Eleanor does Gender Studies

I should probably write some kind of apology for the hiatus here, with assurances that I won't do it again.
But that's boring*, so let's just move along.

There are days when everything goes neatly into the box I expected it would, and days when I'm completely foiled in my attempts to educate.
There are also days when a simple idea becomes something so monumental that I want to run about screaming with excitement** but I can't because we're too busy doing whatever it is.

Then there are days where, without any prompting from me, one of the girls will pick up an idea, or ask a question, and suddenly we're studying a completely different topic to the one I'd intended.

And then there's Eleanor's Week of Gender Studies.

It started innocuously enough: I'd set Ellie the task of imagining a person from a world completely unlike ours, and then considering what that person would think of some simple items from our home***.

So she wrote out a description of her person:

"They are from Neptune.
 They are half fairy and half alien.
 They are both male and female.
They are very small and their hair is green tentacles".

Ok.

So.

I had a few questions about this.


First I asked her what she meant by both male and female: did she mean the people on Neptune could be male or female, or something else?
No: she meant that her person was both male and female, like all the other people on Neptune.
Right.
Then did she mean that they were emotionally or mentally genderfluid****, or was this a biological trait.
Biological: people from Neptune have both boy parts and girl parts.
O......kay.

There followed a long conversation during which I mentioned that there were people just like that on Earth, offered the term intersex as being more appropriate than "both male and female", discussed the varying degrees by which a person could be male or female or otherwise, touched upon the differences between sex and gender, mentioned the us of ze as an alternative to he or she*****, confirmed that yes "they" would be fine for her Neptunian if the Neptunians preferred that, asked how said Neptunians would know the difference between one person or several and somewhere along the lines realised that I was having this entire conversation with a six year old.

Then she went back to her desk****** and wrote about the ways in which a tentacle headed, six inch high, intersex person from Neptune would view some simple household objects.
It turned out neither sex nor gender really had much impact.

And then we got on with our day.

That was on the Tuesday.
Wednesday passed with nothing unusual bar a few questions as to why people thought some things were for girls and others for boys..
On the Thursday we set off to ballet class.*******

All proceeded as usual until it was time to get changed for Phoebe's class, when, seemingly out of nowhere Eleanor suddenly asked: "Mummy, why do we have different changing rooms for men and women?"
 This being a question which has occasionally bothered me, I found it a little different to answer.
Eventually I settled for explaining that some people weren't happy about dressing or undressing in front of people who might be attracted to them, or to whom they might be attracted, and that sometimes they might have to worry about people looking at them in a way that made them uncomfortable.
I declined, at this time, to discuss rape, in a public changing room, with a six-year-old, however pretty much everything that she said next applied pretty well in that case too.

In a voice clearly designed to carry into every corner of the building, Eleanor declared that this, was silly.
She further added that it "wouldn't even work, because boys can be in love with boys and girls can be in love with girls, and anyone can be attracted********* to anyone and if they're that worried why don't we just have cubicles?"
And some more that I can't quite recall at present.
I think she may have punched the air a few times.

So I agreed that, yes, it was quite silly when she put it like that, and she was preaching to the choir here anyway, and preaching to the choir was just an expression that meant I already agreed with her, and yes, people did have stupid ideas but could she perhaps lower her voice just a bit because now she seemed to be making that lady over there a little uncomfortable with all the shouting?

And then she muttered something about people needing to be uncomfortable if the world was stupid and we went off and waited for their teacher to arrive.


I rather thought that would be it for that day.

During Phoebe's class the parents tend to congregate outside, letting the children learn on their own, but staying within reach in case we're needed.
Naturally this leads to conversation.
One of the mothers (and it is all mothers and grandmothers out there, except for Eleanor) noticed that Ellie was reading Doll Bones by Holly Black and asked if she enjoyed horror stories.
 From here we began discussing our own literary preferences and it transpired that everyone there enjoyed horror, James Herbert being the most popular author, while no-one had any interest in the sex-and-shopping or romance novels generally marketed towards women.
So we talked about the foolishness of stereotyping for a bit, before it was time to go back in and collect our various offspring.

As we walked through the door I heard one mother observe to another that, yes, her daughter loved ballet too, "I think it's something girls just naturally gravitate to".
At this point I became both incredibly glad and rather sorry that I'd asked Eleanor to lower her voice earlier, as she grabbed my sleeve and whispered "Do you think she listened to anything she was just saying?"

And then we went and did a maths activity involving buried treasure.

On Friday we went to the library, where Eleanor got out a number of books about a girl's adventures in fairyland.

Because that's fine too.











*And, honestly, I will do it again.

**Or blog about it.

***For our archaeology project: when you think about it, this is often what an archaeologist is like when they first approach a site.

****Yes. I explained the concept of genderfluidity to a six-year-old.

***** "But some people don't like that either darling, so it's better to ask, if you don't think it would be impolite to do so".

******It's an antique school desk with an inkwell and a place for a pen and I love it.

*******Our Thursday: I get up and drag anyone who isn't up out of bed.
After two bus journeys, (during which we read, to various values of the word read) we grab lunch somewhere and either shop or visit a soft play centre where I will spend seventy five percent of my time looking for one daughter on behalf of the other.
Following this we have Phoebe's ballet class, then a gap where they get changed then sit with a friend and do some activity I've cobbled together (usually sneaky maths).
Then Eleanor has her class while Phoebe and I sit in a coffee shop with friends and re-enact Sex in the City******** with two adults and two three year olds, then we take Eleanor to Rainbows, then there's dinner, then games night and then I fall over.

********I have never seen Sex in the City.
But I have seen adverts.

********* Although she actually said attractled, instead of attracted.
She also mispronounced cubicle.

The mathematical value of Pieday

Ok, everyone knows how to do maths with pie.
Cut the value of Pi into the top before you bake it, make an open-topped pie chart with different fillings, measure the diameter, circumference, radius and depth: pie-based maths is fairly intuitive really.

Today, however is not about maths with pie pie, or even maths with Pi-pie.
In fact, it wasn't originally going to be about any kind of mathematical pie.
It was going to be about an ancient Roman cake-pie thing called placenta* which we were going to make for the Roman feast we had intended to make tonight, however a change of plans and an untimely stomach bug** later, here we are.


This isn't a recipe, I won't be listing ingredients or going into the method, or anything like that.
This is just a rough approximation of how, and why we make mathematical muffins***.



Start by convincing yourself that muffins count as pie****.
This may seem an unnecessary step but, just like salting and draining aubergines or adding that pinch of turmeric to a curry, it will have a huge, if unnoticed impact on the final result.
Remember that pie is a filling surrounded by some sort of crust.
Note that the glossy top of a muffin is somewhat crust-like and that, while a muffin may not be glossy and crusty all over it is still made from the same muffin mix and therefore, spiritually, all crust.
You have only to add a filling to achieve pie.

Concede that, while filled muffins are an oozy nuisance*****, if you want to call this Pieday then filled muffins you must make.

