Two full days of 9-4pm education – i’m worn out! Let’s see, what have we done today?

I’ve managed to supervise all 3 lots of music today; that takes a bit organisation, but i’m keen to make the most of the money being spent on it, so i need to make sure we do the work. As i spent most of my life trying to avoid music practise as a child, i have a certain interest in trying to keep it enjoyable but also expected. Luckily today Fran really seemed to have benefited from the work on her bow hold and enjoyed playing, Maddy got furious with her fingers but turned it around and Amelie is just thrilled by her opportunity to play still, so it all went okay. I feel a bit of a fraud when i don’t play but being in the lessons really helps, so i can make a difference which.. .erm.. .makes a difference.

What else?
Fran – some multiplication practise, the end of the chapter on The Norman Conquest, Handwriting (Claire suggested these books, Handwriting Today and Fran and Maddy both liked them), reading, a comprehension quiz on rivers and then a load of stuff on flags. All the map colouring has sparked an inclination to colour in general, so she’s been colouring in pictures of lions this afternoon.

Maddy – writing, maths on adding and subtracting and converting length and distance, endless bits and bobs on Egypt which she made into a book, a lot of reading and then some time with me reading the Usborne Time Traveller book; we did the Egypt section with her and Amelie. She loves factual books to read and i’ve run out for her – i must try those books that SB had (Helen, can you remind me what they are?) Maddy has suddenly decided that actually she can colour stuff in nicely (she’s been, for all her neat and detailed line drawing, very anti colour up till now) and so she made lovely flags and did a fab King Tut’s mask which she stuck on to a cover that she also coloured in (i’d have let her have coloured paper if she’d asked!)

Amelie – she read to me (very nicely, she likes the Up, Up and Away books) and then did the second Dolch word list. She is coming on really well, so different to what the older two were like at this age. Her writing is great too. Then she recapped on some vertical addition with carrying, spent a large part of the afternoon colouring in pictures of tigers and now she’s got a map of India to colour.

Josie has been in a world of her own all day, downstairs. This world in fact, a world that only she is allowed to inhabit.

I must blog about her sometime; she really is quite fascinating.

Sometimes i almost look back fondly on the days when Max went out to work, i stayed at home bored out of my mind with a bunch of teeny weeny people and everything was the same every day. These days, we’re always trying some new combination of things/stuff/blah blah.

We’re working on my having a sabbatical from BM/PM – much as i like it, i do slightly resent the fact that it takes me away from the kids and HEing and if this is my last year of HEing 4 full time at home kids, i’d like to enjoy it. Plus the businesses really need a different brain type applied to them, i’m not really very profit focused at all, whereas Max is. So we’re trying to do things in another way; i’m popping in once a day in the evening to straighten up, see what needs doing and keep on top of problems and doing customer stuff from home and Max is gradually taking over my days there. I really don’t mind and it’s a good opportunity for him to see if he finds it fulfilling. Hopefully, soon, i’ll have my Wednesdays and Fridays back and i’ll be able to go away more again. Obviously with Christmas coming i’m bound to have to work hard but if we can employ Max’s organisational skills, maybe it will be easier than it was last year. At least the house won’t be covered with boxes and we might even have room for a Christmas tree!

Today we tried to really get down to working consistently again. Fran made a start on GP English and did several exercises, (inspired by seeing Gwenny was slightly ahead of her!) mostly with success. I’m trying very hard to encourage her to work on her handwriting at the moment and being a bit stricter on things, i really would like her to find writing significantly easier before she goes off to school. She gets very frustrated by it at times but actually, she really isn’t bad, just a bit cramped up and inconsistent. Punctuation doesn’t come easily to her either, but she is trying. She does know it, she just forgets – a lot! After that she did quite a lot more of stuff on Europe and several quizzes on stuff to do with the UK – i dug out a couple of KS2 CGP books that she’s going to work through over the next few weeks too, just to see if there is anything that we’ve never really talked about. We’ve got a vague plan of looking at Europe in terms of geographical landforms, cultures and politics etc Then she did some reading and i supervised a reasonably intense (and extremely badly received!) cello practise on bow holds and fingering

Maddy had a productive day; she asked for “geography like Fran” but wanted to focus on Africa, so more sheets got printed out for her, she did a lot of work on time in Singapore 3B (nearly finished it now) and she and i worked out how many months old she is (104). She did well. She also read quite a bit (Magic Treehouse, Amelia Bedelia) and answered some GP English questions. It was all very harmonious. Maddy guitared to herself, Amelie violined endlessly (will have to supervise tomorrow) and generally it all went well.

