just another morning here

We’re back down to earth with a bump here. Last week my sister was staying, which was really nice, but we didn’t get an awful lot done as we were still in definite holiday mode! We did do a couple of nice things including a mooch around town to show her the sights (or at least the good coffee shops!), church followed by a BBQ with friends on Sunday, a trip to Dartington Crystal (because we’d won free tickets) on Monday, and a fair bit of dossing around at home.

Yesterday we had Caitlin and Riona with us, took Esther back to the station early afternoon, and then the new term began with Anna’s first cello lesson later on in the afternoon. Incidentally, she passed her Grade 4 cello (108), don’t think I ever blogged that. And Abbie passed both the Grade 1s (piano 114 & recorder 107) that she took at the same time.

In the evening the girls both sharpened all their pencils and got their uniforms ready, and I think they even managed an early night – certainly they were in bed by the time I got home from an aborted Miscarriage Support Group meeting (forgot the keys, oops. still saw one person though and had a good chat on the stairs instead!).

Today the girls were back at school, and obviously pleased about it as they were both up and ready way earlier than necessary!

Josiah and I have had a relatively good home-ed day too. He did a couple of workbook pages from a music and a maths book, just to try and get back into the swing of doing something each day. He seems to have forgotten how to write all his numbers!

Then we did his music practices together, then made a picnic while signing up for Education City again, in order that I don’t feel too guilty about hours spent in the office, our next destination. By the way, does anyone still have a valid ‘refer a friend’ code that I could use when I actually have to sign up properly in 10 days’ time? Steve and I had a business meeting to attend together so Josiah amused himself with Education City on the computer at work while we did that.

The plan after that was to head to Home Ed group, which I assumed would have started back today, but the park was empty. Joe was a bit disappointed – I really should have checked beforehand as I probably had the info in an email somewhere. Ah well, there’s always next week. We had our lunch in the park anyway, and it gave us the chance to have a good chat about a couple of goals for home ed, which was good. Joe’s decided he’d like to try making a lapbook about the Romans, so that gives us something projecty to do alongside basic workbook things. He was only 18 months old when the girls did their first ever home ed project on the Romans so I don’t suppose he can remember much about it – in fact thinking about it, they did it with Aunty Jacky and I took him out to the park while she was there, so I can’t remember much either!

Anyway, then we headed back to the garage to get a few more things sorted; we’ve got a stand in the local shopping centre’s ‘Motor Show’ next weekend so there are some extra things that need doing for that.

Now we’re home for piano lessons. Still chasing my tail with lots of paperwork to catch up on so better stop blogging and get on with it!

So, I just did my response to the Dfes Consultation on Home Ed guidelines. If I was respondent id 197 does that mean only 196 people before me have done it? Bit scary, that – I’m sure there are loads more people out there who have comments to add – get on and do it before the end of the month!

So that got me thinking, and I decided to write a little bit about what Josiah’s been up to in terms of home ed recently; we’ve had reports and parents’ evenings for the girls lately so have caught up on their school progress (all fine, according to their teachers, who still seem to know different children from the ones we do !!), so this is something of the same sort of round up.

We haven’t done any written maths lately, just plenty of real life stuff, and the odd CDrom maths related game on the computer. Joe’s happy doing all sorts of mental maths as it crops up at the shops or wherever. He doesn’t know his tables off by heart, but is usually good at working them out when he needs to.
He can tell the time well and has a good understanding of the 24h clock.
He does plenty of weighing (usually while cooking) and measuring when he needs to measure things, and is accurate when he does. He will happily convert units of measurement (ie cm, m, km etc.) and is often the quickest of our three children to work that sort of problem out!
He enjoys logic/mathematical puzzles and we often sit with our ‘puzzle-a-day’ calendar over breakfast doing those.

Writing generally hasn’t evolved as something Josiah enjoys doing yet – I hope that will change but until it does I’m not going to force the issue, not at age 6, anyway! When he does write his handwriting is neat and his spelling is generally ok, for a 6yo
Joe reads for pleasure at night in bed, we regularly find him asleep amidst a pile of books. I’m not sure how much he’s reading and how much is just looking at the books as he still prefers picture books, but I don’t mind as long as he is enjoying them.
He’s also listened to the Chronicles of Narnia over and over again on the ipod, I must get some more audiobooks for him actually, he really enjoys them.
He will quite happily use a non-fiction book along with contents/index pages, he is confident about alphabetical order and can pick out relevant information from a book when he is looking for it. He is also well able to read and follow a recipe from an adult recipe book, which I think is fairly impressive.
We’ve played through a couple of adventure games on the Wii recently for which he has ploughed through guides to get through them, so I think that counts as reading comprehension too

We’ve done the odd science kit together, and as well as that Joe does lots of cooking, and plays with sciencey stuff like gears and electronics. He’s still interested in all things Space related since our project earlier in the year, and he’s also done a fair bit of learning around biology/human body stuff, through his favourite books and supported by plenty of conversation (notably Anna recounting her pshe lessons about puberty in great detail over the dinner table ). We’ve done a bit of gardening this year although most things have either drowned in the swampy waterlogged beds, or been eaten by slugs, but never mind.

We recently used Education City for another of their trials; well timed to fit in with my jury service the other week. Josiah spent a fair bit of time sitting in Steve’s office playing on it, completely unaided and unsupervised. I picked up the reports at the end of it, and having put him in for Y2 activities (he would only be at the end of Y1 at the moment), I was pleased to see that he was consistently scoring an average of 80% across all the subjects, in all the activities he’d done, thereby reassuring me that the informal year we’ve had hasn’t been too bad for him

Arty stuff happens in splurges, when we have a project on. We did the dalek thing earlier in the year, which Josiah really enjoyed, and he helped out with planning, designing and making the R2D2 costume last week. He likes drawing, occasionally, but doesn’t like getting messy, so we don’t do as much arty crafty stuff as I used to do with the girls at the same age. He does enjoy fimo modelling, and hama beads if he has some inspiration.

