the big ship sails on the ali ali o

Check out that cloudless blue sky Conker letters

We have had a great home ed day today. S stayed up late reading Sapphire Battersea and then finished it off this morning. All 300 odd pages of it.

We have been to the park to meet some friends. It was seriously hot even without factoring in that it is the last day of September. The children put on an amazing circus performance for us. Totally spontaneously. Complete with: lion tamers, high wire (zip wire) and spinning and made up circus names for themselves. They all played together really well. It can be done!!

This afternoon our 'home ed helper' came over for 2 hours during which time she & S made cookies, played: magic cauldron, party party and shopping list and O did some jigsaws. I squeezed in some word game with E. He is getting it! Lovely to watch.

Tomatoes from the allotment in a feta salad for tea (with lamb koftas on the side) To think we were googling green tomato recipes this time last week. Serious sunshine!

Spies

S has written and 'published' her first spy novel, inspired by Ruby Redfort I suspect. Some of it is in mirror writing which she knows is how Leonardo da Vinci wrote.

Inside, after decoding it, I can tell you that it says

• avoid untrustworthy people
• always have a side-kick
• finger print the enemy

and she has threaded it all together with ribbon binding herself.

Sapphire Battersea

Another day another book delivery! Easy to see why Big Small was so keen for this one, Sapphire Battersea by Jacqueline Wilson, to arrive as it is shares her name. Just like Ruby Redfort yesterday we weren't expecting this book to arrive until October so a great surprise on the door mat.

There are occasions in the life of a mother of a six year old book worm (who was assessed as reading at an age 13 level two years ago now) when you worry that your daughter might run out of suitable reading material. Not today.

PS The reason she doesn't look very smiley in the pictures is because I interupted valuable reading time taking these photos.

Flying High in a Friendly Sky

Flying High in a Friendly Sky

It seems like so much learning and activity happens in between blog posts at the moment it is hard to know where to start without it all coming out like some kind of James Joyce Stream of Consciousness writing. Late last night E's new Galt letter wipe off sheets arrived. He had been using S's old ones but they were so old they just wouldn't wipe off anymore so we bought him some fresh ones of his own. They are exactly the same except they have one less column on! Cheeky hey!

Poor E really does have a big bruise on his bum from the slide slip in Worthing on Monday.

Awake early this morning O was playing letters, E wanted word magnets & S and I sang times tables. E went bonkers when I cut his sandwiches into the wrong kind of triangles so we spent ages talking about: right angle, Equilateral, Isosceles and Scalene triangles and how a bloomer loaf doesn't work well for triangles. S looked them up on line. Then S & E played Hogwarts with the lego for an hour or more.

Home is working well. The stress of group meet ups of E wanting to play with people that don't want to play with him and S feeling bothered that people want to play with her & she doesn't is too much for me at the moment. Especially combined with looking after an active toddler. Much better is to stay home and be with a family we want to be with.

I am focusing (on their behalf) on friends of their choosing rather than groups. So today they had their BFFs over, their Daddy One dropped them off and for the first hour or so I didn't see them! Origami, lego, angry birds, lego website, barbies, barbies at the art gallery, in the garden teaching O baby animal names........... Then they came to me for help to make spy novels and adventure stories. In some strange way 6 happy children seemed easier than my usual 3. Baby Small joined in painted and we started talking about finger prints and forensics and evidence and I just love being a part of the way their minds go..... When we can have 3 children over and not a single upset until an accidental slip 30 seconds before they leave I know things can be okay.

After the friends left E and I made the duplo pyramid you can see in the photos and another day in which I am confident they have covered everything they would have done at school and more comes to a close. But the bigger change is in me I think, I worry very little now about where they would be at if they were at school or how they would fit it at school.

S is enjoying her new books. If I was to choose a new book it would be this one "The Education of Millionaires" it looks interesting - but I can only say "millionaires" in a Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses voice!