Amelie and Josie played a long, complicated game all day, so we left them to it. Once the afternoon had arrived and i’d fashioned dinner out of the scant remains of food we had in the house, we tidied up as much as possible, found all the jazz and gym stuff and finished off The Starlight Barking, since Fran would be home too late tonight. Not sure what we’ll read next, we’ve got quite a stack to get through.

Tonight i got to watch the end of the middle two doing gym and was fairly startled by how strong Amelie seems to have got; she was doing something half way up the wall that made my eyes water and way hauling herself about on the bars with such confidence that i was quite gobsmacked. Maddy was much happier in her new leotard, so hopefully we’ve solved that. Fran, Josie and i popped to work then i dropped her off; i really hope she enjoys being in Novice tonight

Some conversation over the weekend has sparked some thoughts; this is not a reply or a justification but i felt that 10 years in and on the cusp of sending in a school application at the specific request of my daughter, was a good time to write down the things that that conversation crystallised for me.

Here are some things i believe about home educating and about schooling; they are personal to me, i don’t wish to inflict them on anyone else, nor do they intend to criticise any other choices. This is what i believe is right for my family. I say again, this is not a reply, or a justification, it is the helpful crystallisation of those thoughts.

*I believe passionately in home educating. It hasn’t behaved, in this house, quite as i thought it would but i am 100% convinced by the results and by the 4 highly individual, highly entertaining, exceptionally normal children that it is producing.

*I do believe home ed both goes in hand with, and initiates, a certain type of parenting here. We have always been honest and open with our kids, we’ve always offered them choices, we’ve always told them how we feel, but made clear that unless we foresee damage, we’ll support choice. We can’t entirely remove how our feelings might affect their choices from the equation, but we do try to avoid emotional pressure.

*I do believe both our style of parenting an HE are a long game; the skills have not occurred in a linear fashion, nor have our children been forced into anything. We’ve listened to requests, listened to feelings, encouraged skills, allowed for variation. When people have liked a playgroup or nursery they’ve gone, if they’ve passionately hated something, they’ve been removed. The one mistake of this type i ever made was trying to keep Amelie in nursery when she was clearly telling me she did not wish to be there. It was the one time, beyond the “she’ll settle as soon as you leave” line i believed about Fran and Maddy in very young nursery classes and the “co-sleeping ends in needy children”, that i have listened to social pressure over instinct. In 10 years and 4 kids (28 ‘years’ of parenting) that i feel i made a very real error of judgement on those occasions; when i have listened to my children and myself, we seem to have got it right.

*I really believe that constant listening, questioning, waiting for the next move on their part and quiet support results in children who make their feelings known and their needs known at the right time. I don’t believe in forcing anyone’s hand any more than i believe in walking away from them crying. I will always help them over hurdles they need helping over, whether it is speaking up for them or just encouraging them, but a leg up a climbing wall that looks like fun is not the same as pushing someone off a drop slide that looks frightening. I’ve seen the results of not being able to tell the difference and i believe than knowing your children well and listening to word and body language is the only way ot get it right.

*I absolutely did not home educate because i had a rubbish time at school. I DID have a boring, tedious and often painful time at school, where my skills and assets were not recognised and i feel the environment harmed me. I’m a bigger person than inflicting my insecurities on my kids and given none of them seem to be much like me, i think we’ve done a good job of teaching them self-confidence.

*I home educate partly because of specific needs of some of my children.

*I home educate because i believe there is a better place to be than a classroom when you are young. Pretty much anywhere else.

*I home educate to offer freedom, space, opportunity and something unique that they can always say about themselves. I evaluate constantly, endlessly and extremely self-critically and i question, all the time, whether we are still meeting needs. Most of all, i home educate so that my children feel unique and feel in control of their own destiny and so that they learn, from the age of 0 upwards, that there is always choice and always another option.

*It is an uncomfortable truth that i also home educate because i passionately believe that schools are often shallow, meaningless, time wasting, small minded, tiresome and dull places to be, because the news is full of dumbing down and failure in the education system, because i rarely meet a teacher with anything good to say about them and because i think the lack of depth and imagination in a curriculum that is identical across the country is pitiful and cannot possibly be good for the future and diversity of this country.

