Today was the shoe shop stop; trainers x 2, school shoes x 2, and shoes to go to the prom in (and therefore totally unsuitable for much else). Very Expensive. Still, everyone was happy and if I’m lucky they will last into the autumn term too.

Anna has now reached the same shoe size as me; I’ve been waiting for this for ages! Now at least every pair of shoes I buy for her, I can borrow back if I ask nicely!

Visited DVLA to get tax (oh, and a quick geocache), then I delivered a car to my parents in the afternoon, so drove up to Gordano to meet them half way. I like a good drive, especially on my own, so didn’t mind. The kids sat around watching iPlayer and playing games while I was gone.

Once back I made a quick veggie lasagne for more friends who came for dinner. We tried to watch Heston’s Feasts on replay but it wasn’t working; had to resort to watching it on the laptop after they’d gone (amazing, wish I had been a dinner guest!).

Very relieved on behalf of home educators that the proposals for changes to home ed legislation have been dropped tonight – had a drink alongside many of my friends this evening (any excuse!). On the other hand I’m still praying for the best outcome for a good friend’s baby at the moment; seems odd and slightly wrong to be blogging about normal stuff when life hangs in the balance.

As a former home educator, I still identify strongly with the home education community and as such I feel compelled to add my letter to those already written. I am also a trained teacher, employed at the moment as a cover supervisor in a special school, with my own children choosing to attend school themselves. For this reason I believe I have a superbly balanced viewpoint from which to base my opinions, unlike the biased reports you have previously received.

Without exception, the home educating families that I know, are loving, supportive people, who have given up their own time and money to do what they think is best for their children. They bend over backwards to ensure that every opportunity they can access is given to their children, and are totally child-centric in their approaches to education, be they autonomous or structured. The children themselves are free from regulation, happy, creative, interested, and always learning – because they have the time and space to do so.

Without exception, state schools that I know are places bound by structure and red tape. Teachers are unhappy because of the amount of paperwork they have to complete, which takes away from the time they can actually spend with the children – someone told me this again only yesterday. Teachers themselves yearn for the freedom that home educators have.
The children themselves often aren’t happy, engaged, or in fact provided with a suitable, efficient education – despite the sterling efforts of most teachers – because this is simply impossible given the huge class sizes, statutory curriculum, and regulations that teachers are working within.

To be honest, if you were only asking for voluntary registration in order to safeguard children, perhaps you would have met with a different response. However, to ask for yearly plans and interviews with children alone was simply too much – and it cuts across the very essence of home education.

To suggest spending so much time and money on monitoring something that simply doesn’t need it, is ludicrous, ESPECIALLY given the sorry state of your schools. You can’t justify monitoring like this for home educators unless you bring it in for all families, regardless of educational provision – and there would be outrage if you suggested it, and rightly so, for these proposals are outrageous. You would also find, I’m sure, if you did apply these proposals to all families, that the educational provision which is failing the most is that provided by the state itself. As such, where do *you* think the money should be spent?

Please, do the honourable thing and reject these proposals as soon as possible. They are expensive, unworkable, and unnecessary.

Haven’t got much to say though. It’s been a really busy week as usual, I’ve spent loads of time fiddling around with the orchestra database and not got very far, while other stuff has just carried on. Josiah was ill on Tuesday, but nothing too serious as he was back at school after one day off. He’s still got a horrible cough but is now on a two week half term, of which the rest of us are exceedingly jealous. As a result, Steve and Joe are in charge of planning and organising next week’s holiday in Wales – I’m just going to drive there with a suitcase and hope for the best!

I’ve been watching the home education select committee process from afar this week; while it seems as though this doesn’t affect our family directly, it’s still something that’s very important to me/us and I filled my response to the consultation in a long time ago. Even if your children are in school, please take the time to read it and respond – it matters for ALL children, not just those educated at home. I’m tempted to write my own Dear Mr Balls, in fact.

Not being able to go to any ‘not-back-to-school’ picnics, and having a new job which might entail writing things down occasionally were obviously the only excuses I needed to join in with the kids’ annual stationery acquisition today – I bought myself a diary, little pencil case, and a 3 pack of these pens in different colours and am happily writing all sorts of things. Sad but true, I think my favourite part of school was writing in different colours, and having all sorts of different colour inks for underlining/highlighting. Don’t think I paid much attention to the content, but the presentation was always pretty (a bit like this blog really!)!