Look into My Eyes

We sure do have amazon deliveries at strange times. Before 7 this morning Cut Throat Celts arrived and this evening around 6pm Ruby Redfort arrived! S has been eagerly awaiting this latest Lauren Child book as she is a Clarice Bean fan. I was under the impression that is was not published til the weekend but we had it on a pre-order so it arrived today. If S had restricted bedtimes I suspect it would be a torch under the bed clothes scenario tonight. In fact it is highly possible she might have read it before it hits the shelves.

Hotter Than July (in late September)

The morning mist clears - on the digger at Fishers Farm. I just had to photograph the sky S designs her dream home

Rainbow cottage is finished complete with pictures on the wall and lamps hanging from the ceiling.

Today I have found it hard to wipe the smug home educator smile from my face. What a transformation in 48 hours. It is not often the last week of September offers up 80 degree weather and so: fresh banana muffins made, peppers roasted, tomatoes from the allotment cooked and frozen, Horrible Histories Cut Throat Celts delivered, we headed to Fishers Farm Park with Grandma to enjoy the warm rays and coffee on board the pirate ship.

S (6) doesn't always want to bounce around as much as E & O so she sat with me and designed her dream home, that she plans to live in alone, whilst they fired balls in jolly jumbos soft play. The Smalls have done: trampolining, pony rides (O changed his mind at the last minute) tractor rides, soft play, tree house fun.

Baby Small (2) fell asleep on the way home so we collected a new Star Wars library book (Star Pilot) for E plus E (4) and I even managed 20 minutes of one on one word game with the key words magnets.

This is the kind of day that reminds me that if I am still a full~time full~term home educator in 2027 I will not mind. it is amazing what a difference sunshine and a few decent nights sleep make. S stayed up with Grandma and I last night for a bit and watched an episode of the BBC Royal Palaces series. Once again she knocked us out with her historical knowledge.

Hello Little Swimmer

S (6) can swim! So it is appropriate that she dressed up as The Little Mermaid shortly after coming home from the pool.

Credit due to her, obviously, and to The Daddy One and The Grandma One who have been taking S & E swimming twice a week between them since the spring time. She has had no formal lessons, instruction or classes just lots of time. Apparently E is pretty close to independent swimming too. I think the holiday to Center Parcs really gave them a flavour for the fun you can have in the water.

We are checking the childhood milestone boxes this summer, swimming, loosing teeth, riding two-wheelers.

S & I were due to have a London day today but last night she said that she wanted to spend the day with Grandma instead as if we always go out and leave Grandma with the boys then she never sees Grandma! So we have had a day of: swimming, allotment, planting bulbs and packing up and posting the ebay sales from the weekend.

The dressing up box has been out again, S as a mermaid and O as a superhero. He danced into the kitchen in his hero attire and has been singing songs from Horrible Histories especially "My name is, my name is Charles the Second." For two he knows many of the words.

Monday

A shorter than short post tonight as I am tired to the core. Today has, outside of a few lovely moments, been really hard work for me. We decided to go to meet up with 10 or so home ed families at a park in Worthing today. We dithered about doing some reading and writing for a bit as it was raining first thing but the forecast promised brighter later. I had said to myself after the NBTSP in Chichester that we would halt such large scale meet-ups for a while as they were providing too stressful but a couple of friends asked specifically if S would be coming along and so greedy for a final few Autumn outings before Winter hibernation we headed off.

It was the proverbial 'one of those days' at the park. O had a great time and avoided the mud but for S and E it was a lot more tricky. E was magnetically drawn to the bigger boys again, most of whom are older than his sister and have little Patience for his younger years meanwhile the Smaller boys (I say smaller because they are not necessarily younger!) are looking to E to play. I chatted to him for a while and I said "You can be a pest to the bigger boys or the cool hero that the bigger boys are to you to them" and he played fabulously with them until he unfortunately fell off the slide.............he has a massive bruise on his bum :(

S was doing okay playing with a friend until another older friend turned up and they went off leaving S alone, shortly afterwards she got stuck at the top of the climbing frame for quite some time before she could attract my attention and was really distressed and upset.

Meantime the mother of the friend she really wanted to see who had been unable to come because her Daddy had gone to work with her baby brother's pushchair in the car texted to say "Call in" so we did.