*I don’t believe that any of my children will have an enhanced quality of life if i send them to school. If they choose to go to school, i don’t think that my feelings are a good enough reason to stop them. I believe that i have done a good enough job of instilling questioning brains and individual thought in my children that should they choose to go to school, they’ll either make it work for them, or have the sense to leave.

*I home educate because i am much more afraid of the consequences of someone else failing them than i am of me failing them.

*I am the parent i am because i have chosen to trust a process, one i would like to watch evolve over 18 years but recognise i may not get to do so and because i have chosen to be my own person and then take the consequences of it. I am the parent i am and a home educator because i love being with my children, because my family unit feels like a community where we all have an equal say and because it is exceptionally pleasant to have 5 other people in the house who i treat, and who treat me, as humans who have a say. Within reason this home is run by consensus and agreement and i am phenomenally proud of that. Much of what happens here has to do with an intrinsic “breathing” of the organism we are and often choices, decisions and emotional needs are worked out slowly by dint of us simply living and interacting together on a daily basis. I think it has only occurred to me this weekend how hard that might be to comprehend from the outside.

*I do NOT want my daughter to go to senior school, i am not happy about it. I am choosing to trust that this is part of the process, because how *I* feel is *MY* process, not hers. I trust and feel entirely happy with, the fact that she has vacillated endlessly about primary school, never getting to a conclusion and never (for reasons i cannot explain) prompting us to say “right, lets do it then” and yet when a form arrives and she says “i want to send it in” we both immediately said “that’s fine, we agree you should”. For the record, that reply has absolutely NOTHING to do with us feeling less able to do a senior school education and everything to do with it just seeming ‘right’. We’ve offered, again, the option to start primary school immediately and she doesn’t want to. It is that fact, beyond all other things, that makes me feel that the process, the life plan, the style of parenting and the way we have brought her up, is working absolutely as we planned.

*No matter what, i will never, ever interfere with what we have worked so hard on here in order to set anyone else’s mind at rest. I had a brief flicker of thinking it might be easier to do that before i remembered i’m 34 with 4 happy, healthy children who i am the parent of; no one can possibly understand our children better than we can. Someone once told me i should try being a lesbian once just so i knew whether i was or not. It was clearly ridiculous to suggest it and i don’t see why my kids need to spend time in school is like so they know if they are happy to be home educated any more than every school child’s parents should home educate them for a couple of weeks so that child can make a choice too.

Please go back and read the first 2 paragraphs before being upset by or cross with my thoughts

We’ve had one of those “home ed should be like this” sort of days (I’m making an effort; for 1, Fran has decided to try senior school… sob… and for another my life is suddenly unexpectedly looking more promising).

First thing we had the first visit from our new music teacher, who is coming to the house fortnightly to do a variety of music lessons with everyone. For the first month she is going to come weekly to get everyone going and then we’ll try fortnightly. It was lovely to see her and all the girls enjoyed themselves; Fran has slipped into bad habits over the summer so got a good workout, Amelie started violin and Maddy got some things to try with her guitar (which she has so far taught herself and done really rather well!) We’re going to do keyboard too when i pull my finger out – and i’m going to learn that too.

While that was going on, i mainly sat in on it but also kept the others working. Fran started on some verbal reasoning but it became quickly obvious that she didn’t know the countries and capitals of the countries of Europe so we moved on to some geography. She spent most of the morning listing countries, capitals and rivers, colouring maps, labelling seas and borders. She loved it and got on very well. Enchanted Learning, as it has done for my whole home ed life, came up trumps Maddy and Amelie did various bits of everything else very happily and it all just worked.

Yesterday, the school admission booklet arrived for senior schools for Fran. She’s ummed and aahed about this for a while but is now quite certain she wants us to visit them all and apply for a place. I’m in a few minds, mainly because all the senior schools here are a bit less than i might like and mainly because she seems to have a lot of feelings about it. I’ve got no idea where it will go, i can’t say i’m happy at the thought of it but i do feel we have to support her through the process. We’re going to be here longer than we initially planned now, so schools weren’t really a consideration when we bought the house – and ironically, the choice would have been more appealing where we used to live. That said, kids local to here go to our local comp and seem okay and it is a sports and performance specialist school, so it might suit her.

Times are changing, it would appear.

