We’re using Story of the World Book 2 with our history etc monthly meetup. The idea is that each family does the reading separately and then we come together once a month and each family brings one or two craft type activities that support the reading we’ve all been doing. As we only got the book just over a week ago, we’re a bit behind with the reading, but we read the relevant bits and came up with a suitable activity.

The chapters we were looking at were 10 to 13 – First ppl in australias, Kingdom of the Franks, Islamic invasion of Spain and Charles the Hammer. The activity our family brought was to design your own kingdom – draw a map, put together a dynasty/ family tree, come up with some laws. I expected it to be the activity that the children turned to if they were at a loose end between other more crafts. Instead I found myself with a table full of children gleefully filling paper with their own kingdoms, and coming up with the most bizarre and wondrous justice systems. The conversations continued on and off throughout the day with alliances forming between the newly formed kingdoms and so on – a really thought provoking activity.

As usual the other participants brought some fabulous crafts. Merry brought Fimo from her CraftMerrily shop and some fabulous dot pictures of lizards and koalas were made. Helen provided chalk and the children blew aboriginal style chalk dust drawings. Zoe did snacks, face (or hand) painting and also stood in with the soap for a carving activity. Gina had dreamcatchers and Katy made Charles the Hammer’s sword as well as leading a play about justice and laws. I think that covers all the activities – I apologise profusely if I’ve missed any! I have got some pictures, though as usual not as many as I should have had. I was slightly distracted by an email conversation with dp about the leaking radiator in our bedroom at home

Which is the reason we aren’t at home tonight. Instead we’re stopping an extra evening with our friends – the children are currently ensconced in front of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader while Helen and I sit companionably side by side, netbooks on knee.

And that was home education for the day. Out of the home, very much not sitting on our own round the kitchen table. Hopefully that’s another myth/ stereotype well and truly dealt with

Here’s your Chinese peg doll – from the time of Confucius, dressed in a Kimono. Material should be silk or silky for preference, but I only had thin cotton or thick wool, so we went thin cotton.

The kimono is made from a rectangle of material, which I folded in half, then cut the middle third out of the front – hope you can see that in the picture as it’s a bit difficult to explain! Popped it round the peg doll, then used another piece as a belt, tied in large bow at the back. Fluff out the shoulders/ sleeves a little and there you go, one chinese peg doll.

Our history etc days are based around The Story of the World: Ancient Times v. 1 with whatever additional crafts ppl can find to add, and it works well, as each family can go into whatever detail they want to outside the group, then the children can do as many crafts as they like while together. And the adults even get to sit and chat in the sunshine every now and then.

A good day.

Today Big learnt to spin on a wheel. So she’s done carding, felting, (drop) spindle, lucet and spinning wheel. Apparently she’s now made 4 skeins of wool, and is really quite proud of herself.

Small has mainly been an urchin. He has attended Barn School, learned his numbers (Roman), some extra letters such as thorn, and new methods of multiplication and addition, as well as playing much chess and other medieval games. There has also been rambling and wanderings with other boys around his age, and it’s been great to have him have freedom without me having to worry particularly about where he is or what he’s doing. Because all the adults keep an eye on all the children, meaning I’m fairly sure all is well with him at all times.

Smallest has majored in being cute. She’s ever so good at it. The one drawback to being Tudor myself is I can’t whip out a camera and immortalise her, so I’m hoping that other ppl have done it for me, and I shall be searching flickr and the net when I’m home.

I have learnt a little of how to felt. It’s rather fun. And so fast! Do you know how long it would take me to knit a statute cap? They can be felted in two days. (Though I have just discovered that the statute of the name was actually after the year we’re in. Oops. Historical anomaly as Sheldon would say.) And I’ve taught children their letters and numbers, and about canonical hours versus god’s hours, and mazed them well, by telling them we rise with the sun, and I kill my hens when they stop laying by ringing their necks….

Oh well.

It has been, in every sense of the word most wondrous.

And the reason I’m blogging this now rather than when I get home is because you still have time to come and see it. The Great Tudor Re-Creation runs until Sunday 10th July, and is open to the public this very weekend. There will be a great fair, with many entertainments, challenges, games and things to buy – if you are within reach of Long Melford Suffolk and have any interest at all in things Tudor I hugely recommend that you come and see it. And tell your friends. And relatives. And if you arrive, look out for me. I look a little like this:

So far this morning I’ve turned linen into a shift, and now wool into a kirtle.

Yes, that’s a kirtle. Bit like a pinafore dress. It’s not finished yet, but it’s a lot closer than it was a hour ago!

I think it’s safe to say I’m not completely caught up in the hype…but I am a bit excited. This is my day out, meeting lots of ppl I chat with on twitter, whose blogs I read and admire. They are my main focus, though yes, I’ll talk to lots of prs as well.

I’m going to offer a word of warning at this point. If you’ve never been to anything like this, you’re going to be rather blown away by the goodies and the excitement and the competitions. But you might want to remember what you blog for. If it’s for goodies, excellent, full stream ahead. But if you have other focuses, then go steady. Don’t do what I did last year and say yes to everyone about everything. You won’t manage to do everything you want to, and you’ll be embarrassed.

Case in point, some months after cybermummy last year I was sent a Kodak playsport video camera to review. You can search my archives, there’s nothing there not because it’s a bad product, far from it, it’s fantastic. It does everything they claim for it, it’s so easy to use that Smallest takes pics and vids, the quality is fantastic, it’s water right and survives the sea and swimming pools, and the only problem with it is me.

I just haven’t worked out how to manage videos online. I’m a geek who doesn’t do visuals, and I hereby grovel to the lovely Kodak ppl, and hope to do better in future.