S had a great time hairdressing the girl's world and drawing as did O playing Thomas Tank Engine with his new friend but without an obvious playmate E was a nightmare. We offered him films. iplayer, glitter pictures but all he wanted to do was make mischief.

So we came home since which time the three of them have been playing fabulously together leaving me sort of wondering what it is all about! I guess the big advantage of having a trio is that in any given day you see what it is like from both sides of the fence.

In Other News

• I had yogurt cake for the first time ever today. It was delicious.
• Saw the biggest pair of scissors I have ever seen - they were almost cartoonesque in their over proportions! (that is what happens when you visit the home of a carpet fitter!
• Also realised I forgot to blog on Sunday - We had friends over in the afternoon. A wonderful family of long term home edders who have returned to living in this area. Spookily they bought EXACTLY the same Sunday afternoon treats as I had to share.
• and this happened

• Regular blog readers will know that Etienne is growing a Dagobah Carnivorous Plant habitat using Venus flytraps. He knows that touching the leaves makes them turn black so tonight he made some finger traps out of empty pea pods instead. Sapphire Peters saw them and said "not Venis flytraps but pea-nis flytraps"

She had absolutely no idea why The Daddy One and I folded with laughter!

Maisy Snuggle Book

I replied to a tweet from Waterstones asking for people to review a new Maisy book on Friday and here is Baby Small reading it on Sunday. Regular readers will know he is a major Maisy fan. I love the way his little hands are holding the pages and his toes are peaking out the end.

Brown Paint

Check out those giant jars of brown paint (aka Nutella) yours for £49.99 Brown Paint is Baby Small's name for nutella.

E's (4) Star Wars Garden grows Brighton Museum

We have been to a very hot and sunny Brighton today the second day of Autumn. But not before E noticed that the Venus Flytrap in his Star Wars garden (see earlier blog post "Wild Wood") had sprouted and grown (a lot!) The Daddy One needed a new battery for his watch and some new casual shoes. The Smalls soon tired of shopping so I sat in a cafe a tried drawing and chatting, only a short term fix so we headed to the museum. E spied some plates by Frank Lloyd Wright he rather fancied, S loved the fashion but O wasn't having any of it (well, it is a Saturday!) So we spent a while on the pier and had lunch in the sun. There are some amazing Egyptian displays in the museum if you can't face London it could just be the place for you. The Daddy One has taken E to the 12 hour lawnmower race tonight.

my wobbly tooth must not ever never fall out

my wobbly tooth must not ever never fall out

Stayed up late last night and watched "Milk" about the life of the 1st openly gay politician in the US. Today, whilst playing mini figures with E, I was struck by how some of them seemed to be modeled on the 1970s characters in the film, probably because they are from that same time period. The most shocking thing about the whole film was how junk food was used as a defence in court and its effect on behaviour meant that a lesser crime was recorded. I never knew about the twinkie defence. It probably resonated with me because of the post birthday party sugar low we have experienced today.

The Daddy One's monthly Friday off today and our first Friday morning with our new home ed helper. A lovely local Mum of a home educated teenager has agreed to come and play once a week for a couple of hours, opening up options for one on one projects and maybe even 5 minutes for me. It was great this morning S did origami for around an hour. She made a Neko Cat, a Kami Cop Cup and a Paku-Paku muncher. I noticed when I was clearing away that one of the book's authors was only 13. S is inspired and is now making paper aeroplanes and flying them round the house.

E had an hour of lego fun whilst I played with O and unpacked a shopping delivery.

In Other News

• S has spent a while on BBC KS2 Bytesize today looking at science and punctuation, and google body and a maths program The Daddy One uploaded onto the tablet.
• More of the Star Wars reading scheme turned up at the library for E, proper long books with no pictures. He was spotting all the "yes" and "look" words as I read him a chapter tonight.
• Today is the autumn equinox.
• S's front tooth that has been wobbly for a month fell out today, the adult teeth are visible underneath, we have been looking at the skull postcard we bought on Tuesday. She is so funny, as she has several other wobbly teeth at the moment she has been outlining her Bank of Tooth Fairy proposals to us (knowing that we are the fairies) whereby she only cashes in her bonds in times of cash flow crisis!
• Having a new comfy sofa in the den is doing little to improve my productivity as I keep sitting on it!
• S is re-reading "Goblet of Fire"
• S & E are playing this game with the hand writing wipe off sheets where they race to see who can be the neatest tracing out the letters and numbers.
• More red tomatoes from the allotment and lots of green ones........

