 2 sheets of shapes divided into anything up to tenths with some parts shaded, gave her a brief explanation of what she needed to do and left her to try and make each one into a fraction. And she did that too, then did the Grade 2 (Year 3) revision sheets flawlessly to, which given she’s Year 1 age, is quite clever really.

Goodness knows what i’ll give her tomorrow.

Fran nad i meanwhile reached a point that we need to explore further before we go on. We did a section on converting ‘big’ fractions down to smaller ones (15/30 into 1/2 type stuffbut no idea of proper lingo!) and that took a while as she isn’t so quick at spotting what you need to divide by as she was at spottinjg what you need to multiply by. She seemed to get it though. Then we did a bit that was comparing fractions and ordering them, and really we need to do common denominators for that, so we’ll look at those tomorrow instead of carrying on with the MEP stuff.

I did love hearing her tell Maddy how important her times tables were and how she needed to learn them to be quick at sums though.

Maddy and i spent a while on ETC1 again, Fran did more EC English and some spelling work, then everyone played for a while, Fran and i both paid off our AC mortgages, Maddy did Gamecube AC and got on very well with that (ACWW is much less reliant on silly words in the conversations though, so actually Maddy would probably be better off with a DS version.) Then we did a bit of gardening, some tidying that could be loosely called Domestic Science (I’ve got Sarah the Princess of Neat coming this weekend, so i must try to recapture that just moved in feeling!) and then took Maddy to Rainbows.

Fran and i have to sit in the car during that time and the little 2 sleep every week, so today i printed off a School Exprerss unit on Africa and we took it in the car on a clipboard and did it while we waited. Loads of new words, talked about population, industry, mining, percentages, environments, comparative words, continents, what a country actually is (that nearly stumped me!) and all sorts of other bits.

Annoyingly, having hoarded the entire st of those for years, i seem to have inadvertently expunged them from my computer at some point. And they were all neatly sorted into categories too. I think i have them backed up somewhere, but goodness knows where. And just when i finally want them too

And Amelie had a great day too, loads of Dora Gamecubing, loads of geomag play and generally a much happier baby altogether.

I do think this photo just BEGS for a caption, don’t you?

Okay. New life model.

*Do not procrastinate first thing; get parcels done before kids finish breakfast (having got them organised the night before) and don’t drag it out half the morning or worse.

*Group maths. Hurrah, this worked again today and i even dug out something for Amelie and managed to get her tootling along beside us at one end of the table while Josie drew at the other end. Result all round excellent, Maddy swum through the Grade 1 and Grade 2 fractions stuff on edhelper, pausing only to moan she wasn’t doing the MEP7 too, Fran did a load of G3 edhelper stuff and then she and i did some MEP7 together. Today we added fractions, compared fraction sizes, converted fractions and generally found it all very interesting and enjoyable. The fraction circles have been a complete blessing but we outgrew them today when we moved on to 7ths, 14ths and beyond. She completely impressed me by doing a whole block of “1/3 = ?/6″ type questions, using multiplication of top and bottom, completely right and actually faster than i could write them for her What i really got a buzz out of was the adding; often, when we hit a new subject, i realise why it was it never all made sense to me, given i really needed it spelled out. Today i found myself explaining that the bottom number (denominator?) is just there to tell you what you are working with, but that the sum is using the actual amounts from the top. Effortless, she got it. Yet no one ever really explained that to me and quite frankly the entire thing baffled me for years. I never really worked out what i was doing.

I had a pants maths education, didn’t i?

Fran was feeling a bit english resistant so i sent her up to work on EC instead of doing written english and that worked fine; she spent ages on the 6 Year 2 english things i’d marked out for her and was quite happy. Meanwhile Maddy and i did some ETC and she reminded me that actually she can read quite well, which i had slightly forgotten! And then we did the bean book together, putting it aside only so that we could go out and get new pencils and pencil sharpeners (where do they go?) later. She went out after that and prepared seed beds for some stuff she wants to plant.

Not sure what else happened; swimming, a trip to Tesco where we got everything but the pencils and pencil sharpeners and then home for tea, playing and the like. The girls got their ballet certificates and medals, bizarrely an identical medal to the only one i ever got! and are very pleased with them. Both got commended (some IDTA juvenile thing?) Fran got 75 and Maddy got 78 - so well done to both of them but extra big up to Moo for not getting outshone by her sister. And that was with no special dispensation for her at all; teacher said she didn’t need it.

Wish they did some sort of numpty mummy guide for ballet exams though, i’ve not got a clue what all this stuff i pay for them to take is!

Right, i feel we have fledgling botany and mammal projects taking off, plus an interest in numbers from Amelie, and interest in French from Fran and other bits i’d really like to press on with. Must get out books again, must start up SOTW again. Hm.

But not got time to do it at the moment. But i’m realising that i’ve got an awful lot of thinking to do about how we home educate, because i’m simply not getting time to give everyone the individual attention i would like to give them and still provide quality and variety as well. I don’t really feel that Fran and Maddy are getting more than an adequate education just at the moment, which isn’t good enough in my view and Amelie and Josie are missing out on mummy time.

Working smarter is, i think, going to have to involve getting back to some sort of structure to our days and weeks and, at least to some extent, involve me getting my head around working with them in 2 groups of 2. Maddy is perfectly capable of working with Fran in plenty of things and it isn’t so very hard to stretch things that little bit further to encompass reading and writing and more detail for Fran.

So yesterday i started with a joint maths lesson on fractions, which worked very well. Fran and i did several more pages of the MEP7, while Maddy sat with us and did some pages on 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4s from edhelper. Fran explained fractions to her and we worked together for a good while and it seemed very successful. I’m thinking that working topically rather than from books for a while might help even up the gap between them and mean they can continue together at some point in the future. Maths is very much Maddy’s strong point, so if i concentrate on getting her up to Fran’s level, without pushing Fran too much for a while (she doesn’t need it really and she’ll enjoy exploring topics in am ore real life way), it might work out.

In the afternoon Fran asked to learn about pandas, so i printed off a booklet, quiz and wordsearch for her from enchantedlearning and she did that. We also used the DK Animal and Life of Mammals book for some extra quality and found a cuddly panda for full effect. Did you know pandas have slit pupils like a cat, rather than round pupils like other bears, earning them their chinese name of giant cat bear? And that bamboo patches are mainly all one plant growing from runners underground and that they flower once every 15-120 years after which the whole patch dies off leaving the resident pandas with a major food crisis?

It’s amazing what you learn.

Maddy wanted to learn about seeds, so i read to her about growing cycles from an Usborne book and then we talked about seed dispersal, pollenisation, fertilisation in general and why daddy needs a willy (as you do!) I’ve got some enchanted learning stuff for her to do today and if i can, i’ll go buy beans today and set up a germination experiment with her.

Amelie was still completely exhausted and vegged most of the day. Tday i am going to do better for her though.