The children packed their lunch up and took it off to the park to eat it today, leaving Steve and I to have lunch together so that was a nice interlude in the day After that I sat and played Animal Crossing – well it is the last day of my holidays! Joe went to TKD and they all revisited Luigi’s Mansion on GC, then did some music practice. We’re all back to school over the next few days – me tomorrow, Anna on Thursday, and the other two on Monday. Ho hum.

And of course, the beginning of term is damned expensive as all lessons need paying for, argh! Cello teacher also said to me “you know, someone at Anna’s level shouldn’t really be playing on a cheapy student cello”, yet Anna is still a midget. So we are planning to shop around for a 7/8 cello – not your average ‘off the peg’ size, so likely to be even more expensive than average. Oh well!

p.s. ha, just noticed that I have used this post title before!

Have had wildly differing days today. Anna and Josiah were at school as normal. Abbie was sick during the night (not quite sure why) so she had the day off, and Steve worked mainly from home to accommodate that. He also tidied up the utility area which was a very useful job to have done, even if it did mean that he happened upon my secret stash of snacks – and ate them, the ratbag!! Abbie’s been doing lots of painting

I, meanwhile, had the pleasure of visiting the home of one of the children in my class, as one of our ‘Bus Day’ trips. The mum had invited us ages ago and it was lovely to finally see their house, which I’d heard lots about, and today I saw why. They have a small garden centre and a fair bit of land, on which they’ve designed, built and landscaped their own house and garden, in a totally child centred and disability aware way, as they have two children with the same genetic disability (and then two more children who don’t have the condition). She’d baked delicious cake, and was totally welcoming to us all – we all looked very tempted when she offered beer to drink at lunchtime! It was a beautiful day weather wise, and a real treat to be able to let our children free as the house and garden were all completely safe. They have chickens, too, so the kids fed the chickens and collected eggs as well

Also had a lovely chat about home education – she’s the kind of mum who keeps her kids off school if they need a lie in (gets raised eyebrows all the time!), and obviously loves having them at home with her – just the type of person who understands the premise of home ed without needing it explained. Interesting. In their case I suspect that the respite of school is much needed, however, especially as the two children who are at my school don’t tend to sleep very much at all!

Home for piano/cello lessons, tae kwon do, trying to cook omelettes for tea, I am rubbish with omelettes though.

Afterwards we went out for a walk in Steve’s teenage stomping ground, to hide a couple of geocaches. We’ve set them up as a multi – not published yet but when it is, it’ll be here. Hope the co-ords are ok! We had fun doing it, there were a couple of streams to cross on the way so that made it exciting

Spent the afternoon playing games and then having a general tidy up before early nights all round.

Today’s Home Ed review links: What the Home Education Review will really mean, and Start Here – a really good explanation of the pertinent issues for all parents, not just home educators.

Abbie really enjoyed looking after Richard (the DM/conductor)’s dog, and had the lead attached to her chair all the way through! Unfortunately she ended up with really itchy eyes afterwards, not sure if it was hayfever, dog allergy, or something else random, but there we go. I ended up being official photographer as the usual people who take photos had forgotten their cameras, hence the overload of photographs on flickr!

Anyway, as well as it being a lovely day for a concert (and they played really well as usual), we also had secret plans to celebrate the director of music’s 60th birthday with party poppers and a huge cake – that all went off really well, and Richard didn’t even look *too* embarrassed!

Steve and Josiah had joined us by this time, better late than never We stayed in town for a while after that, had coffee with my sister, then shopped for a bit – geocache loot – we may yet get around to hiding one tomorrow.

Home for a bit of relaxation and preparation for Josiah’s birthday ‘do’. He’s just got one friend over for a sleepover – his first ever! When his friend arrived, Steve whisked them off to Sainsbury’s to choose their pizza (Pizza Hut dinner here again, think that might turn into a tradition!), while Abbie, her friend and I set out to put clues around the area, for a treasure hunt that Abbie had designed.

The boys loved the treasure hunt and literally ran around the route after all the clues The prize was a box of food for a midnight feast – not sure it will last until midnight but we’ll see.

They’ve played on a car racing game on the playstation, watched Inkheart again, and shock horror, Josiah even got his violin out to play the James Bond theme to his friend – a jaw drop moment!!

Anyway, they are sleeping in the tent, so that’s a treat as far as they’re concerned, and they’re being relatively quiet at the moment! Planning pancakes for breakfast tomorrow

When I’ve had a moment to myself, I’m reading a lot around the reaction to the Home Education Badman report, and despite not being an active home educator at the moment I still believe in choice in education, and am therefore also outraged at some of the recommendations in the report. There are a lot of better blogs than mine with more eloquent authors than me writing about the subject – so many that I don’t really know which one to link to first! In particular today: Renegade Parent and Dare to Know. I’m guessing that the average Joe Public may not even realise that the review exists, or the implications of it – but it *does* matter to everyone, not just home educators. It’s a question of choice in education being removed, privacy and individuality being eroded, and it’s unacceptable.