Turn Me Out

Lego Mini Figure Cakes Watching the bees in action

Turn Me Out

The Daddy One borrowed the bus yesterday to collect the new sofa so this classic tune kick started our day "Turn it up!" said E.

There were 8 home ed families at Warnham Nature Reserve this morning and 7 at a 6th birthday party this afternoon. I hope this volume of friends stick with it (& us) through to the teenage years and beyond.

S was very overtired and hungry thanks to a late night and no breakfast and was being really over sensitive about E & O running off at the start of the walk but E was a dream boat being really kind to the younger boys. Why can't I spin all the plates at once? We did see: dragonflies, butterflies, various mushrooms and many other signs of Autumn on our walk.

We really like Warnham. The working beehive at the start and the harvest mice are popular and it is flat walk that only costs £1 for adults and free for children. The cafe is gorgeous.

We didn't manage to hook up with 7 of the families that came this morning. I was going to cancel when we were invited to a party but we have to ship out on a Thursday anyway to give our cleaner a chance and the weather has been so lovely......... I hear some of the other families have only just come home!

Then, after our picnic lunch, it was onto Goring for a birthday party on a lego theme. Check out those mini figure cakes. Everyone has been moaning about the changes on facebook but I figured change is inevitable and facebook is free - until today when it had failed to update to show me that the party venue had changed! All was not lost though and we found our way there.

The Smalls had a blast, and a lot of chocolate! I always worry how they will be with several of their friends in one setting but it worked out really well.

Full Term Home Education

I have had so many emails, tweets, fb messages about this post that I will rework it at some stage. I would like it to be like the format of the book "Free Range Education" only with submissions from home educated 14-21 year olds and their families. So far my friend Barb Shepherd has shared a long message with me as has Fiona Nicholson whose son is 18 and not at college nor intending to go. There is much from a US perspective on this area but little in the UK arena.

Our local South Downs Small School has just become an official exam centre meaning that home educated children who want to sit exams now can far more easily than before. But do all home educated teenagers sit exams? To the best of my knowledge our local group has only one family, out of the 130 in the group, doing A levels at home. To most of the home educated teens after 15 or so the lure of a technical college or Sixth Form college or even school seems strong. My view was once if you are sitting GCSEs as a private candidate to do A levels then why not just go straight to the As? and if you are doing A levels to do a degree why not approach your chosen course and see if they have ever admitted a home educated candidate before without any formal qualifications or alternatively do an open university course from home. In other words why try and replicate the school offering at home. Employers like diversity and in my experience home educated candidates have that in spades.

More and more I am reading about uncollege (in the UK the term would be the rather clunky ununiversity) and this book "The Education of Millionaries" and yesterday I read this about how IT managers say work experience is better than a degree and at the moment I like this view. It seems like a natural and logical conclusion of our stance at the moment.

I have been musing of this of late, not least because we live miles away from any such Further Education college facilities but also because the maths of human capital theory have changed and I wonder what the future holds.

Personally, ideologically, I am very drawn to the world of uncollege and like the idea of a very organic transition from home to work. There is much written on US sites about home educated teens who have progressed with no formal exams but this seems less so in the UK.

I have been reflecting on why.

Is the lure of free education from 16-19 too hard to resist against the high cost of sitting exams as a private candidate?

Do teens have some fundamental biological need to spread their wings that college and later university provides? At every age and stage there is pressure to send to school or institutionalised learning does it all just get too much after a decade or so at home?

Is exam success so tied up with life success in our culture that the uncollege prism is just too risky?