So that’s my cautionary tale. Don’t overcommit yourself. You are only human. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a kirtle to put boning in…

I was a bit panicked about the peg doll craft as I’d never heard of Nazca before it came up as this week’s theme, but a bit of research on wikipedia came up with “A large portion of dresses were found portraying birds with speckled bodies, double-headed serpentine figures, and anthropomorphic figures.” So I decided embroidery was the way to go, especially as someone else was already doing weaving

So, a Nazca peg doll.

Materials:

(So that’s a peg doll, some thread, a needle, bit of material and a pipe cleaner in case you aren’t sure.)

Embroidery – I chose to do a two headed serpent. This is the body with head number one.

And a close up of head number two, formed with a chain stitch, body filled in by sewing through the running stitch.

Here’s your finished serpent:

Although other ppl chose to do chain stitch birds instead – rather beautifully it must be said.

Twist a pipecleaner round the peg for arms, cut a neck hole in middle of bit of fabric and dress your doll. Hey presto.

Oh, and here’s a gratuitous cute offspring picture. Because she’s cute.

If you enjoyed this craft, you may also enjoy our Greek peg dolls and Minotaur peg dolls. I’m also hoping to link to other crafts from other participants.

Run 1.5 miles on just under 16 minutes.

Home, shower, dress. Somewhere in and amongst put washing in, (nappies, strip sheet of double bed and bedside cot). Dress Smallest, wrangle children in passing.

Wander to Post Office (bumping into relative for chat on way) to recover money Big lost in stamp machine last night. Find it in rejected coin slot. Stop at coop on way home to buy stamps.

At home, pack lunch and hang out washing before piling children into car and heading to medieval reenactors fayre to meet with friends for afternoon to work out what is needed for Kentwell.

Meet dragons, buy signed book (The Tudor Tailor
) , facilitate drop spindle lesson for Big, get hugely reassured about whole Kentwell thing, but miss cafe and spend afternoon without tea.

Drive home.

Wash up, make tea, eat tea, fetch washing in, make beds and write blogpost on phone siting on bathroom floor while Smallest in bath and tea going cold.

And I wonder why I never seem to get anything done…

I’d have appreciated it if that had been as interesting as the journey got, but sadly Smallest decided to license up the proceedings further by regurgitating her early breakfast banana all over her lambswool jumper She seemed fine once she’d done, the jumper not quite so good. Thankfully we made it the rest of the way without further incident, pulling up to park a couple of cars away from our friends Marcus and Michelle with their daughters. Big was thrilled to catch up with them as it was the first time she’d seen C since her stay in France.

First order of the day obviously a cuppa as we started to gather and peruse handouts on making authentic Tudor costume. For my sins I have 4 of us to clothe, and even if I make everything from scratch the whole venture is going to set us back a couple of hundred pounds – I’m not up to making shoes, and we’ll also need wooden bowls, pottery cups, knives, spoons and other sundries. A friend and experienced Kentwellie, Katy had managed to snap up a secondhand kirtle that she thought would do for me, so at least that’s a start.

Tea drunk, time for the first talk of the day, this one aimed at new participants. A chat about how Kentwell came to host re-enactments and how they work, and what we could expect from the rest of the selection process. And then we were sectioned off into small groups and sent off for a tour with one of the existing participants, getting the real lowdown on the house and its immediate environment. Tbh, if we don’t get to go any further, the tour made today’s trip out worthwhile. Although both Big and I would still be very upset to not make the cut.

After the tour another talk, this time a briefing on the chosen year, 1553. Big and I have been doing research on it already – it’s an exciting year! Three monarchs, including the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, and Kentwell in the middle of the region in the thick of it all.

And then we had lunch

Actually to be more accurate and then we queued for lunch. And while we were queueing I caught up with dyers and weavers – two of the stations that I’m most interested in. Regular readers will know that I’m quite into my yarn crafts – goes right back to carding and spinning wool at primary school, round about the same age I learnt crochet from my step-grandmother. The queue moved very slowly so I also had plenty of chance to chat to friends and the kids had lots of time to explore around the house.

After lunch, a chat for new participants this time more about the shape of a day during a recreation, with a Q and A session. And then more queueing, this time for a personal meet with the head of Kentwell, who does a quick interview with every applicant which feeds into the decision he makes as to nay or yay and if yay, what the station will be.

I’m hoping for something working with wool. Big was as well, but as it’s preferred to give older children a bit more distance from their parents, if I get woolshed or felting, she may well get something else entirely. Cross that bridge when we come to it I suppose.

And very eventually, we wended our way back to the car and home – last off the site (along with our friends ) Admired the supermoon on the way home, but didn’t stop for pics, only for food at macdonalds when we were nearly back. And now I’m flagging, but the baby is still bouncing frantically around the floor. I’m hoping this blogpost isn’t as disjointed as I suspect it is, but I’ve been interrupted half a dozen times when writing it, and rather lost the thread.

I wanted to talk about everything I think we’re getting out of this process. An enthusiasm for history. Bringing the past to life. Chance to socialise with ppl from all walks of life, learn new (and very old) skills, understand politics, conservation, all sorts really. But I think I might have to leave that for another time when my brain is working. And instead, I’ll finish with a pic. Always a good way to end.

Anyway, my contribution to the crafts session was peg dolls – I’ve decided to do this each time so that the children can build up a collection of peg dolls in chronologically arranged costumes. However, when I went to look up a suitable costume, I discovered Cretans of the relevant era basically wore loincloths, which is not really something you can do to a pegdoll!

Devoid of further inspiration I turned up more or less empty handed to be rescued by Helen who, in a here’s something I thought of earlier plan, had all the materials to make minotaurs. So I scrambled off into a corner and figured out the process, documented for your pleasure below.

First you need materials. Peg doll, brown felt for the head, lolly stick for arms (although pipe cleaners would work just as well if not better and are going to be added to my craft supplies in bulk), glue, string for attaching arms and furry material for the body.