Violin lessons are ongoing; Josiah and I practice most days. It’s hard work – he wanted to learn and so we started, but he often wants to give up. We’ve come to an agreement that he can quit either when he’s 18 or when he gets to the end, whichever is the sooner I’m hoping that I will be able to quote Anna who famously said ‘but if I was good at it then I would enjoy it’, and in due course he will enjoy it more! Still, he is good at it, he makes a nice sound, so it is worth carrying on with the discipline, in my view.
He’s done a fair bit of music theory too – as much as he can absorb at his age, in any case, and has started piano lessons with Laura, which he enjoys. He finds it hard to play in front of/with other people, performing is not his thing particularly, although he did enjoy the one group lesson we had with violin. In a couple of weeks Laura’s pupils have a concert; he’s already said that he’s nervous about it, so it will be interesting to see if the reluctance he’s had to perform/play violin in public will be the same with the piano, or not. A very different scenario and at least the girls will be there too, but who knows how he will react.

Swimming lessons are ongoing and Josiah is progressing well there. We try to go out somewhere most days for exercise, even if it’s just round to the park with a bike. He is keen to start some sort of karate or something, so we may look into that for September, although I don’t quite know how we’d fit it in to a week.

Most regular readers will know that I have found it immensely hard to have one child at home full time rather than all of them, for a whole host of reasons. Josiah doesn’t seem to mind, though, but he does miss the girls very much when they are at school.
We’ve started going along to home ed group again and that has been good for both of us, although for various reasons I haven’t managed to get there for over a month now (and won’t until September, because of music exams this week, a towing test next week, and then it’s the holidays). Joe made a couple of little friends in the few weeks we went and we’ve been meeting up with one of them recently so that’s been really good for him (and me too).

There must be lots more I could say, but when I sit down to sum up I simply forget all the conversations we have, and the vast majority of Josiah’s learning is probably done this way. As such there isn’t any visible evidence of reasonable progress, and if I’m honest I don’t really want to start measuring him against any abitrary yardstick either. He’s growing up, enjoys having plenty of time available just to be himself, and the vast majority of the time he’s great company, makes intelligent conversation, and is relatively helpful too. And he makes mean choc chip cookies

So, we went to the 5th MuddlePuddle Summer Camp at Kessingland Beach. Only our third, we missed a couple of years, but it was good to be back Didn’t get the camera out much, but photos are here.

Various highlights according to the various members of this family, but as this is my blog, I’ll write about mine We will certainly remember the rain and mud. Thankfully it served to highlight the wonderfulness of the new folding camper, which is definitely a change for the better, I think all of us appreciated it for the space it gave us. Even the awning wasn’t too horrendous to put up (although we did have a fair bit of help both times we did it so I’ll reserve judgement until after the rest of the summer). We did have an awful muddy flood in the awning for a few days; when the trailer started to simultaneously sink (unevenly) while the awning pegs fell out of the ground, and the mud began to smell, we decided to move to higher ground – but had to get a tractor to tow the trailer out, as the cars were getting stuck in the field and our car would never have managed! So that was amusing

It was great to be among friends for a week, and to chat to new people too, albeit briefly. In some ways it was a shame that the weather wasn’t really ‘sitting round outside’ weather as I didn’t see enough of some people, but there we go.

Our day at Bewilderwood was fab, highly recommended by all of us.

Sparky’s – some of us love it, some of us hate it. Actually this year in some ways it was good to have somewhere warm and dry to go! And it’s only a couple of years until all my children are old enough not to need the accompanying adult (and have to ask other people’s parents )! This year some of the children entered the karaoke competition and Anna won, meaning someone is going to end up taking her back in October for a second helping of Sparky fun – aargh! Still, at least she won static caravan accommodation for the week as well.

What else?
We went to see Shrek 3 at Lowestoft cinema on the Sunday (a mini-tradition there as we watched Shrek 2 there on its release weekend three years ago).
I managed to miss pretty much all the planned camp events (well, the ones that still happened!) for one reason and another. Anna did some tie-dying though!
Didn’t go to the beach at all. I don’t really like beaches, and no-one else asked to go, so we didn’t.
Enjoyed the cabaret on Thursday, fab to see so many different performances.

Had a really really naff journey home, it took three hours longer than it should have, which just goes to cement my hatred of driving to and from the East coast (Em, don’t know how you do it on a regular basis, it would do my head in!). Still, despite that and the general swampiness of the week, it was definitely a great time

As usual, home education leads me to realise that I don’t know anything about anything (and to think I trained as a ‘professional’ teacher, supposedly so much better than a parent at educating children – er I don’t think so!).

Joe chose a science kit to do this morning, and it was all about forces. Gravity, friction etc. demonstrated by the standard ‘toy car down a ramp’ experiment, etc., which he really enjoyed. Then we got onto centrifugal force, spinning things around his head and in bottles, etc. At which point I had some vague recollection of there being centripetal force as well, and went to look up the difference between the two, thinking that centrifugal was an outwards circular force and centripetal being the opposite but now I’m completely confused, because this article says centrifugal force is not really a force at all!

Anyway it must be time for coffee! Hopefully by the time I get back someone might have educated me …