Get out the emergency box of muffin mix.
Assuming your mix is blueberry, go and get the jar of blueberry conserve from the cupboard.
Make up the muffin mix.
Add a little lemon zest****** because it's there, and because lemon and blueberry go so well together.
Consider swapping the blueberry conserve for lemon curd.
Determine that no, these are blueberry-pie muffins, so blueberry it must be.

Feel a moment's sympathy for the writers of those so-called recipes which list cake-mixture and packaged icing on their ingredients.
Quash this ruthlessly.

Note that at least the blueberries in the package are tinned and not dried because otherwise these would be dried-blueberry muffins not blueberry muffins: it's not as though you call scones******* with raisins in grape scones.
Not that that matters here.
Because these are pies.

Sort out the oven, muffin pie cases and so on.

Now spoon half the muffin mixture into the cases.
Add a teaspoon of the fancy jam in the middle of each splodge of mixture.
Top with the rest of the muffin mix.

Put the pies into the oven, set the timer and have a cup of tea.
Get distracted contemplating apple-pie muffins made with a really good plain muffin mixture with lots of melted butter, and a proper, non-gloopy, apple-pie filling with two kinds of apple, and a crumbly topping made of soft brown sugar and cinnamon*******.
Ok, so not all filled muffins are an abomination

Once the muffins are done take them out, let them cool a little and get on with the maths.

The thing about mathematical muffins is that it's not how they're made********* that makes them mathematical, it's what you do with them.
So count them.
Do addition and subtraction, cut them into halves, quarters and thirds, talk about the number of cuts needed for each and how many times you would need to cut them for each.
Talk about why that isn't the same.
Do most of the things you could do with a normal pie.
Measure them.
Figure out the height of an average muffin, then work out the height of six average muffins balanced on top of one another.
Balance them, giggling madly, and measure them to see if it's the same.
See how many times you can cut a muffin into equal-sized pieces before it crumbles.
Eat them.
Time yourselves cleaning up.

Make some more so you can check your results.





*Ew.
There, now that's out of the way we can get on with the blog.

**Apparently contracted by text.
I suppose it's a natural evolution of the computer virus.

***Which are still American Muffins, but also still get away with murder due to the awesome power of alliteration.

****Because this is Pieday.

*****And, frankly, just rather disappointing cupcakes.
Which are themselves just overblown fairy cakes.

******But not juice, as this would throw off the acidity of the mixture and mess with the raising agents.
Resolve to experiment with lemon muffins another day.

*******And I hope you mentally pronounced that correctly.

********Because cheese on a sweet muffin would be a thousand kinds of wrong.

*********Although obviously weights and measures are all sorts of fun.

Onward to adventure!

We're currently about two thirds of the way through a project on the ancient Romans* so it seemed like a good time to pay a visit to Vindolanda**.

Vindolanda, for those who don't know, is a Roman fort along Hadrian's wall.
As well as the archaeological site and ongoing dig, there are two museums: one at the site, and the Roman Army Museum nearby.
 The Vindolanda Charitable Trust's website recommends visiting the Roman Army Museum first, then going on to the fort itself afterwards so, not having visited either before, that is what we did.

Before we went I had stocked up on worksheets, downloaded and printed off from the education section of the trust's website***, in addition to which we were handed the museum's own treasure hunt to complete, so we were sure of having plenty to do.
 
First stop was the School room, which is set up for school trips, with seats for a classroom, a video "lesson" from a dummy teacher and various interesting facts and fables set out around the walls.
 I was pleasantly surprised to find this room open to the public, as the website seemed to imply that it was intended for use by school groups only.
The presentation was, in fact, clearly geared towards school groups, with references to the "class" and "your teacher", but this in no way reduced the enjoyment the girls found in it.
 Once the dummy teacher had finished expounding, we searched the walls for the answers to our many worksheets, took special note of the bust of Pliny the elder who "died when he breathed in Mount Vesuvius, Mummy", ignored my exposition on the subject of Seneca, and were off to the next gallery.

The next room contained two more films as well as with various models of roman soldiers alongside appropriate artefacts.
 The films were reasonably entertaining, but were a lot to sit or stand still for, after the long car journey to the wall.
Unfortunately the answer to one of the questions on Eleanor's worksheet was only available in the less interesting of said films.
 After missing the information twice, due to bad timing, we decided to return later to find that answer****.
 So, on to the next room to dress up as legionaries, listen to a recording (no film!) about the life of Emperor Hadrian and discover, to Eleanor's horror, that Hadrian had never been to Sardinia.
Uniforms returned to their place we next took our seats for yet another film: this one a three dimensional offering on the life of a Roman soldier on the wall.
It was a very good film, in point of fact, and kept everyone's attention nicely, but by the time it was over we all seemed rather sick of watching things we could have downloaded on YouTube.
 So, on to the next room.
There was a film playing in this room too, but I have no idea what it was about as we all ignored it.
Instead we wandered through various army artefacts and other displays, on equipment, weaponry, Roman food, and the number of people actually on the wall (as opposed to off sick) at any given time; translated the password of the day from Latin to English, and tracked down the last answers for our worksheets.
 By which time everyone was getting hungry and we were more than ready to hand in the treasure-hunt and round up some lunch.

After lunch we hied us to Vindolanda itself

The site was awesome, in the proper sense of the word, and it was incredible just to walk around it, looking at the various ruined buildings, trying to figure out what they were, reading the descriptions of what historians think they were, and squelchily discovering that the ancient spring still ran just fine.
 We rambled about for a while, filling in the second lot of worksheets, before happening upon the active dig.
We watched politely for a while, quietly discussing the archaeology and guessing at what various finds might be, until one of the archaeologists came up and offered to show us some of the day's finds.
 She explained the various pieces she had set aside: some unrelated pieces of pots, a cow's tooth and a game piece, then invited us to ask questions.
Alas, under Eleanor's inquisition she was forced to admit that they had yet to find a mosaic, butshe was able to tell us that the building they were working on was a shrine and tomb*****, unless it wasn't, as they wouldn't really know until they finished excavating, if ever.
 Despite the lack of extraordinary finds the girls seemed as thrilled as we were to look over the dig and appeared to happily accept my statement that archaeologist was "the coolest and least glamourous job ever".

And then they rampaged on.
 We discovered replica shops with recorded dialogue, a replica nymphaeum (Eleanor's favourite thing of the day) a tea-shop rather better than the one we had lunch in, another museum (this time with more artefacts****** but less films) and, finally, replica buildings of fortifications from the wall itself.
 Having scaled these (from the inside, thank gods), our now decidedly weary family headed back to the car park and set off for home.

It was surprisingly hard to leave.

Should we go up again I suspect we'll make a few changes to our itinerary, such as visiting the fort first, leaving the museum till we're tired enough to want to sit down and watch things, instead of haring all over the place.
We might even find somewhere to stay for the night.
After all, we didn't even visit Housesteads, this time round.