First of all, you do the head. I found that using a pritt type stick in a very generous way worked best – put a thick stodgy layer around the shoulder area and wrap the back of the felt round. Then dob more glue on the felt, bend it over the head and wrap the front around, so that you get a sort of triangle affair that hints at minotaur horns. While this is setting a bit, fasten the lolly stick arms on with a bit of string – you may have to help your children with this bit depending on their dexterity.

For the body we used very furry fabric. Cut a slit in the middle like so.

And gently poke the head through so that you end up with a minotaur that looks a bit like this.

And there you go, one peg doll puppet minotaur. If you’ve a black felt pen your child can draw on a face, although I neglected to get a picture of one so adorned.

There were lots of other fabulous crafts on offer – if you followed the link to Helen’s blog above you can read all about them

This morning we were due to set out early or mid morning for historyetc. I stayed up late trying to get stuff done beforehand, and then got up early to finish things off. And we still didn’t leave home until 12.30

This meant that the children missed the morning crafts and lunch with their friends and if I had been organised enough to be bringing something with me everyone would have been waiting for it. So perhaps there is a bright side to being disorganised and unprepared. (As an aside I have now figured out my contributions from now on. I’m going to get a batch of pegdolls and a pile of remnant material and each time I’ll look up a costume related to the period we’re doing. Then they can all end up with a little collection of historically dressed pegdolls. And as a second contribution I’m going to provide a pile of lapbook blanks and some suggestions for bits that can go in them and then especially older children who run out of things to do can fill them in with whatever takes their fancy Job’s a good ‘un.)

However, I managed to send some emails, and deliver an iPad to the post office, although it would have helped if I’d looked into how to return the @WomWorldNokia E72 *before* I tramped it down to Smiths (which admittedly is only 5 minutes further down the road than the post office, but still, it was 5 minutes I could have done without spending out and about). Which is why I still have the E72

Where was I?

Oh yes, history.

The children, when we finally arrived, loved it. They made jade rune stones and silk bags to keep them in, made shakers, listened to African stories and helped cook papayan fried rice. And of course there was playing and chatting and time to go on the wii and ds.

The adults may have found time to drink wine and eat takeout curry

And soa has bounced, crawled, giggled, slept, eaten, cruised and generally been an utterly adorable one year old.

One year old. I can barely believe it even now.

I won.

I like winning competitions

So on Thursday we used the vouchers – we took Tim’s brother and sister-in-law to Sutton Hoo, spent some time in the exhibition hall

and then retired to the restaurant.

We have visited before, and we have eaten there before. So we knew we were going to have a good day out.

It was more than good.

The kids had a fab time in the exhibition – even smallest enjoyed herself and crawled around and drew. As you can see, Small dressed up, although we couldn’t find the tunic dress for Big, so she settled on just trying on the headdress. And then the meal was absolutely fantastic.

When we went in I went up to the till to explain I had the voucher, and was greeted with “we’ve been expecting you” which was a pretty good start to the conversation. The voucher was for 4 ppl to each have a meal up to £20 including a drink, but the guy on the till said that we could just have whatever we wanted and he’d keep track and let us know when we ran out of money.

We tried quite hard, but we only went 15p over. Think that was Smallest’s gingerbread man

The rest of the adults had a steak and ale pie, while as the token veggie I settled on leek and stilton bread and butter pudding. I was slightly disappointed when mine came out as it looked like I had more salad than pudding, but tbh the portion size was actually about perfect. Although I did have room to squeeze in apple and berry crumble for dessert. I gave up on my beer though (Tim was heartbroken to have to finish it for me ) and was impressed to discover that they have jugs of water and glasses on offer, so you can just help yourself. It’s a good touch.

They also have Tripp Trapp high chairs, so smallest got to sit right up to the table, all the better to steal food from everyone’s plate. Apparently mushrooms, steak, and potatoes are good, and custard is even better, either cold from Aunty S’s trifle, or warm from my crumble.

All the staff were friendly and helpful and the children enjoyed their meatballs too – proper meatballs with chunky bread and cheese on top. And they had jelly for afters.

All in all, I can’t speak too highly of our day out – we had a wonderful time, and I would really recommend Sutton Hoo, both for the education, and for the food.

There were two candidates that stood out, Blickling Hall and Fellbrigg Hall. We decided that we’d keep Fellbrigg as a possibility for a stop off on the Tues and go to Blickling, mainly on the grounds that Blickling wasn’t open on the Tuesday

We didn’t regret the choice for a moment. Blickling is absolutely stunning, and really, you could spend days there rather than hours. It was our first visit to a National Trust property since buying membership at Sutton Hoo and I think may well have put us half way towards paying for membership. A visit with parking would have cost £30 We need to cram in a few more visits to make it all worthwhile, but I think we’ll probably manage it over the summer.

With it being a slightly cold day (understatement!), we decided we would focus on the inside of the house, and leave the stunning gardens for another day. Turns out that The National Trust provide packs that children can borrow – these consist of a “gone exploring” badge, so that room stewards know what they are up to, a folder with a page of suggestions of things to look at in each room, pen/pencil and pads for making of notes, and torch, magnifying glass, binoculars and measuring tape so that they can really focus in.

Those who know Small will know he was in his element with this pack. Big was too, just as soon as the connection with Anne Boleyn was mentioned – and she kept careful note of the Hobart bulls as we went around the house.

The room stewards were unfailingly polite and helpful – when we broke for lunch part way through one of them short cutted us out to the main door and when we reappeared a little while later took us back to where we’d broken off We had our lunch (using our rather wonderful Outwell Calabash Picnic Bag, complete with wine glasses for squeezed orange juice don’t you know ) at a picnic table next to the little play area – the kids played in a determined fashion despite the chill while I walked briskly to the car with soa to fetch the food.

The only bit missing appeared to be rubbish bins, surely a reasonable addition to a picnic area?

To summarise – we loved Blickling Hall. We fully intend to go back and enjoy it again, and we were very impressed with our first experience of National Trust properties as members. It was a very good day out. Oh, and the children even got to keep their “Gone exploring Blickling Hall” badges

Today I had the children do a Level 3 Sats Maths paper. Earlier this year they were doing nothing structured at all while I waited for them to deschool, so how and why have we got all the way to Sats papers?

