just another morning here

This is what Abbie and I ended up doing while the others were out this evening – I still haven’t managed to start on any operations!

Time for the Apprentice now though

I have really enjoyed reading a set of posts on Tall Skinny Kiwi today – Losing My Religion in London – start here and read on through, there are four in the series plus one extra on Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle which I also appreciated. Just interesting, and appealed to me on a number of different levels.

Otherwise life is back to boring humdrum carry on … with one highlight for Josiah – this week he is the ‘special person’ in his class at school. This caused rather huge excitement over the weekend as he gathered together bits and bobs to take in to school. I failed to produce a photograph though, just don’t do paper photos any more – they’re either good enough to be on the wall in a frame, or they’re on the computer, nowhere inbetween, and I don’t have a printer! Ah well.

Being ‘special person’ apparently means you get to stand at the front of the line every time the class lines up for something, take the register back to the library, and on Friday they get to do show and tell about their stuff/photos which has been sitting on a table all week.

Perhaps it would be worth adopting this approach at home too; less arguments about who should push the coffee down, sit in the front of the car, have the first bath, or choose which game to play!

We stopped in the park on the way home so Joe came home all muddy and I made him strip so that I could wash his uniform. He refused to put any more clothes on to go and play outside with the girls, so he and I spent a happy hour hamaing together, having been inspired by Merry’s flickr pictures.

He chose a pirate pattern to follow, from one of the pattern books. Swords do it every time

I don’t think he’d ever really bothered following a pattern before, only followed the shape of a board, iyswim, so I showed him how to count it, and we did a pretty good joint effort. He’s really pleased with his pirate, and I’m thinking of taking it to stick it up on the ‘special person’ board in place of Joe’s photo tomorrow!

Yesterday actually turned out to be really nice. The journalist was lovely, and I get the impression that the feature will be very positive. Having said that, I did think that she maybe should have informed herself a bit better on the legal position on home education before trying to conduct an interview, because it was marginally annoying to have to explain it, and to explain why the Children’s Bill has implications for home educators, that sort of thing. That was before we got on to the topic of LEA involvement. I hope I handled it all well enough.

Why did we do it? I guess I agree to do these things simply because I’d rather someone relatively normal did an interview than they had to scrabble around and end up finding someone way out who might not be very good at communicating the whys and wherefores of home ed, or who was doing it for such a particular reason that it might give a skewed impression of home education. If I didn’t do it, someone else would. It’s interesting, I like meeting people, I like thinking through what we do, why we do it, the advantages and disadvantages of it, and while being able to communicate those to the rest of the world isn’t vitally important to me, if an opportunity comes my way I don’t mind agreeing to it. I don’t think there’s anything in it for us, really, either – I don’t particularly like that sort of publicity, but then again I don’t dislike it enough to not do these things in the first place! I sincerely hope that it will be okay, I’m expecting it to be good, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Anyway, the kids also enjoyed being part of things – first thing in the morning we had a look at this website and discussed the platonic solids and why they are a special group of solids, then they set about constructing them from Geomags. Anna made little labels for a display, and by the end of it they were happily counting vertices (balls), edges (rods), and faces (panels), and using that language correctly. They also got the hama beads out, and games like Connect 4 and Downfall, which are both strategic and therefore very educational, imo! I was really proud of Anna having an interview, too, and being articulate about home education – for once she didn’t say that she’d rather be at school! Instead she said that sometimes she feels like going back to school but that most of the time she likes being home educated. This is progress, and I’m pleased about it – because while we’re happy that we’ve made the right choice for our family at the moment, I’ve always kind of wanted her to agree with us! It’s taken two years to get to that! She was really proud to show off her Different Life video, too.

We took the reporter with us in the afternoon to our HE dance session, so she was able to interview some other parents there, as well as observing us socialising, and then she left from there. We carried on to Anna’s cello lesson, shopping at Sainsbury’s, then home for a quick tea before dashing out to Miscarriage Support Group in the evening.