*Which has involved all manner of fun that I may go into later.
Or I may just post the photographs of the Roman feast with which we plan on ending this project.

**We would have liked to go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, since the tentative plan for this year is Romans, followed by Archaeology, followed by volcanoes, but Vindolanda is rather cheaper and therefore actually achievable.

*** There are sheets for both the museum and the fort, these are labelled for particular age-groups, but it's worth reading them through before you print them off as all children have different strengths and weaknesses.
 In the girls' case Eleanor was perfectly happy with the sheets labelled as being for nine to eleven year olds, while Phoebe worked through the sheets for seven to eight year olds with a lot of help from her daddy.

****We did, we still missed it and settled for talking to her on the subject instead.

***** Everything at Vindolanda seems to be a something and tomb: we saw a temple and tombs, shop and tombs, house and child's grave and a mausoleum.
Given the apparent local propensity for just shoving people in the nearest temple or burying them under the tiles, we assumed that either the mausoleum belonged to someone terribly impressive, or the residents of Vindolanda were curiously morbid.


****** Including roman horse armour, which was Eleanor's favourite thing on those occasions that the nymphaeum wasn't.

The Local Education Authority Visit

*cue the Dark Lords march*

We were very scared about this, even though we had invited them to visit, the WYHEC boards are full of horror stories from Leeds, now we're in Wakefield but we still spent the sometime tidying, ensuring that no washing was left out (in case they decided that it was a sign of neglect and called in social services)

When they arrived it was slightly stiff at first, they asked us why we wanted to home educate, and we explained because we can't afford private school, and what she's done so far, after a few minutes it became obvious they weren't out to put a stop to this horrific home educating and were actually really helpful.

They told us that we can make use of the local Schools Library Service and put us in touch with the local School music service as well to look at getting some cheap musical tuition for Ellie.

Ellie helped immensely by sitting in a corner and just reading one of her library books the entire time. The book was in the same series one of the visitors much old daughter was reading (....bloody Rainbow Fairies)

So a good visit overall and they've already sent us the information they promised so, so far I'm really impressed with Wakefields Home Ed team.

Fun with Maths

It's fairly easy to have enjoy reading: even without all the word jigsaws, make-a-word games and so forth available, the very act of reading is in itself fun*.
 In addition there's plenty of material out there to teach reading: even basic workbooks tend to provide twice as much reading support as mathematical, because they treat reading and writing as two different subjects, despite the fact that they support one another.
Science and even maths workbooks still support reading because, well, they're books, you have to read them to use them.
 So home-education-wise reading is not a problem.

Maths, on the other hand, is.
There are workbooks out there, of course, and we can always write out our own problems as well.
We can set sums using handfuls of raisins** or small toys, we can demonstrate on an abacus or on our fingers, we can sing Ten, Twenty or Two Hundred Green Bottles***, there are a lot of things we can do but, in the end it all feels a bit, well, mathematical.
It lacks the enticing air that a good book, or a game of Flag Man**** has without even trying.

 We recently bought a copy of Games for Mathematics, by Peggy Kaye, having found her Games for Reading very enjoyable, but even here the games tended to be of the solve-all-the-sums-to-climb-the-ladder variety, which does little to inspire a reluctant mathematician.

We've found a few things that do work though, so I thought I'd share a few here.

Games

I've said this before, I know, but playing games is wonderful for developing basic maths.
They don't need to be Games for Mathematics, although Orchard Games make some lovely ones, just playing games, counting spaces and spots on dice, developing simple strategies, and following the rules of the game can help to strengthen essential skills.
 Change the number of dice and require players to add them together, or subtract one from the other***** to throw in a few sums without making it too obvious.
 A beetle drive****** is always a good way to practice simple maths, and can be re-themed to suit any project or obsession as needed: house drives, car drives*******, viking longship drives and so on all work very nicely.


Trains and Automobiles

You can play counting and addition games with any small toys, but it can easily turn into just an exercise in bean-counting.
 The advantage of playing with cars or toy trains is that the maths can creep in without being obvious.
Set up a garage with room for a few cars at a time and, as the cars go in an out, ask how many more can go in before it's full, or how many there will be when the next one goes in.
Try racing them across the dining table or down a hill and keep track of which colour car wins most often: do red ones really go faster?
Hopefully the addition, subtraction and basic probability (when you start guessing which car will win this time) will go entirely unnoticed.
 With trains you can add or subtract carriages, compare long and short trains, estimate how many carriages it will take to carry a particular number of things, use carriages as a unit of measurement (how many carriages is it from that bend in the track to the tunnel?) and do just about anything you could with the cars.
 The trick with all of these is not to stress the maths: if the child doesn't want to add up all the blue cars on the track, don't worry about it, just add them up yourself and move on.


World Building

Blocks are great things for basic maths.
Again you can just count or add them, but it's more fun to play around with it.
Build a tower, then without counting, try to estimate the number of blocks needed to make another one the same size.
Or build two and try to guess how tall they'll be when you put one on top of the other.
Or add the two towers together, or see how many you'd need to remove from one tower to make it the same height as another.
 The maths is more overt here, the trick is just to have fun, and build an amazing city, while you do it.
A good idea is to separate the blocks into their various colours and try to guess how many are in each pile, then build towers as you count them.
Once they're up you can see which tower is tallest, how much bigger it is than the next tallest, what tje difference is between the tallest and shortest towers and so forth.
 If all else fails you can always just try to build a tower to the ceiling.


Colouring by Maths

We got this idea from Nicky, who got it from someone at school.
They're sums, but attractively packaged.
Find a picture or two to colour in on the internet, or use an old colouring book.
Then decide what colours you want to use to colour it in, and assign a number to each colour.
Then label each section with the appropriate colour but, instead of just writing in the number, use a suitable sum.
So to colour a duck green, the child would first need to decode 8-3 or 2x2 to get 4, then look up the number four on their list of colours to find green.
It's far more appealing than it sounds, and again you can choose pictures to suit your current project, or a child's particular interests.
Alternating colours on flags, rows of flowers, or other repetitive images is a good way to introduce some simple pattern-recognition as well.


We've also learned that the people who produced Reading Eggs are in the process of bringing out a new offering: called Mathseeds.
They seem to be offering free trials, so once it's up and running we'll give that a go too.
 I'll let you know whether the sound effects have improved********.



*Unless you're reading Mein Kampf or something.

**Subtraction, obviously.

***Or the multiplication version: Ten Green Tribbles

****Apparently we shouldn't hang people because it isn't very nice.
Running them through with pirate swords is A OK though.

*****If you want to avoid minus numbers try buying dice from a specialist games shop: you can get ten, twelve, or even twenty sided dice, which make subtracting a standard six-sider far less likely to cause problems.
You can even get dice numbered in tens, although using these might mean that you finish your game of Snakes and Ladders a little sooner than you intended.

******You know: roll one (or make ten) to draw the body, roll two (or make eight) to draw the head and so forth.

*******Yes, it does.

********Surely they can't be worse?

January Home Ed update

I want to start doing a weekly update, but i'm not sure of the format, so for now the format is a ramble.