It’s for my confidence I’m afraid. A thing that sometimes doesn’t get said, I suspect for fear of letting the HE side down, is that not all children have fantastic overwhelming interests and occupy themselves autonomously in projects that seem (or can be written up as ) educational from morning to night. Perhaps this too is my fault for having sent Big to nursery at the age of 14 weeks, perhaps the externally imposed structure from an early age removed any self direction she might have developed. Certainly her brother is very capable of occupying himself and you can see him learning all over the place, and he didn’t go to (a very different) nursery until he was 2 1/2.

I don’t believe that’s the case though. Big is a child who wants and needs a lot of input from the adults around her, always has, and I suspect always will. On balance I don’t think nursery adversely affected that, but then I suppose I wouldn’t would I? I do recall another friend once stating in some exasperation “I am not an entertainment machine”, and there have been many times in the last nearly 10 years when I’ve felt that too.

And this is after trying a wealth of different approaches. After nursery there were a couple of years before flexi-schooling started, when I was at home full time with Big and Small. We went to home ed groups and camps, I strewed the house with workbooks, imported enough fact and fiction to open my own library, stocked the shelves with art stuff and science kits and demonstrated crafts left, right and centre. Nothing has really taken her fancy for more than a few days here and there. We’ve visited castles, museums, science sites, houses, done workshops, learnt to make baskets, attended forest schools and nature reserves, supplied instruments and activities and still nothing has really taken off.

So, structure and Sats. Partly because I was worried that if school ever became a factor my lovely bright daughter would be left wallowing behind her age mates, and partly because I felt that I was letting her down and failing in my legal duty to offer that suitable education.

What is a suitable education in my eyes? What was I failing to achieve? When it comes down to it, I don’t think that the facts that children may or may not acquire at primary school are particularly important. If you wish to learn information, you will do that when it’s important or relevant to you. Atm very little appears to fall into those categories for Big, and that’s fine.

Basic skills, to my mind, the foundation of education, are a different story. I know that children learn in fits and starts and that it works better when they are interested in something, but Big doesn’t seem to have those fits and starts very often, and she definitely isn’t interested in maths. Or English in terms of grammar, spelling or handwriting, and I’ve gotten way too jumpy to wait any longer. Plus attitudinally she deteriorates when she is not occupied, whereas when I enforce some kind of structure that tends to spill over and she becomes more productive the rest of the time as well. So atm she’s reading lots about Anne Frank, as detailed below. And because they both managed to acquire computer bans, they’ve actually played together without screens between them, which has meant tempers all around have been much more pleasant.

Last week we did the Sats level 2 paper, and they both achieved level 2A. Today we did the level 3 paper, and despite much stress caused purely by neither of them listening to me, they both sailed through for a level 3. This taught me a couple of things. I have immensely perfectionist children who get terribly stressed by things they feel they can’t do, despite me explaining over and over that this exercise was so that I could find out what areas they needed help in and I didn’t expect them to be able to do it all. And also that the national attainment levels really aren’t set very high. Small has just achieved beyond expectations for his age with very little tuition, and I suspect that if I could get Big to calmly attempt the KS2 papers, she wouldn’t acquit herself so badly either, even though maths is definitely not her strength.

So I feel reassured that a knock on the door from a LA inspector could be repulsed without me having to make anything up. They are certainly not receiving a worse education than they would in a local state school, and when it comes down to it, they may well be doing better. And I know where the gaps are in their skillset and what I need to cover over the coming days and weeks.

If I’d left it longer would Big have developed interests and started learning autonomously? I’ll never know I’m afraid, but there are still many hours in every day that I’m not filling for them, and I am following their interests as far as possible in the structure that I’m employing. So perhaps as the years go by, they will become more self-directed and I’ll be able to step back into a facilitation role. We can but wait and see. And blog it of course

Can’t remember when I last blogged properly about the older children (odd thing to say about Small!) so this is going to be a braindump of things I can remember that I may or may not have blogged before.

Small is continuing to enjoy Beavers, and now has three badges down his arm, and a Promise badge on his chest. They seem very organised at his pack – they’ve baked twice, he went to a swimming gala (Tim was very impressed, said Small did actually swim the whole way across with his float), they visited a church and wrote a prayer and last night he went to the district carol service. Even more impressive, I put soa in a wrap and took him there

He’s also still enjoying his swimming lessons, and seems to be making progress faster than I would have expected for just a half hour session once a week. Really wish I could be getting them swimming in between times as I think he’s very near to cracking it, but think by Centerparcs he’s going to be either actually swimming or will be by the end of the week.

Work wise he’s spending most of his educational time wandering through the bbc bitesize site, particularly the KS3 area which has a subsite called Questionaut. This week he’s learnt to use a calculator, and I inflicted a KS1 Sats paper on them both – he scraped a level 2A (the top of the expected level for the end of the school year he’s in) with several careless mistakes mainly down to the fact that he doesn’t write any working out down. I’m not sure he understands what working out is supposed to be about tbh, on the one question that asked him to write down how he worked out the answer he put “I think of a question and then work it out” or something of the kind

Big’s big success of the last month has got to be her swimming. Not so very long ago she moved up from the yellow hats to the green hats – it was at the start of the current batch of ten lessons anyway. Then the week before last her green hat group was doing lengths rather than widths and it rapidly became painfully obvious that she is way more powerful than the rest of her group as she consistently caught up with the child ahead and had to manoeuvre round them. As a result she was sent over for a test with the next group up, and passed, and last week was her first session in with the blue hats.

The blue hats appear to be concentrating on the finer points of their strokes – turning the head to the side to snatch a breath rather than lifting it from the water in crawl for example. As Tim said, she’s already at least as proficient as either of us and there’s not a lot we can teach her although she does obviously need to develop her stamina, and continue with the fine tuning of her strokes. We are seriously considering the swimming club now as we think she would really enjoy it.