Perhaps it is a continuation of the "well, you'll send them at secondary level" attitude that I blogged about here. In the UK the school leaving age will be 18 when it comes time for my smalls to leave, with this in mind I find it hard to see the advantage that would be gained from early study.

Is academic success how we judge whether a home ed experiment was a success? Maybe outsiders do but I have repeatedly stated for us it is about the journey, the living everyday, and the happiness. Is your job the biggest contributor to your well-being? or is it your partner? your children? your hobbies?

It is our intention to be in it for the long haul but I am interested in the views of those with older children and employers.

In practical terms for our little family unit home educating with a college or exams at school goal would see 2018 as when the luxuries of term time holidays and Sunday night movies nights would end but, if we are in it for the long haul then 2030 would be Baby Small's graduation.

Do we devalue the time spent as home educated by adding college on the end? and then I wonder if even thinking of marketing yourself to an employer is too 20th century and probably they will land up preferring instead to be self-employed.......

Daddy Cool

Daddy Cool - No Bones to visit for the first day this week but a Boney M song instead. Daddy Cool because our Daddy One is very cool. A home day today, a chance to catch the latest Giles Peterson show (the next person that tells me I like elevator music might like to spend 2 hours in a lift with those beats!) and to make Jamie Oliver fruit pancakes. 4 deliveries to wait in for, tomatoes from the allotment to skin and roast and the arrival of a new corner sofa that is big enough for us all to sit on. S wanted a cocktail parasol for her drink today but we didn't have any so she made one! Grandma helped us vax a rug, the colour of the water was alarming. Have borrowed the machine to do the rest of the house. We have done: cutting & sticking, hand writing wipe-off sheets, played with the scales weighing the bears, jigsaw puzzles, dressing up. S finished The Longest Whale Song (JW) and spent over 2 hours this morning reading other library books on her bed. She has her appetite totally back and at one point today was teaching O to read and E to write. I sense my work here is done.

O gets on the scales Dr E shows off his cutting and sticking S makes her own parasol Super Hero O Making comics and magazines (with free gifts!) All their own idea

Stone to The Bone

Foyer of The Hunterian Museum. Another day, another collection of animal skulls! Sticker dolly dressing on the train home. S holds up a postcard of the skull of a 6 or 7 year old with the second teeth pushing out the milk teeth.

Stone to The Bone

My brief today was to take S (6) to places in London she has not been too before. Grandma took E&O to Fishers Farm Park whilst S and I headed to the capital. Not before I had required the help of youtube to transfer car seats. I wonder if I would pass GCSE car seat. Minor chaos on the train as the whole ticketing computer network had crashed. Fortunately we were able to buy travel cards on the train because the queues at Victoria were long.

Our first port of call was The Hunterian Surgeon's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. We hopped in a taxi but changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace plus queues to see the Royal Wedding Dress and an accident meant we abandoned our cab and walked, the driver said it would be quicker. S wondered how I knew the way and I told her I had a friend who lived at Lincoln's Inn and The Daddy One and I had been to some parties there. You are not allowed to take photographs inside so S is outside the building with a postcard of the skull of a 6 or 7 year old child held over her face. You can see how the adult teeth are pushing the milk teeth out of the way. This is exactly what is going on inside her head at the moment. We saw the skeleton of a giant (nearly 8 feet tall) all kinds of organs in jars and bones on display, a necklace of human teeth, ribs cages of people with rickets, skeletons of people who were very small, the pickled brains of geniuses that had been donated to medical science. In a way you could view the contents as a bit gory and certainly S didn't want to hang around to watch the films of the operations but that would be no justice to their contribution to the understanding of modern medicine that we have today. S really enjoyed it, the portraits on the staircase reminded her of Hogwarts she said. I read on the leaflet that prior to the 1920s The Royal College of Surgeons was an all male affair and that most female surgeons were self taught and gradually developed into competent surgeons. Regular readers will know that as well as great songs to title posts after I am always on the look out for autonomous learning anecdotes and non traditional career paths.