Mostly this is about Ellie still as Phoebe is still very iccle.

For Maths or English in the morning, we're mostly using the Letts books. She's working her way through the "Magical" series, we talk her through each exercise and then let her get on with it. 

January's Project is Vikings, and so this one we are all excited about.

The new word wall is up but with a new improved format, Ellie writes the entire word and then she decorates around it so far shes' put up "Vikings" with various pictures cut out, and "Thing" with a drawing of people having a "Thing"  and then various things :)

Books this week have a Viking theme, we've covered Viking Maths, and how they dressed (with accompanying craft activity to dress the family) .

Amelia's printed out some colouring sheets as well, and thanks to Nicky created a colour by sums game (i.e.. Blue = 9, the sea is 6 + 3) which is great.

In February we're going visit Dig & Jorvik centre, and then going to spend a whole day at the Jorvik Festival 

The plan is to finish the project with a Viking feast in full costume (Amelia, Phoebe and I already have the right kit) so Ellie is going to help Amelia design and make a tunic for her.

Phys Ed wise Ellie has started 2 new Ballet classes (well moved up to older group). 

Also I think I've reached the limit I can of teaching Ellie to swim myself  so signed her up to the new classes starting at Sun Lane in Wakefield, and she starts in a few weeks.

Phoebe, is doing really well, she's started say a few words, demanding books, and is on the way to mastering the art of building towers, however hasn't grasped the fact that once it gets to a certain height she can carry on by standing up! 

I think she's also decided that strangers aren't evil by default, I even caught her smiling at an old man this week rather than her usual expression of suspicion and disdain.

Catching Up

I've been pretty quiet lately, what with one thing* and another**.
This doesn't mean that we haven't done anything though.
In fact, we've finished our Houses project.
I really didn't find this one as inspiring as the others we've done, but I'm glad I persevered as Ellie was terribly keen and, in the end, we got through an awful lot.

So, what have we been doing?

We've experimented with construction materials.

Experimented on our constructions.

Built a dwelling or five.

Re-written the classics***.

And played a few games.


Somewhere along the way education occurred****.

*Eleanor.

**Phoebe.

***On the subject of the classics, The Jolly Postman is a triumph of the Wold Newton genre.
Many thanks to Nicky for the loan.

****Ok we did some other things too, like reading books, talking about houses, pointing out different buildings while we were out, and so on.
But I didn't get any good photos of those.

L.A la la

Halloween has just passed and it strikes me as a good time to talk about one of the Home Educator's greatest fears: the Local Authority.

The fact is that the Local Authority doesn't actually have any authority over home educators: we aren't required to see them, we don't have to submit our work for their consideration, we needn't, in fact, have anything to do with them at all.
 Similarly, the L.A isn't required to do anything either, unless they have reason to believe that a home educated child is not, in fact, receiving an education.
  So why worry?

The problem is that not all L.As are aware of this.
If you read the Home Education section on a few L.A websites you'll find that while some go to the trouble of mentioning that all their services are entirely voluntary, others will state that they "require" Home Educating parents to inform them of their intentions, submit an outline of their plan for education, meet with their representative every few months, or follow other, entirely imaginary, requirements.
 One L.A even states that its purpose is "To get home-schooled children back to school", which is hardly encouraging to the home educating parent.
  Some L.A representatives take things even further.
There have been cases* of L.A representatives demanding private interviews with children, threatening to call social services unless a deregistered*** child was returned to school, actually calling social services with fabricated complaints****, and repeatedly turning up on the doorstep uninvited and unannounced, demanding a meeting.
 So it's hardly surprising that when home educators talk about the L.A everyone gets a little nervous.

Part of the problem is the Badman Review.
Badman made a lot of recommendations about home education: he wanted us to be required to register our plans, to submit to regular interviews, to allow our children to be interviewed in private, and quite a few other things as well*****.
In fact none of these recommendations were followed, the review found they were unnecessary, and that should have been the end of that.
 Unfortunately many L.As took these recommendations to heart, and although none of them were eventually passed into law, they tend to act as though they were.
Add to this the fact that while one representative may be perfectly reasonable another one may not and you can see why things can get a little scary.

Some home educators avoid the matter by simply not telling the L.A that they are home educating.
Others jump through all their hoops out of fear of threatened reprisals.
 Others send terse letters informing their L.A that they will be home educating, they know the law, and they want nothing more to do with them thank you very much.
In each case, sometimes all is well, sometimes problems arise, it all depends you see.
In the case of deregistered children things are even harder as parents cannot avoid telling the L.A and, in addition, have to deal with their child's erstwhile school which, again, may be perfectly reasonable or may take things very badly indeed.

Since we don't have to deregister our daughters from anywhere, and aren't required to tell anyone that we are home educating, it may seem strange that we intend to inform our L.A.
 The thing is: we don't want to hide away.
We aren't ashamed to be home educating, we think it's the best plan for our children, we don't want home education to be a secret, furtive thing.
 And then, the more people who do keep quiet, the less people are seen to home educate, the more it will seem like a strange, freakish thing, the choice of hippies and religious fundamentalists, not something that normal people do.
 Yes this is still us I'm talking about.
So, hippy or not, we will stand up and be counted.
We will write a nice, polite letter.
We will allow an occasional visit.
When they come we will give them tea and perhaps even a biscuit.
 If our representative is too pushy we will be diplomatic, we will, in as friendly a way as is possible, let them know that we understand what is and is not required, we will not allow things to become heated.
We will still give them the biscuit.
Hopefully all will go well



*I'm not going to go into detail here, these are things I've heard from the often quite scared people in question, they're personal stories and even if I had permission to share them I wouldn't really like the idea.**

** Yes, I know my footnotes are usually funnier than that.
Sorry.

*** Deregistered: officially removed from the school system, it sounds impressive but you just have to write a letter.

**** Fortunately the social workers in question soon saw that there wasn't a problem but it was a terrifying time for the parents and children, and it wasted the social workers' time.

*****Sound familiar?

Feelin' Blasé

Eleanor has a new project.

Her previous projects have been a lot of fun*: raising caterpillars, digging up worms, hunting down dinosaurs, we've both had a great time.

 This latest one, however, somehow just doesn't grab me.

The project is on houses.

She chose it herself, which is a wonderful thing: she looked at the world around her and thought "I want to know more about this".

Intellectually I'm thrilled.

Emotionally** I'm less excited.

Don't misunderstand me: we've plenty to do, we won't be sitting around saying "So...houses huh? They're those things with the walls and the pointy bits on top.  Er...".

There ought to be plenty to pique my interest: we're looking at different styles of house, what we need in our homes****, what houses are like in other countries, what they were like in the past, how addresses work*****, What houses might be like in the future, all sorts of things.

 We're going to look at the way Ellie's own ancestors lived, and talk about the problems faced by people whose houses don't belong in any one town, or community.