Work wise she has been exploring bitesize as well, though as she gets very stressed about things she doesn’t understand I am currently on strike where Questionaut is concerned with her This follows a major breakdown in communication where she just flat out wouldn’t believe me that a particular part of a question/ answer was irrelevant (it was a question about coordinates on a grid, if you are at (-2, 5) how many units are you from the y axis? She was determined that she had to know how big a unit was, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get across that that part really didn’t matter).

Positive news though is that she too achieved a 2A on her KS1 Sat , getting only one thing wrong. They will be attempting the level 3 paper next week.

Finally made it out to the library yesterday for the first time in a month I’d guess. Big bought herself a replacement library card as she has yet again lost hers, and then got out lots of books about Anne Frank including A Friend Called Anne and The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition itself. She also picked up Suffragette: The Diary of Dollie Baxter, London 1909-1913 (My Story) – she’s read a couple in this series and really enjoyed them. I’m just pleased that she’s reading again, as she went on strike when she ran out of Lady Grace Mysteries.

And now soa is no longer happy in her bouncy chair, so blogging more about my birthday present and adding piccies is going to have to wait til our next break.

I’m often accused of cloning, which I find amusing now that they are growing up – Big’s hair has darkened and her blue eyes are now brown. Small is still blond and blue eyed, but they are so very obviously brother and sister. Stick their half sibling there as well and she’s very much from the same pod too and given that she’s no blood relation to me it all gets a bit confusing.

Character wise, on first glance they are very different. But they both display a startling level of intensity. For Small that makes him incredibly self-directed, and woe betide the adult that gets in the way. He has a turn of temper that he has absolutely no control over, and while it’s better than a year ago in that he’s more likely to take it out on inanimate objects like doors instead of soft ones like ppl, the force of it still takes me aback.

Big also has a hair trigger temper. Her’s comes out verbally and in attitude though – she’s been practising teenager style strops since she was about 3. I keep assuming she’ll grow out of them, but there’s little sign of it happening yet.

When it comes to learning though, that’s when they really differ. As I’ve blogged before, I was waiting through a long deschooling period and seeing no inclination to get on with anything. If it seemed vaguely educational I would get wails and tantrums – Big has a perfectionist streak that holds her back from trying a lot of the time.

So I imposed some loose structure. A requirement for a certain number of work items each morning, to include basic skills like maths, english and then history, science, languages, whatever. And we got into that routine, and OK, we still had a lot of strops but overall life was calmer.

In the last week, things have changed. Small suddenly started wanting to substitute his interests for the third work. Then for the second work. Maths is non optional – I’m not going to get to the point we’re at with Big where the basic skills are a real struggle. So now he has a geography book, and he’s looked up a variety of countries on wikipedia, printed off maps, drawn or coloured in flags, written bits of language in, learnt about population, area, density. I didn’t know that he could read numbers into the millions, but he can, and another side track took us off into large numbers, learning what comes after million and billion (some of which he’d come across in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Space)

Yesterday, for some reason, he dived off into dinosaurs. He’s spent nearly an hour looking them up this morning, and we’ve discussed how ppl know what dinosaurs were like, and which bits we don’t know, and how we know about their behaviour. He was quite agrieved to look up one and be told that it has very unusual teeth and therefore nobody knows what it ate, as they don’t fit the standard herbivore/ carnivore/ omnivore pattern. He’s looked up various other animals as well – came bouncing into the bedroom this morning to tell me that tigers eat crocodiles and boars. And then he looked up boars

There’s a vague interest in Albert Einstein coming through, and courtesy of Tim buying a 3-in-1 tuner from Lidl this week, his guitar is now out again and he’s working through his lesson book (Progressive Guitar Method for Young Beginners: Book 1) again.

It’s fantastic to watch him taking off like this, and it’s having an unexpected side effect this time around. First of all Big got very upset that Small didn’t have to do the defined three subjects. I pointed out that really all I want to see is them learning, and I don’t particularly mind what they are learning. And if she could come up with something that she wanted to do instead of something I suggested, she was very welcome to do it too. So she stopped stropping, and went off to find her myths and legends book, and spent a gratifying amount of time writing things up in a book for herself. She even went and got her spelling log, used it to write out words she knew she had in there, and put in words she wasn’t sure of.

She’s still doing maths every day, and we’ve agreed on a short amount of handwriting practice every day too. It’s paying off – we looked back to the beginning of her english exercise book and can easily see an improvement in legibility. She’s also starting to pay more attention to how she writes the things she’s writing, so we’re getting fewer spelling mistakes that are just missing letters. She wants to get back to playing the piano too, so we need to clear away the pile of clutter currently surrounding it that’s waiting a trip to the loft for storage.

So, tell me, can you teach autonomy? Is that what is going on here? Is it still autonomy if it’s externally encouraged? Thoughts in the usual place please

Yesterday they did logic games instead with aunt S, and I was quite impressed with how they were both managing Guess Who. Logical processes definitely improved there. Snakes and ladders proved a game too far though, as Small had a complete meltdown when he was overruled as to whether he’d landed on a snake or not Apart from that, they’d had a lovely morning, including a nice long walk out, which meant that they needed a lie down before swimming (given that I’d woken them up before 8. I know that’s not early for anyone who works or has children in school, but as we do neither atm, it’s very early for my offspring).

Swimming was excellent. Small completely stunned me by doing half the small pool in a very creditable back stroke (no idea where that has come from, but he seems to have got it) and they both got badges and certificates, as well as Big having it confirmed that she’s passed her test and from next week she’s in green hat. There are several other children her age/ size in that group, and it’s taught in the proper pool, so she shouldn’t end up with quite so many bruises on her knees during lessons in future!