Being cross, I decided to stay up late breaking (and then fixing) the church website that I look after – finally went to sleep about 1.30am which is very late for me!

Woke up at 6am as I have every morning this week, to the sound of piano practice. Taking music seriously is good of course but it’s getting a little too serious even for me! Bit tired as a result, early night tonight.

Have been thinking all day about the Home Education consultation report due out today – haven’t been home yet so haven’t managed to read it, but I’ve read enough tweets etc. to know that I’m going to be almost as cross about it as most of the HEors that I know.
Still, I do wonder whether it will actually become legislation. But until that point it’s worth standing up and fighting the intrusion on privacy *as a parent*, never mind what educational provision our family has chosen.

Meanwhile mad Thursday evening continues. After school I dashed to drop Anna at choir with the others. Then took her to her piano lesson (date of G5 – 30th June) and the rest of us mooched in the park. Thankfully met a friend from work along with a 9yo sibling of a child at my school (friend has his sister for respite for her – great idea as I’m sure it’s much needed!) so it was nice to see them.
Then on to swimming lessons for all 3. Blogging by iPhone before I fall asleep while waiting for them to reappear!

Despite the usual Melrose illness and the fact that lots of people left early as a result, which was sad, we still had a great week. We enjoyed our time in the hostel and out of it – I hardly saw the children as they were having such fun socialising, and I had a lovely time with friends too. Would have been even better if people hadn’t started being ill/going home on my birthday, but there we are, such is life.

My three all enjoyed Helen’s music workshop, and the girls loved Matt’s computer game one too. Josiah still maintains that ‘he has enough computer games already so why would he want to make a new one?’, and nothing will persuade him otherwise! Our trip to Dynamic Earth was good, and we all had fun joining in on a couple of geocache trails. All very educational I’m sure, just to justify the week out of school!

Firstly we went to the library and picked up as many books on the Romans as we possibly could. Josiah particularly enjoyed reading Usborne’s ‘The Story of Rome’ himself, it was just the right level.

I confess to having cheated slightly; while googling for Roman Lapbooks I found an Ancient Rome Lapbook pdf pack at the HomeschoolEstore.com, and figured I might as well save myself the hassle of planning the lapbook out for myself so I bought the pack. I must say I was fairly impressed with it, it was very comprehensive and I think both of us benefited from not having the think up the ideas for things to do in the lapbook! It helped us to break the project down into manageable study chunks, too – as we did each section (food, clothing, specific people & places, etc) we learned about them separately. We didn’t do all of it, but we used the sections that we fancied learning about, and Joe’s lapbook turned out really well.

Steve took Josiah to the RAMM museum in town, and they inspected lots of Roman things (coins, mosaic pieces, games etc.), dressed up, learnt some Latin words [wasn't impressed at the suggestion of learning more Latin though!] etc.

We had a trip to the Roman Baths in Bath, which was great.

We took a trip to a rather lovely mosaic shop in town, Opus Mosaic, and bought ourselves a few tiles to make a mosaic with. Actually the lady in the shop (its owner) was really helpful and it turned out that her teenage daughter had been home educated so we had a lovely chat about that as well! Abbie enjoyed helping with this – and it was a great opportunity to bring in some maths and ‘planning’ skills as Josiah mapped out his design on squared paper before doing the tiles. Still need to get some grout to finish it off!

We’ve touched on a fair bit of maths; not only with Roman numerals which Joe enjoyed doing, but also due to discussing the timeline and calendar we ended up talking about negative numbers a fair bit, and adding/subtracting them. Josiah looked at a few of the Roman emperors in his lapbook, and worked out their ages from their birth/death dates, some of which were fully BCE, some were CE so easy to work out, and some crossed the change between BCE and CE. Can’t quite get the hang of this BCE and CE thing, I kept slipping into BC and AD by accident. Anyway, I digress – he got on fine with the maths of it!

The project and lapbook were pretty much finished by half term, then we discovered that during half term week the museum were putting on some Romans activities so we went and did some of those, which was a great end to the project. I think Joe would say he’d enjoyed most of it, well all apart from the writing, anyway! He is such a reluctant writer, he must have actually written about 10 sentences at most.

Weblinks we used:
History For Kids Rome Links
BBC Schools Romans
Roman Empire – children’s section
The Romans in Britain