 We're even going to make models of all the different kinds of home, and put them all together to make a miniature town.

But somehow it all leaves me a little...flat.

I can't shake the sense that we're just going to be sitting on the floor making houses out of cardboard.

This, of course, is one of the realities of home education: sometimes it isn't fun, sometimes what one person enjoys, another won't.

If it were Eleanor or Phoebe who was stuck in the doldrums I'd be looking for a way to tow them out again, perhaps by looking at things in a different way, or by scrapping the whole project in favour of some hands-on investigation of the art of paper-making.

As it is though, Eleanor's having a pretty good time, so all I can do is carry on and try not to dampen her enthusiasm.

Who knows? Maybe I'll learn something along the way.

*As opposed to alot of fun

** Which is the more usual way one experiences thrilledness***

*** Pronounced thrilledness, no particular reason, it just sounds better that way.

****Shelter! Beds! Food! Loo roll! An enormous library!

*****With sneaky hidden maths.

Spot the Home Edder

The other day Eleanor made a triceratops mask.
She was terribly proud of it and declared that she wanted to wear it to the library, to show it to the library ladies.
 So off we set, Eleanor in her mask and wellingtons*, me wearing Phoebe and hauling the bag of books, all of us stopping to talk about anything that struck us as interesting, and I thought: "Ye gods, we're a home-ed stereotype".
 It was about half past three, so as we walked we passed several groups of uniformed children, all making their way home from school.
I felt as if I might as well have been carrying a banner that read "Home Educating Crazies", the contrast between them with their regulation hair and shoes and us with our whatever-came-out-of-the-drawer fashion statements, seemed so intense I was sure we must stand out for miles.
 Then we got to the library and the first thing the librarian said was "Did you make that mask at school?"

The fact is that you can't identify a Home Educating family by sight**.
That girl wandering through the park in her bee costume, picking up worms?
Home Educated.
The kid in the television character t-shirt being dragged round the shops?
Home Educated.
The girl in the ballet school t-shirt and jeans practising pliés in the lobby.
The child who bumped a knee coming off the slide and cried for exactly eleven and a half seconds before climbing straight back up and doing it again.
The girl with the sensible plaits and "nice" coat who looks like she just stepped out of an old children's book***
That kid coming back from the park covered head to toe with mud.
All Home Educated.
In fact, in this case, all Eleanor.

I imagine that any of these might be somebody's idea of a typical home educated child, and I know there are many more: a quick scan of modern media presents the scary children from Cougar Town, the  Christian boy from Glee, scholarly warrior Carter Kane from the Kane chronicles****, and many more.
 And the thing that really stands out about them all is this: they're all different.
Even the worst stereotypes of sheltered religious children***** with no idea of how normal kids should behave differ wildly from one place to another.
 Which makes perfect sense to me.
Because Home Educated children differ so widely that, really, you can't pin them down, you can't stereotype them because there is no typical "type" to start from.
 The only thing they have in common is parents who, for whatever reason, don't send their children to school.
Apart from that, really they're as different as any other kids.
They're no different to any other kids

You probably pass home-edded children all the time and don't even notice them: on the bus, at the library, outside the cinema when you thought they should be in school.
We're like a bodysnatching alien invasion from the nineteen fifties: we're everywhere, we could be anybody, we look just like you.

Which is ok really, because, really, we are.






*It wasn't raining, she says she just wanted to make her feet all stompy.

** Unless they're all wearing T-shirts that say Free-Range Kids or something anyway.

***Five Children and It, or The Secret Garden, you know, something with lots of fresh air and knitted underthings.

****Yes, I read children's books.
Because they're good.

***** I know no children like this.
I do know Christian children who are home edded, and Muslim children, and Pagans, Jews, Atheists, and a bunch of others who may or may not believe in something or other but don't think it's worth talking about.

Games for Reading, Writing, Maths...

In my last post I mentioned Peggy Kaye's Games For Reading and the dinosaur board game we made.
This game was so much fun to make, let alone play, that I thought it deserved a little more attention.

The concept in the book is very simple: draw a line of squares and colour them in with various colours.
Then write the names of those colours on some cards and shuffle them.
To play the game give each player a token, a coin, die or similar object, set these at one end of the line.
take it in turns to move along the line by drawing a card and moving to the next space of that colour.
The first person to reach the end of the line is the winner.
Obviously this game helps with reading skills, particularly instinctive reading of the trickier colour names, but with a little adjustment it can be a lot more.

This is the game we made.

At one side of the board is a compsognathus nest, at the other is a Tyrannosaurus nest.
Players take the part of hungry compsognathus scurrying round the board to collect eggs.
In its simplest form the game is just like the original version, except that the winner is the one to collect the most eggs* which makes this a slightly longer game.
 The first variant turns this into a slightly more strategic game: players must move round the board clockwise until they get to the tyrannosaurus nest, they can then choose which direction to take based on the cards that they draw.
In the second variant one player** becomes an angry tyrannosaurus intent on gobbling up the compsognathus that keeps stealing her eggs, this player also travels clockwise until they reach the compsognathus nest and can then travel in either direction, the winner is the player to collect the most eggs before the tyrannosaurus catches one of them.

The next variant involves the cards.
 Our cards have the colours of the rainbow and numbers from one to six in lower case and capital letters.
If you draw a number you move that many spaces, if you draw a colour you move to the next space of that colour.
This is lovely for basic reading practise but lovelier still is that you can update the cards as the players grow older.
Instead of a card reading "red" you can make one which says "move to the next red space" or "miss a turn", instead of "one" you can have "four minus three" or "3 + 4" or any other instructions.
You can even add forfeits or trivia questions: "Name three cities in Scotland to move to the next red space" or "Stand on one leg for one minute or miss a turn".
The possibilities are almost endless.
Best of all it's actually quite fun to play.

Since writing that last post I've also discovered Peggy Kaye's website, it's worth looking at if you're interested in this kind of thing and she even has a few of the games from her various books up there.
We tried her suggestion of writing a menu for a Monster Cafe but, of course, ours was a Dino Diner.
We wrote a menu****, we set up the restaurant, and we opened for business.

I don't think I'd want to eat there but Eleanor's dinosaurs certainly seem impressed.


*Or the first to two, three, or however many eggs you can stand to play for.
** If you're playing this with your kids you're probably best off being the tyrannosaur, if they're playing  alone and no-one wants to be it*** then they can draw cards for the tyrannosaurus separately and keep moving it clockwise until it catches them.
*** Or they all do.
****Making sure the herbivorous options were clearly labelled

The Writing's on the Wall

We're trying lots of different ways to encourage Eleanor's reading and writing.

The most obvious of these is just reading: we read to her and she reads to us.

Unfortunately for the latter endeavour Eleanor has an astonishingly good memory.

This is obviously an excellent thing in many ways: it helped her to learn the alphabet for example, but it makes learning to read from books awfully expensive.

The problem is that once she has read a book once she remembers it so well that any future attempts at reading are more in the nature of a recitation.