Small is taking the lead in deciding what he wants to study as part of his three work sessions in a morning, and as it’s really the doing of something that I want to encourage rather than a specific choice of subjects, I’m really quite happy with that. So this morning he did some sticker maths, read some Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Space and then asked if he could learn about France. So we explored wikipedia, found him a little map of central Europe, he drew and coloured in a flag, wrote some French phonetically and we looked up the name of the island nearby (Corsica). All good stuff, and completely self directed.

Big and I had a little fall out over the idea of a spelling log, mainly based around her concern as to what would happen when she’s filled the book. I can’t see that happening desperately soon – it’s a smallish exercise book, but it still has 50 pages (100 sides) so we did some extra arithmetic to work out how many sides she could have per letter, and settled on 4 for each apart from x and z which each got 2 Given that she can fit two columns of words per page, I think the book should last for a while!

Once that was sorted out, she went off and read some more myths and legends. She’s also doing a project with Tim on how this town looked a couple of hundred years ago, so while she’s doing that, I’ve planned to do some artwork/ drawing with Small and we went out this afternoon to pick up Giovanni Civardi’s Complete Guide to Drawing which I’d seen for £8 in the shop down the road. Got Big some terry fabric and some felt so that she can do the decorated baby blanket she’s planned as well, so I foresee arts and crafts in our immediate future.

Explored the charity shops on the way home looking for Hallowe’en costumes – found Big a wonderful slinky sparkly black dress and a broom, but not so successful for Small. However he already has a red cloak and red trousers, and will be happy if I whip him up some horns and a devil tail. So all I need to do now is work out what we’ll take as a food contribution. Think it’s likely to be bread cheese and fruit!

Tim’s away off up to old house tomorrow with a large van to try to empty the shed and garage (not *quite* sure where everything is going to go but cross that bridge when we come to it) and I’m going to be hoping that baby isn’t in too much of a hurry and can hang on til he’s done up there and safely back home.

Oh, and Small lost his second tooth yesterday. He doesn’t look like my baby boy any more – isn’t it odd how the changing teeth changes the face so completely?

I had a plan. Last time I was in the library, I’d noticed a book, Gifts for Baby, that looked like it might have some simple craft projects in it, suitable for Big to do. And our library is open on a Sunday.

So, before lunch, but after she’d exhausted the book she started last night, we were ready to go to the library. Slight hitch in that Big had lost her library card, so she decided she would take her purse and buy a new one, plus she had fines to pay off. We set off in the glorious autumn sunshine for a pleasant walk together.

Thankfully the book was still in the library, and even more thankfully, she liked the look of several projects in it. *And* it turned out her library card had been left in the library – as there are self service machines for checking your own books out, it’s quite easy to abandon your card. So she didn’t need to pay for a new one, though she did clear her fines off, with a comment from the librarian about it being good to clear off your debts, but better not to incur them in the first place

Joy of joys, the next Lady Grace Mystery, Keys, had arrived as well! So that meant she would have something to read when we got home too. Sadly, she has now caught up with the author, so we’re back to scrabbling around for books to catch her fancy after this one.

Then we headed for home, via a quick stop in the cheap shop for some black acrylic yarn for my current crochet project. Seems odd that with five crates of yarn and fabric that I have no black, but there you go.

We looked through the craft book together, and there are several projects she likes the look of, so looks like crafting is back on the agenda. Which is good, I do think part of the reason that she gets herself into a state from time to time is that she’s not being productive, and crafts are excellent for that.

First project chosen was making soft blocks – she still had some stash fabric from the remnant shop bargain basket, so I printed her a template and she cut out 12 12cm pieces, before learning about nets to make cubes and how to lay out the fabric so that the patterns wouldn’t run into each other. Then we had lunch

After lunch (which took a while, I don’t understand how Small can spin out a banana sandwich, a yoghurt, and a biscuit to last nearly an hour!) I set up the sewing machine and we sewed the first block together. Big did the straightforward flat bits and I took over once we were into 3D. Then we turned it the right way in, she stuffed it and finished the last side.

She also wants to use these things towards a Brownie badge, Toymaker – I’m assuming that some assistance with complicated bits is acceptable? (Really wish that our Brownie leaders were just a tiny bit more forthcoming!)

And by the time we’d done all of that, complete with the usual rethreading of the sewing machine a couple of times and so on, I was nearly passed out on the kitchen chair. I didn’t sleep well last night, due to the hacking cough that developed as soon as I tried to lie down, and the acid indigestion that set in later on So I needed a nap.

Big wanted to know what she could do while I was resting. I suggested that she could look through her badge book and plan what badges she wanted to do, that she could take pictures of the block she’d made and write a little bit to explain how she’d made it to show to her Brownie leader (who I’m assuming will be tester), and that she could design another toy – she wants to make an activity book out of felt that will have dressing practise in it, such as a zip, buttons and so on.

I think she probably read some Lady Grace as well

I slept two hours. While I was sleeping, I think Tim may have explored some of a project he wants to do with the children too. And as soon as I got up, they started fighting again Although Tim tells me that it wasn’t for my benefit, they did fight while I was sleeping too.

Made tea, baked potatoes, broccoli, bacon (all things that Small eats) and we ate. The whole sitting down as a family thing is working pretty well now, although I could do with getting my timing a bit tighter so that the kids aren’t running late on shower night.

And then it was shower night and bedtime. And now it’s tomorrow, so I think it’s my bedtime too.

Support group Weds afternoon, and they were the only big children there, so they absorbed the 4 year old into their game and had a lovely time. And we were on time It’s a very relaxing session for me, and apparently we are welcome to other sessions run in the same environment, some which are staffed, so it’s acceptable to go and sit in another room with a cup of tea and leave your children without you for an hour! Tempting There’s even a sensory room we found out as we were leaving this week, so Small’s been promised that will be turned on next time. I may find it difficult to drag him out again

Weds evening is Brownies. Almost a disaster in that Big’s brown trousers were on the line and resoaked following the downpour while we were out at group. But I remembered in time, so they were spun and then shoved into the emergency tumble dryer (I hate using it, but needs must ) Set off on time, then she had to run back for her cress seeds, which she’d forgotten to plant last week, so were only demonstrating two days growth. She took her badge book as required, and apparently they didn’t even open them. Sigh. Think we’ll look at moving to guides in January.