This evening we’ve been to Brownies, where i am now Screech Owl. I have to say, i really love helping out there. It is so nice to do something again that doesn’t make me money. Kids are great, adults are friendly and it just makes for a change. Love the people watching too but was mostly rather awed by how good Fran is at being a Sixer; she’s a great big sister but she’s got something about her being a Sixer. There were lots of new kids tonight, she got a new one into her Six and watching how she was welcomed by Fran and her Six made me feel all warm and cuddly

I’m ever so proud of Fran today, (though feeling very slightly guilty!) After only 3 months or so at gym they’ve pushed her up a class, into the Novice class, which is a by selection rather than a recreation class, (“Novice class competing general level for floor and vault competition for boys and girls” says the website). I feel bad because she has wanted to do gym for years and i pulled her out of one class for being too arsy (the gym not her) and did do it again for so long; hope i haven’t spoilt her chances. Anyway they tested her today and the jist afterwards was that they’d move her up, get her strength up and let her try competing, maybe even as early as November, and then they think she’ll go a good bit further than that and move into the squad at some point.

She, not surprisingly, is thrilled, although she would have loved squad straight away, but she needs more skills if she is going into it at 10 and i’m much happier if she keeps it as a hobby for now, as she’ll have to drop more things if she does more gym. There is no way we could add 8 -12 hours a week of gym to current dancing/music/Brownies etc, nor into our budget. I’ve been reassured by various people (thank you Sarah E, i forgot to reply but appreciated it!) including a friend from school who did British Squad training, that things are far less weight obsessed now, and this gym seems to have an excellent attitude, but i’m perfectly happy to take it gently. But she’ll adore the chance to compete and knowing she is being actively encouraged to go further and being watched will fire her enthusiasm. I watched her testing tonight and she can really haul up her performance when she needs to.

Maddy and Amelie are apparently considered good and being watched too, though we had tears from Maddy tonight which i don’t fully understand but think has something to do with her feeling ‘sensorily’ distressed by her leotard. Long time since we’ve had that issue with her. I’m pleased for them all and feel quite pleased too that this will lessen our dependence on dancing; i think gym may well suit them better.

So now Mondays have jazz at 4pm-4.45pm, then we have a snack, Gym for M and A from 5.30pm-6.45pm while F, J and i go to work or home and then Gym for F from 6.45pm to 8.30pm. I’m gonig to have to drive up and down one stretch of dual carriageway about 8 times in 3 hours. *snort*

Much of the week before last was spent in me frantically getting ready for us to go away. We had some new racking delivered for work which arrived a week late, which caused a few problems as we’d put everything (think 3-10 of everything of 1000 products) into boxes ready for swapping it the week before. So imagine trying to send out 100 parcels a day from that, with a new staff member and you can imagine it was a bit fraught. However, by deciding not to go to the Autumn Fair (didn’t seem much point on going on a buying mission until i know whether i want to actually expand any more) and Max taking a day off then all of us working our pretty posteriors off, we managed to get 12 whole new bays of lovely metal racking up, giving us new space, a re-organised room that suits current selling patterns better and got organised on what we want to keep/sell off. Then with a fair bit of hoop jumping i got nearly everything sorted/ordered/fixed/finished that needed to be ready for going away, including nearly (though to be honest not properly enough) handing over the customer care side to MF for the week, courtesy of a shiny new office blackberry. (To be fair, i got the new one, she got the old one!)

I’ve got no memory of the week as far as the girls went except i know they actually did loads and i managed to do loads with them too. I’ve no idea how we managed that.

Anyway, Friday we jumped into the car and headed off to Centerparcs at Elveden in Suffolk. We drove there in the rain, using the Sat Nav in my new phone as entertainment, walked from the car park in pouring rain but when we came back out after coffee and a cake, the sun was out and it stayed dry for the rest of the week. We did a LOT of swimming and walking during the week and started pretty quickly that day. Eventually, after about 3 days i found it completely impossible to be around so many cute, plump, happy and adorable babies, so we started going at about 6pm and that worked really well for all of us and gave the day a really long, full feeling.

I don’t think we did anything dramatic on Saturday other than book our weeks activities and talk a lot about politics. Fran is really very into how parties and voting works, the economy (good week to have time for that one… ) and pretty much anything that comes up in the news and we talked almost constantly about current affairs as we walked about. Maddy was starting to take an interest too which was great.

Sunday: Max, Fran and Maddy did the Aerial Adventure. Maddy was wildly excited about this, being a complete daredevil, Fran was quietly nervous and Max put a very brave face on it. I stayed on the ground in a vocally supportive role. As i predicted, because Maddy can’t empathise or predict feelings, she was petrified the minute she got up there because she just wasn’t prepared to feel scared, so it was all credit to her she made it round because at some points she was crying with fear and lost her footing once so dangled briefly too. Fran was fine, having dealt with her demons before hand and Max was just bloody brave, because he is more scared of heights than i am!!!