We are lucky, of course, in that we have a library just down the road from our house, so books are rarely in short supply, however we have found it necessary to find other ways to help her to read.

Looking For Directions

This is an easy one: when we're out and about we ask Eleanor to help us find our way around.

She looks for signs to tell us where we are, and signs that tell us how to get to where we want to be.

It's cheap, straightforward and compensates wonderfully for my complete lack of anything that could be described as a sense of direction.

Besides which her simple joy at being the first to find the way to the Pond Dipping Platform, or to spot the sign for Pontefract is beautiful to behold.

Decorative Words

Eleanor chooses a word and helps me to spell it.

I write the word out in big bubble writing and fill the inside of the letters with glue.

Next we choose lots of decorative bits and pieces, we try to find things that suit the words: glittery reds for the word Fire, tattered bits and pieces for Scarecrow.

Once we have these Eleanor decorates the word.

Lastly I stick the word on the wall.

It sounds simple but this helps her to spell and to learn to read by instinct, looking not just at the letters that make up each word we choose, but at the shapes of those words as well.

The words stay on the walls, where she can admire -and read- them as much as she likes until the wall fills up and we have to start again.

Blackboard

She has a blackboard, she writes, she rubs it out, she writes some more.

The nice thing about this one is that it's done entirely on Eleanor's own whim: I don't tell her what or when to write, she simply picks up the chalk whenever she feels the urge.

Lately most of her words have been related to the film Brave, but that's a whole different blog-post.

Games

There are some great games out there to get children reading.

The obvious one of course is Scrabble*, and then there are all manner of educational games, like Eleanor's favourite: Shopping List by Orchard Games, or the various children's versions of Cranium, but almost any game is good: there are instructions to read, headings on cards, spaces labelled Miss A Turn or Go To Jail, all of which encourage reading without over-emphasising the work involved.

 We've even made our own board game, inspired by a suggestion in "Games For Reading" by Peggy Kaye, a book full of, well, games.

For reading.

Games are good.

Reading To Phoebe

Ok, this is just Eleanor reading out loud in a different guise, but Phoebe loves it, Eleanor feels ridiculously grown up and pleased with herself, and it's encouraging two children to love books.

What more could we want?**

Bath Tub Words

This one started because we noticed that Eleanor tends not to read as well when she's tired.

We thought it would be a good idea to give her a little practice doing just that so, at bedtime, I started writing a word on the bathroom wall using her plastic letters.

She read the words, she played with the letters, sometimes she made new words.

It worked so well that now I have to write whole sentences just to keep it interesting.

Everything Else.

The world is full of words, we talk about them***, we look at them, we trace their shapes and feel the tastes of them in our mouths.

Whatever we're doing words are bound to creep in, whether we're cooking from a recipe, sending a quick message to Daddy, fetching the post, running to the bus stop, singing a song.

The words are there, all we have to do is use them.

Do you have any ideas for fun with words?

Let me know in the comments below.

*We have this and Junior Scrabble.

It might be obvious but it's still fun.

**Answer: better books.

Seriously, babies these days have no discrimination.

***And, obviously, with them.

Absence makes the heart grow blasé.

We went to Center Parcs* this year.
While we were there Eleanor went to a Pirate Princess Party**, which was mostly a great success.
Unfortunately somewhere along the line she started to miss us and, when we failed to materialise became very upset.
 When we picked her up Richard remarked that she was probably upset because she wasn't used to being away from us "because she's home-schooled".
 Everybody there seemed to think this a perfectly reasonable explanation for her distress, I on the other hand was more than a little annoyed.
 Eleanor, at the time of the party, was three years old: six months younger than the minimum age for starting pre-school.
As such her home-schooled status could not possibly have had anything to do with the matter.
If he had said "Because we don't take her to a nursery" it would have been quite reasonable: nursery children have to get used to being away from their parents much sooner than those with a parent at home, so a nursery child might have done much better at the party than our three-year-old with her stay-at-home Mother.
 This didn't even occur to Richard at the time.
This might seem like a bit of a rant directed at poor Richard so here's the point: he supports home education, he's actively involved in home education, yet, like so many people he subconsciously assumed that a home-educated child must be less socially secure than a schooled one, to the extent that when our three year old became upset he thought not "she's three" but "she's home-schooled".
If home educators can think this way it's no wonder the rest of the world seems to agree.

Fortunately for all of us home education doesn't seem to have scarred her too badly and at the age of three and a half Eleanor's a much more confident little girl.
Somewhat to my chagrin in fact.
This week she is attending a Musical Theatre Summer School which runs from nine in the morning to half past three every day from Monday to Friday just like a standard school.
She has been looking forward to this with great anticipation, I, on the other hand have been terrified.
 Most schooled children start pre-school at around three and a half to four years of age.
They'll probably have gone in with a parent for a day or two to get used to the place and the people but when the time finally comes for them to be left alone there are, inevitably, tears.
So when the time came to leave Eleanor on Monday I naturally expected her to be a little concerned.
She knew the teachers*** but the girls were all strangers, all bigger, and mostly a lot older than her.
I thought there would be some trepidation, some hesitation, a little reluctance to see me go.
Not a bit of it: she barely paid attention to my leaving, so engrossed was she in what those bigger girls were doing.
Coming to pick her up I was afraid there might have been some tears in the interim: it was a long time to be without a parent after all, most preschool classes are only half days at first and children still have trouble with those.
At the very least, I thought, she'll be glad to see me.
Nope.
I was met with perfect equanimity but with utter disinterest: a glance, a shrug that said "Oh. It's you. Hello you." and she went back to fastening her shoes.
 It's not that I wanted her to be upset but would it have been so hard to look just a little happy to see me?
Alas, we seem to be raising a confident, outgoing little girl who's comfortable in any society and who has no desire to cling to her parents whatsoever.
Oh well.
Maybe it's because she's home-schooled.





*You don't know what it cost me to spell it like that.
**Apparently pirate princesses say "Ooh la la arrrr".
***One teaches her ballet class, one taught her as a toddler, and one ran the baby class.

So About Those Groups Then

My last post was meant to be about Home Education Groups but unfortunately I got a little carried away while explaining that my-children-socialise-very-well-actually and didn't get around to talking about the groups at all.
 There are a lot of groups out there.
There's a great big group that meets once a month for themed crafts and playtime*, a science group that meets to do experiments, a conservation group that meets up in the woods, a book group which discusses books and shares creative writing projects, a construction group that meets to, well, construct things, and any number of other activity groups, sports groups and general social groups.

 Then there's our new group.
It's a local group, started on the grounds that "we need a local group", and currently very small: only three families came to our last meeting although more are expected in future.
 We're still finding our feet a little with this group, figuring out what the format is going to be.
Some ideas have had to be set aside, others introduced when we felt something was missing.
It's a work in progress but the wonderful thing is that because it is so small and new we are able to shape it to fit our needs, without worrying about the traditions of a dozen other families.