I don’t mind doing badges with her if that’s what we are supposed to do, but I do think a little communication would be in order, I don’t actually know where I’m supposed to start with it. She came back with an excellent little craft – bit of paper painted and cut in such a way that when you fold the flaps over you’ve got a union flag.

Another successful tea, Small very much likes lamb chops now (I think basically as long as they are cooked plain!) and he accidentally got a bit of kale in with his cabbage, and decided he liked that too. He’s really broadened his horizons food wise, the veg box has been a huge success in that direction. Just got to keep up the momentum now.

Hm, I was going to do the whole rest of week in one post, but I’m already up to 400 words, think I might keep going anyway.

Thursday was momentous in that I slept in and it threw off the whole morning. Which doesn’t bode well for when we’ve a baby and I’m getting irregular sleep We had another very serious chat with Big about her attitude – the arguments were sparked because Small didn’t want to play with her as he was too busy reading a french book. Tbh, if he’s doing something like that, I don’t really want her trying to drag him away – he doesn’t get enough space to be autonomous in the way that I know he can be. But all that put her in a bad mood, and there was flouncing and shouting, and like I say, serious conversations.

She pulled herself around, and even did some extra maths, although I was evil with her handwriting practise and printed out a sheet of “I must not hit people or call them stupid” which didn’t go down too well

For third subject we did music appreciation, which meant they each chose something to listen to off the media centre, and then I chucked in something classical. It went really well, they started listening hard enough to pick out instruments and rhythms and even enjoyed Brahms and Tchaikovsky

Afternoon we went to the library, and then called in on S on the way home to see how her extension is going. It’s now a proper room, with walls, roof and windows, and the electrician has just been in, so there’s lots of wires poking out of walls. Small wasn’t quite sure he saw the point in that!

Friday I woke up with a stinking head cold, but soldiered bravely on until the afternoon, when I collapsed back into bed. It did help It’s not actually all that bad a cold I don’t think, but when the space your lungs should be in is already occupied, it makes the whole coughing and sneezing so much worse.

Big had a much better attitude to her work, and did double maths, along with mental arithmetic which is the now standard response to her making any silly mistakes in arithmetic. She did some spelling incorporated with handwriting, and Small complained that number patterns aren’t maths and wanted to know what they were doing in his book

And that, pretty much was Friday, which wraps up the week more or less.

Small actually made some mistakes in his maths, but nothing to do with arithmetic. His difficulty was in deciphering the pictures in his book – he was doing a section on graphs which required him to count up different things and we had quite an argument as to whether one picture was a duck or a fish! He gets the principle behind it all, so I’m not worrying too much about it

For reading he excavated Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and did a chapter of that, and then I marshalled the two of them out of the house in search of shoes for Big.

To do this, I put on Tim’s docs, as mine don’t fit my slightly swollen feet. This was a mistake, as his appear to way a ton, and without a lift in the left one, I could feel it pulling at my back. Stopped off in Superdrug and bought a padded insole so it was better on the walk back, but not a long term solution. Am loath to buy a bigger pair of shoes just for the next 5-6 weeks though.

In Clarks it became apparent that Small’s struggles to put on his trainers were because one foot is now a half size bigger. Sigh. That means that that pair of trainers, barely worn, were a bit of a wasted investment. So he needed new shoes, and was quickly satisfied with an interesting looking pair of trainer shoes in black and red. Big was, as usual in a shoe shop, another story. She’s gone through size 3 without stopping, and from being 2 1/2 at the beginning of summer is now 3 1/2 width E. They had two pairs of shoes in that size, neither particularly practical for the winter (Mary Jane style, so with lots of exposed sock iyswim) and neither pair fitted her particularly well either. So we left without any, and she’s agreed to wear her wellies if we go anywhere in the rain until we can try to find something better.

Quick look in shoezone proved they have nothing much of interest to me, and then headed for home via the greengrocer’s for top up vegetables. We’re done with the veg box now, and we are regularly having sit down home cooked meals all together. So that turned out to be a pretty good way of doing it.

On the way home we were talking about what the third piece of work should be and I suggested that we could read the Bible story of creation to compare and contrast with our theory of evolution from the day before. We were discussing this as we crossed the road beside an elderly gentleman, and I’m not sure what we said that was terribly upsetting, but he stopped dead in the middle of the road to listen to what we were saying. Perhaps it was hearing Small’s opinion of creation stories…

Home, and I was shattered and in pain, plus I’ve got the edge of a cold, so I ended up retiring to bed to recharge for an hour before taking them swimming, and even then we went in the car I don’t like using the car for these little journeys, but I know I need to conserve energy now, and I couldn’t risk setting off my back again.

Another good lesson for each of them (you have no idea how much I relish being able to write that!), Small can now put his face in the water, and Big has been told if she can just get her breaststroke breathing sorted out, she can be tested for the next group up. Which would be excellent, even if she does end up leaving her friend C behind, as it shows she’s making real progress and being more able to keep up with CP at next year is a real possibility.

Home, and Tim did the honours with cooking, sausages of meat and vegetarian persuasion, beans, eggs and toast Good filling fair for two exercised out offspring And during the meal they explained what they’d been doing in work that morning, and we discussed language including the dreaded word nice, which both Tim and I were banned from using at junior school as it’s a non word. Always makes me think of the comedy sketch though.