Once down (it took 45 minutes or so, ending in a long and dramatic zip wire, we took Max for beer.

Josie was determined to try the Time Out club so i booked her for an hour, told them to call me if she was upset at all as it was only a try out and was then VERY annoyed to get to the desk to have the girl lolling there tell me she had been crying for much of the hour. In the room they said they’d had to abandon the session as she was so upset but when i asked why they hadn’t called they said “well, we’d have to have physically left the room to get in touch. You really booked her in to the wrong type of session…” When i pointed out i’d asked advice on the front desk, she said “Oh well those girls don’t really know what we do” – i fail to see how i was supposed to know better than they, nor why a girl on the front desk couldn’t call me, nor could one of the 2 women supervising 4 children. Only sour note of the week really. Josie was distraught and it took ages to calm her down. Suffice to say i complained loudly.

By Monday the girls were well into a routine of walking to the shop for us in the mornings to get bread and a paper; Fran has taken to Sudoku in a big way and slightly stunned Max by doing the “Hard” one in The Times flawlessly. Was great to have real papers this week as the market collapsed (though not quite so nice as we wondered what would happen to the HBOS shares, which might have affected us quite badly) and we got a lot of mileage out of looking at photos, images, headlines and cartoons together. We started playing badminton every day at 5pm (Fran and Maddy got very good, Maddy has a killer serve when it comes off… that sounds like a phrase from a Chalet School book…!) then swimming afterwards so we all began to collapse in a slump for a while in the middle of the day and watch films, play games and read. As the weather was good we also got to use the playgrounds a lot which we haven’t been able to do before, having only ever visited in frosty January up till now. Much preferred September

TuesdayMore of the same i think. Fran had an unlucky moment with a stone pillar at the pool and ripped her little toenail completely off. She was very brave. Very nice brawny first aider told us the plans for upgrading that area for next year. Our villa had been improved too and we had bedroom tv (luxury!) and a dishwasher (double luxury!) Tuesday was the day that Josie abandoned the baby pool area (we never returned) and let go of my neck. She went down the blue and the white slides and started to hop about in the pool on her own doing “swimming races” with all of us.

Wednesday i had a massage which was fantastic and otherwise and all the big girls tried the climbing wall and made it to the top in various combinations.

Not sure what else.

ThursdayJosie, Amelie and i had a horse and carriage trip, pulled by a very well hung horse. Maddy pointed out the size of his willy loudly

We went to Treasure Island to play and met a very friendly squirrel who was quite happy to take chestnuts from our fingers and even sat on both mine and Max’s lap.

(In case you are wondering, i left my camera at work, so had to use my phone all week; then my flickr email address was only on my old phone so i had to send the to Facebook for back up and now i can’t figure out how to Bluetooth them to my laptop! More later… if i can face it!)

I had a 3 hour spa session while Max and the girls went to a Sparky-esque show and then i met them for swimming and badminton. Max did a fabulous line in sausage, mash and veg all week so we hardly ate out at all (not our thing really, too many intolerances!) We did the Pancake House one night (variable) and Indian Takeaway on this, the last night. Unfortunately, despite our best (actually, not best, mediocre and slapdash) efforts, it had something in it that Amelie didn’t agree with which meant we had a rash, vomit and tears. And rather a lot of anger this time, i think she feels fairly aggrieved about the reaction she has as it is very itchy and takes a while of feeling rotten before she is sick. Poor girl.

Friday we strung out with Starbucks (several of them there now, i loved the Mango Fruit Blend), playing on the beach by the lake, i had a facial (lovely again but curses to my bladders weakened state, it can’t handle detox and it is not relaxing to need a wee while wearing a Halloween style facemask!)!) and then we had lunch in the Bella Italia (brilliant, best restaurant there), another swim, a trip to the sweety shop and finally home… taking sausage and mash with us for tea!!!

It was a great week and as we hadn’t really had a family holiday this year, booking a week instead of 5 days made it a totally different thing to the midweek break. It felt like we were there for ages and had time to really relax and get into it without rushing to fill our days up to make the most of it. Also, because you can arrive at 10am on the first Friday and not leave till the end of the second, you get 8 days – even better. Had it been winter, or had the kids been too young to do some of the activities (they did jobs to earn them) it might have dragged but for us, this year, it was just perfect.

Love it.