 Currently the structure is something like this.
We arrive.
 Thanks to the vagaries of the public transportation system Eleanor, Phoebe and I get there before everyone else so I find our room** and get things set up a little bit, locating drinking water and generally trying to minimise hazards etcetera.
Everyone else turns up, the children play for a while.
We attempt some sort of game or activity, the children either embrace this and run with it, reinvent it completely, or abandon it in favour of being pirates or something.
We subside into parental murmurings while the children get on with playing.
Generally there's some sort of free activity like building with blocks, drawing, or building with boxes then drawing on them, available which the children will embrace enthusiastically just as we're starting to wonder about lunch.
If the weather's nice we'll go outside to eat packed lunches and let the children play.
If not we sit inside and talk over our sandwiches.
 After lunch we get out some more activities, we're vaguely attempting to add a theme to each day so if we've been clever these will tie in to that: next week we'll be doing dinosaurs, with play-dough fossil printing as my contribution to the activities***, last week we celebrated Yorkshire Day so everyone made white roses out of tissue paper.
We might include some reading and writing games like word jigsaws or Flagman****
Then, after the kids have had time to run about a little more we'll settle down for a story to let everyone calm down and get used to the idea of going home.
Finally we pack up all the bits and pieces, everyone says goodbye to everybody else, and off we go again.

It seems like a fairly simple, practical timetable put like that, but that's only because you can't see the joins.
It's taken us three meetings to get to this point, discarding some excellent ideas because they simply didn't work, adding others almost by osmosis as they seeped out to fill an empty space, puzzling over  how to make sure everyone is involved, or how to deal with the tears at Going Home Time.
I doubt its form will remain stable for long: There's been talk of music for games or home time, someone will start bringing something, or suggest an idea, or notice a problem, and the next thing we know we'll be doing something new because "we always do it this way".

I don't know what our little group will become over the years, for now, like us, it is just beginning.

*Honestly, I could write a blog just about this group, the only reason I don't go into more detail here is Home-Ed paranoia.
Expect a post about that later.
** Which is harder than it sounds.
***Technically Eleanor's, in fact the whole dinosaur theme is her fault really as she wanted to share her project with everyone.
****Eleanor got upset when we tried to hang the man so we gave him a flag instead.
*****If an episode of Walking With Dinosaurs counts as a film.

We Get Around

The biggest issue for a lot of people, when discussing Home Education, is socialisation.
"But how will they be socialised?" is the common cry whenever you mention that you're not sending the kids to school.
It gets a little annoying to be honest, I mean here I am with my friendly, talkative daughter who clearly knows how to behave in society and people are asking how she'll be socialised.
She already is pretty darn socialised* for her age!
Maybe they mean how will she socialise?
It's true that we won't be sending our kids out every day to sit in a classroom or run around in a contained space with a lot of other children of the same age but that doesn't mean they won't be socialising.
At present Eleanor has two ballet classes a week and Phoebe has one**, we visit the library, where the ladies on the desk always stop to talk to Eleanor, at least once a week, we visit the Soft-Play centre where they can play safely with random kids (who, now I come to think of it, aren't in school either), Eleanor goes to the swimming pool once a week where many people know her by sight, we attend a playgroup and all manner of Home-Ed groups***.
That seems like plenty of socialisation to me.

It's true that it's a different kind of socialisation, it's more fluid, less forced, and the people they socialise with aren't all the same age as them, but I consider this to be a good thing.
Our daughters will grow up knowing how to talk to people of all ages, in formal and informal settings.
They may never experience the latest playground obsession for yo-yos, or slinkies, or collectible plastic aliens with removable plastic bits****; or the woe when we refuse to buy them some rubbishy plastic alien with collectible plastic bits; or the sheer misery of having someone laugh at them because they packed the wrong kind of sandwiches today, but, frankly, that's a price I'm happy to pay.








*To be socialised means to be able to function in society, socialisation is a lifelong process.
** Where "ballet class" in the latter sense means "clap your hands to the music and smile at your friends"
***This was actually meant to be a post about Home-Ed groups, then the introduction got out of hand.
**** I doubt it to be honest, stupid crazes get everywhere, I'm still not going to buy them the wretched aliens though.

How I Plan

I'm sure there are home edders out there who plan their projects in line with a carefully ordered curriculum ensuring that each of the main disciplines is covered more or less equally.
I expect they create beautiful little timetables and feel a wonderful glow of satisfaction every time they cross off another step from their exquisitely structured day.
They probably check the recipe book every time they cook too.
 In case you failed to read that last line in a sufficiently sneering fashion I should elaborate: this not how I do things.
I don't really look down on people who do*, I'm sure they have wonderfully well planned and exciting days full of balanced and orderly learning, I simply can't do it and, to be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to.
 My planning process goes like this:

• Think of something, e.g Dinosaurs.
• List everything I can think of to do with that topic.
• Come up with as many associated activities as possible.
• Cut out all the bits a three year old probably can't do.
• Put them into some sort of rational order.
• Attack

So far it seems to work pretty well.

I'll confess it may look much more organised from Eleanor's point of view: she, after all, has no idea that her mother is essentially a flaky beatnik*** who is making it all up as she goes along, so she probably thinks I have selected each and and every activity for maximum educational benefit and placed it in the lesson plan with the care of Capability Jones bedding in a strangely recalcitrant buddleia.

It certainly looks a great deal more sensible when it's finished and the fruits of her labour are all laid out in the big blue project book.

So perhaps it doesn't matter that I bounce around the planning phase like a fluffy purple muppet, or that I choose topics based not on any educational guideline but on what sounds like fun at the time.

 Eleanor enjoys herself, I enjoy myself, Phoebe enjoys herself****, and everybody learns.

Which, honestly, is what I was planning all along.

*Which would, to take the recipe analogy a little further, be like Nigella Lawson** looking down on a three-michelin-starred chef.

** Only less glamorous, not so well paid, and without a camera spying on me every time I go to the fridge.

***Because no-one has taught her what beatnik means yet.

****Unless we manage to get the glue away from her in time.

Clearing the decks

We have a very empty wall.
 This wall was, until today, bedecked with paper butterflies, caterpillars, ladybirds that counted in twos and other arthropodic wonders.
Now, though, the project is over, we have exhausted the possibilities of our back garden (at least for now) and are ready to move on.
 So today Ellie and I took down all her worm and butterfly related work, even the stained glass pictures*, and stuck them all into her project book, creating a really rather impressive record of the past month or so**.
The book isn't quite finished yet: we still have to print out all the photographs we've taken and stick them in, but we've left spaces so that shouldn't be a problem.
More irritating is the realisation that I haven't kept a list of all the books we read over the course of the project: not a vital point admittedly, but I'd like to be able to keep a complete record, if only for reminiscence's sake.
 This is something I'll have to remember for our next project, for now the wall is clear and ready for our next project, leaving behind the tiny**** and starting something enormous: dinosaurs.