Somehow the conversation morphed, as conversations do, and Tim introduced the idea of rhyming slang. He even went off after the main course and brought back a cheat sheet, but he hadn’t edited it quite as carefully as he thought he had, so I deemed it unsuitable for little eyes. (I have no intention of explaining the meaning of some of the words that they have rhymes for just yet, thank you very much!) Then they rattled around getting ready for bed, and Tim and I watched Electric Dreams, the 80s before I retired, to toss and turn (well, more sort of wriggle and occasionally roll over) for several hours for no apparent reason. So I’m tired this morning.

He’d been asking for Brown Beaver’s phone number, and I wanted to know why he wanted it. He said that not everything had a why, and I said I thought it did. His response was that there was no why that the earth started, and I have to admit, I had no comeback on that one. So he wins the argument there.

Aren’t 6 year olds still supposed to be trying to work out the why for everything? Rather than disproving that there is such a thing. I think I love how his mind works though, it’s so sideways to everyone else!

In other news this evening Big and I made apple crumble between us – I did the easy bit of peeling and chopping apples and left her to do the crumble topping while I took Small to Beavers. Got a phonecall from Tim while I was there to confirm that I had finished the filling and immediately cottoned on that this was because Big had read the recipe and was concerned I’d left out the flour. I’ve never put flour in my fruit filling before and wasn’t about to start now, but this had left Tim in charge of a daughter who can read recipes and likes to be precise, and if she can’t be precise she’ll be dramatic. But I was a mile away so I couldn’t hear the histrionics for once

As I seem to be relating the day backwards I’ll continue. Afternoon was somewhat annoying as they started it by fighting at which point I gave them both more work to do. Fed up of the bickering which so often results in one or other of them in tears, so if I have to schedule the whole day I will Which was a shame as we’d had a pretty good morning – the work spun out over 3 1/2 hours, but that was mainly because they were really enjoying the history aspect of it, yet another Great Lesson, courtesy of Miss Barbara, this time on the coming of humans. Small is particularly taken with it all, and the maps which I printed out to go with it, and we discussed it all for ages. Then he went off and drew a timeline of a possible evolution of spiders, after confirming what evolution meant.

Big loves history, so any time to discuss any historical aspect goes down well with her, and recovered the morning after a struggle with her English. The struggle this time was with the question, which I’d read ahead and thought was straightforward. What I hadn’t anticipated is that she doesn’t do idiomatic language, and so she didn’t have a clue what most of it meant. The question was asking her to work out the meanings of various idioms (eg getting into hot water, showing a clean pair of heels) and then use them in a sentence, and I suppose I could just as well have asked her to translate them into another language for all the sense it made to her.

How has she got to nearly 10 years old without me noticing this in her? She reads voraciously, but I’m now wondering how much of it actually makes sense to her. Anyway, instead of her using them in sentences, I got her into Credo reference online courtesy of Suffolk Libraries and we started looking up the idioms and finding examples of usage. I’m hoping that was a better idea than the plan in the book.

Small finished his book (The Thing from Knucker Hole) this morning and they both did their maths without too much fuss, so despite the whole thing stretching out, it felt relatively painless. Oh, and I nearly forgot them working together to make a clock face for Small to continue practising with – they even roped Tim in with that as he passed by.

So that was Monday.

Sunday was quiet – I made it out for a walk on my own in the afternoon, and Tim excavated one of the two garden sheds. The one he sorted is insulated out, for no apparent reason, so may be a bearable bolt hole even in winter Small did demonstrate that he’s cracked telling the time by reading the clock accurately to a time that we hadn’t started work on yet He’s still a little hazy around the minutes to stage, but he’s pretty much got the principle of it down now.

Saturday was even quieter, mainly as I’d had a dreadful night’s sleep Fri-Sat and after fighting with my blog for most of the morning (and losing it has to be said ) I retired to bed for at least part of the afternoon.

And that is where I need to go now.

Took Big down to the library to pick up her next Lady Grace Mystery, Deception. She is absolutely adoring these, and getting lots out of them historically as well

Of course, a little later we had a row, when I told them that we were going out, and they didn’t want to, but Tim and I wanted to go to Orford Ness, this being the last week that it’s open during the week, and it was a glorious day for it as well. Departure was hindered by the fact I’d put the temporary membership sheet into a safe place, and couldn’t find it again but we got away eventually, to arrive after the last ferry crossing :’(

Making the most of the day out anyway, we retired to Orford Castle. Tim had taken the kids before, but I hadn’t been. He disappeared with Small to do a high speed tour, while Big and I took our time with the audio tour, which was excellent. I managed all the steps apart from the basement, but was aching somewhat by the end so we gave up on a plan to pop into the town for an explore and headed home via a moderately scenic route showing the kids where Tim grew up and his walk home from school.

It was a lovely afternoon out and although I was in some pain, it wore off a little on the ride home. Wimped out on tea though as didn’t want to risk really setting my hip off, although I still went out for a walk to pick up a baby bath from freegle, while Tim marshalled the kids into the shower.

Afterwards they wanted to sit in the living room with us, while really I just wanted some child free time. Big was quietly perusing catalogues, but Small isn’t very good at quiet, and tried to assist Tim with his scrabble (which was very funny ) before finding Space (DK Eye Wonder) and reading selected excerpts of it out loud. Eventually they did retire to their bedroom for a short time playing, allowing me to heave a sigh of relief and start hunting out the resources for my last TMA for MS221.

Have had enough of this maths now. Am trying not to get stressed about the exam, but can’t help feeling it’s going to be a disaster as I really haven’t understood or acquired skills during this course. I have to score 40% to pass, and I need at least 40% on this TMA too, which should be feasible as it’s at least partially on imaginary numbers which I did at A level (surprised to find that they are now being introduced at level 2 of OU courses. But don’t worry, there hasn’t been any dumbing down of qualifications in the last 20 years since I did A levels….) but it’s so very difficult to focus on something I’m enjoying so little. Taking a year off OU next year, don’t think it would go too well with new baby anyway, and then will ponder after that.

And then we watched TV and I went to bed.