We spent about 45 minutes inside which was perfect, it is free entry. You are given a security pass at reception as you enter. If you have older children who enjoy sketching you could certainly stay much longer. I imagine we will return. There are some upcoming events such as bone handling on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, skull and tooth handling with orthodontics in October half term, a talk about the Irish giant and how different methods of capital punishment work.

Next we headed to The Grant Museum of Zoology which again is free, this was our second destination because it does not open until 1pm. My best thing here was a jar of about 30 pickled moles! S liked the elephant skull and heart and the tortoises. We talked about how similar the skeletons of humans and apes are and how we evolved. Their website is excellent and lists upcoming events.

I had a third destination in mind but I could see we had already taken on board a fair amount so we headed into the West End to pick up a few bits for Grandma and a new sticker dolly dressing for the way home. It is London Fashion Week this week and S enjoyed spotting all the well dressed folk in town for the event.

If you are looking at biology, bones, skeletons etc I would recommend both places especially if you feel you have exhausted the well trodden Natural History Museum. Some of the amazing things we saw today will stay with me for a long time.

Schools are for fish

Butterflies at The Booth Museum this afternoon The slide for three at Dyke Road Park A lion skull A Narwhal More butterflies - that explorer must have wiped out species! Some were almost pearlised. Sea Life Centre - hard to take photos as very dark. Fun on The Pier with a great view of Brighton. S said "As if I would ever be able to lift you in real life!" Normal services resumes. Gallivanting is back. Strewing has returned.

Experience has taught me that you don't spend the first day after a two week holiday at home all day as the solo adult in charge unless you want a grumpy Mummy at the end of it.

I was concerned over the weekend that we might have little alternative today but all the campers woke up happy and healthy and ate a small breakfast. So, we headed to Brighton, my home for most of the first half of the 1990s and more specifically to The Sea Life Centre.

Our leaving the village was protracted though, a rare encounter with another car on our access road left me with some incredible tricky reversing to do, especially as the Autumn morning had misted up all the windows and mirrors. Tow Mater the world champion backwards driver I am not. Then I noticed that the front tyre needed inflating so I popped into the petrol station and, as I unscrewed the dust cap it pinged off down a nearby drain.

Undeterred we continued! The Smalls asked if the Southwick Tunnel on the A27 was the Mont Blanc tunnel. We past a park on Dyke Road Avenue (top of my desirable places to live list) that they all rather fancied so we said we would come back there. I drove them past where I used to live in Regency Square and E said he was sad I didn't live there anymore.

Super jammy we found a parking space right outside the Sea Life Centre but a coach pulled up so we messed around on the pier for ten minutes or so. I have learnt to relax a lot about my adult X before Y sweet before savoury attitude and rather than spending the whole of the Sea Life visit questioning me about the pier curiosity satisfied they didn't even mention it again when we came out. Sandra Dodd mentioned how she used to order an instant slice of apple pie for her children when they arrived in a restaurant. I thought that was a good tip.

Very impressed with the Sea Life Centre. We saw the giant turtles being fed, baby seahorses a few weeks old, touched star fish, saw sharks and nemo fish and garden eels and a very odd prehistoric looking green Moray eel that we came back to several times. Et liked the puffer fish best. We had some very random mid-morning snacks in the cafe as is often the way after a sickness bug when your palate is recovering. Then we headed to the park via the Brighton Dome which S was keen to see as she has read about it in Horrible Histories and particularly likes the George's and the song when he said "I'm George IV, the Regent King which means that I was just standing in"

It has been a glorious sunny day in Brighton, The Smalls enjoyed a tour by car as I learnt that most of the driving priorities have changed since I lived there and the North Laines redeveloped. We found the park and I was reminded that changing the nappy of a two year old who has basically been exclusively breastfed for 48 hours is a little trickier than usual in public. The park was right opposite The Booth Museum which we have been considering for a while so we popped in. The butterflies were amazing, such a large collection and the skeletons fascinating. S enjoyed seeing the Narwhal and the minerals and fossils but overall the taxidermy birds did scare them a little I suspect.

Home via our local library to stock up on reading matter. Back in the groove. This is how we roll.

I am being called. the Barbies want an Aqua Sauna the playmobil man has his sword stuck.