*I miss those already: I'd stuck them to the bathroom window to keep the light out of my eyes.
I suppose we should buy a blind really.

** Note to Home-edders: keeping a book like this is also handy if your LEA representative comes round*** as it gives an idea of what you've been doing.

***
Of course, you aren't actually obliged to see the LEA rep unless you want to.

**** Technically the smallest known dinosaur, Ashdown Maniraptoran, was only about thirty centimetres long which is about the same as the wingspan of the Queen Alexander Birdwing butterfly, but you know what I mean.

Confessions of a Project Obsessed Mother

I've mentioned before that I have a slight mania for project-planning.
As soon as I have a quiet moment: most often when I'm feeding Phoebe, my mind will start to wander and a project topic will crop up, I'll take a few notes, and the next thing I know I have two or more months of activities all planned out.
 I don't even need to be particularly idle, I've come up with projects while sewing and watching television*, while looking up something I came across while reading**, or simply while looking up ideas for other projects.
Even when I had an idea for an activity to break up the concerted workload of the various projects I'd planned I found myself turning it into a project.
 What's particularly silly is that we intend to give the girls quite a lot of autonomy in choosing their studies: we'll make suggestions, but we want them to study subjects that interest them, so there's no guarantee that any of these projects will ever see the light of day.
 So, lest all my hard work be lost in obscurity forever, and more importantly lest you think that I am kidding about this, I present a list of Projects I have Planned.
 Just the titles though, it's more fun if I don't tell you what they're actually about.

In No Particular Order:

Worms and Butterflies***
Opal Surveys
My Family
Dinosaurs and Fossils
World Religion and Mythology
Vikings
Volcanoes
Archaeology
Ancient Civilisations
Putting On A Play
Something Chemical
Cromwell and the Stuarts
Fireworks!
MIGOWIY**** 1: Household Management and Gender Politics
MIGOWIY 2: Germs and Medicine
MIGOWIY 3: Activism
Vaccines and War Machines
Where Food Comes From
The Game of Conquest
Winter Holidays
What Makes Weather?
Water
Myths and Monsters
Glass
The Nine Times Table Challenge
Truth and Lies
Calligraphy
Turing

And those are just the ones I had on my phone.


*Ok, it was School of Hard Sums, I admit.
** Prince Rupert's Drop, take a look.
*** Hey! We've done that one!
**** Mummy's Ill, Get On With It Yourself

No Timetables

One of the great things about home ed, as most home edders will tell you, is that there are no timetables involved.
 Which means that if no-one's in the mood for maths you are free to read books, look for the hottest and coldest places on the map, paint pictures, watch a film in Italian, do a jigsaw puzzle, or do whatever else you are in the mood for instead.
It means that you never miss your big exciting educational trip because of flu (or indeed chickenpox).
It means you get to go on holiday when most kids are stuck in a classroom, and then visit all the museums and local attractions once everyone else has headed off on their considerably more expensive (but possibly warmer) holiday.
 It is also not entirely true.
It's certainly true that we have no written timetable (unless you count the big calendar I write reminder notes on) but nevertheless our weeks, and even days, do have a certain pattern and rhythm to them.
There are the home ed groups which, when someone's ill or on holiday, go ahead just the same without them, there are the ballet lessons, twice a week, which start promptly, end on time, and won't move for anyone.
There's the library, always visited on the same day, at around the same time: the point at which our convenience and the library's odd opening hours coincide.
There are buses to be missed at our peril, there are "See you next week"s and "Sorry we can't come"s.
Our time is not entirely our own.
 On a day to day level it's the same: On a day at home Eleanor tends to get her work books out in the morning, then she'll dance or watch a television program, perhaps I'll read to her or we'll play a game before lunch, on Mondays and Wednesdays we'll probably do some sort of art-based activity, on Tuesdays we'll look things up, Thursdays may involve making things, Friday has pie, and every Friday ends with us curled up on the settee watching films in Italian (for Eleanor) or Japanese (for me).
 None of this is obligatory, it just suits us, in the same way that that regular library visit (on a Thursday, last thing after a day of ballet, and craft projects) suits us.
I like it.
 I like the way our week rolls along from mostly-at-home more work-intensive Monday to a Friday spent almost entirely out of the house, not even glancing at a book*, until it all rolls up in that cozy ball on the settee.
 And if I stop liking it, or Ellie does, or Phoebe has something to do or somewhere to be one day, we can change it.
 Because we don't have a timetable.

*Ok, Eleanor does take a workbook out with her, just to pass the time during Phoebe's ballet class.
And we might read a story or two on the bus.
And sometimes hey have them at the Soft Play centre after lunch.
But apart from that there are no books.
 Not many anyway.

Quarantine!

So far we've managed not to resort to congaing round the house chanting "We've got cabin fever", but we do have a rather fed-up little girl.
 Fortunately we've managed to come up with a few quarantine and chickenpox themed activities to take the sting, if not the itch, out of her imprisonment.
 The most important thing, in a quarantine, is to make sure that nobody gets in or out, so to assist with that we made ourselves some quarantine flags and stuck them up all around the house (with accompanying notes just in case our visitors, for some reason, can't read flag-code).

Fun With Flags

The next thing, of course, is to treat the afflicted.
  Home-made penicillin might be all too easy to produce in our kitchen* but, alas, penicillin is of no use against the chickenpox virus, so we settled for treating the most noticeable symptoms with some home-made bath bombs.
 The recipe for these is surprisingly easy and doesn't require anything you aren't likely to have lying around the house anyway.
As long as you bake, drink chamomile tea** and use essential oils that is.

First, assemble your ingredients: bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar (about a quarter as much as the bicarb), a cup of cold chamomile tea (or plain water), a chamomile tea bag or other dried flowers or herbs, some essential oil (we used lavender for its soothing properties) and any carrier oil, olive is fine.

Mix the bicarb and cream of tartar thoroughly, if you want to add any chamomile -or other flowers- then tear open the bag and mix them into the combined powders.

Then add the essential oil, using anything from ten to twenty drops depending on strength, more if you're making a huge amount of bath bombs, and mix quickly before it starts to foam.

Add the olive, or other carrier, oil and mix again, quickly.

Now add just enough of the cooled chamomile tea or water to make the mixture stick together when squeezed.
A plant mister can help with this stage: you want to add as little as possible (we used less than an egg-cup full) so spritz or sprinkle gently and again mix quickly to avoid setting off a reaction.

Finally squidge the mixture into moulds using whatever you have at hand, we used an egg carton but you could also use teacups, those capsules from the inside of kinder eggs, or pretty much anything.
Leave it to dry for about four hours, then tap the bombs gently out ready to use.

The lavender and chamomile mixture is wonderfully soothing and smells lovely.


*Joke! Joke! Do not alert social services! My kitchen is really pretty clean.
Comparatively clean anyway.

**Confession: I do not drink chamomile tea, this is because it tastes like cat-pee smells, it is very useful for soaking home-made baby wipes though.

Yes, I am a tremendous hippy.