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Montessori minded

Mathematical traumas

7th July 2009 by Jax Blunt 1 Comment

over the weekend I printed out placement tests from Maths no problem for both offspring. Small is acquiring maths concepts in the same way he acquires all knowledge (ie I have no idea, just suddenly he knows something) but Big has had her mathematical confidence dented over the last couple of years by osmosis, and I’ve been trying to work out what to do about it.

I don’t like the books that we’ve found in the Smiths and so on, and while I do like Montessori it requires rather too much one to one with me, which when it’s something she doesn’t like, is to be avoided or it just becomes a flash point. I thought that the Singapore maths might be right up her street, and I’d printed off 1B for Small and 2A for her.

Turned out I was pretty much spot on for him – he managed most of it with some pointers, while I was miles out with her. Her confidence is none existent and her abstract skills are lacking. So I printed out another copy of 1A which she sailed through with a couple of mistakes, giving me an idea of where to place her.

So I ordered from Maths no problem then later on realised that they have new editions arriving within the next few weeks. I mailed them to ask if they could hold and upgrade my order, and they are doing precisely that. Lovely helpful ppl. I’ll review the books once I’ve got them too 🙂

So that took up most of our morning one way or another. Later on Big and I chatted about her diary some more – seems that she wasn’t writing a diary, she was trying to write a My Story about her life, and hadn’t realised that in a fictional account, things get switched around. So now the pressure is off and she’s going to write a special occasions book instead. Good.

Small did some more science from his book, cutting out a snake to do an experiment to show heat rising. Of course the heating is only on for brief periods to heat our water up atm, so he hasn’t managed to use it yet, but we’ll get there.

Then in the evening it was Beavers. He is having a fab time there, although apparently they are having to support him in the games a little. And when I dropped him off, he didn’t line up with the other children, he just waited with Brown Beaver. They are being very good about making adjustments for him, and in return he has been behaving impeccably. Now if I could just arrange for a Beaver or two to come over he’d be over the moon.

I took my OU work with me and sat in the car with it, revising differentiation. It did not all come flooding back 🙁 Maybe my brain really is rusty.

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Filed Under: Big, Getting to know you, Jonny had two apples, Making things, Montessori minded, OU, Puters!, reeling, writhing, Small steps

Broad and balanced v intrinsic motivation.

27th June 2009 by Jax Blunt 5 Comments

This review does not argue against the rights of parents as set out in Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 outlined above, nor their deeply held convictions about education. I believe it would be wrong to seek to legislate in pursuit of an all embracing definition of “suitable”. However, such is the demand and complexity of 21st Century society and employment that further thought should be given to what constitutes an appropriate curriculum within the context of elective home education. Such a curriculum must be sufficiently broad and balanced and relevant to enable young people to make suitable choices about their life and likely future employment.

As stated previously, the term “efficient” has been described in case law as an education that “achieves that which it sets out to achieve”. On this basis there surely can be no argument against those who choose to educate their children at home being required to articulate their educational approach or ‘philosophy’, intentions and practice and with their child demonstrate its effectiveness. Indeed many do so already. This is not an argument for prescription; on the contrary it is simply an argument that the rights of parents are equally matched by the rights of the child and a recognition of the moral imperative of securing education for all children commensurate with their age, aptitude, ability and any special needs.

(my emphasis).

The difficulty we are encountering in reactions to the review are that so much of it seems reasonable. It seems reasonable to balance the rights of the parent and the child whatever that actually means. It seems reasonable to suggest a broad and balanced curriculum, and also that parents and children should demonstrate evidence of learning. Disregard the fact that this is not applied to every school pupil, that is not the point here, and will not win us any backers.

For many parents the idea of putting together a 12 month plan and then having to demonstrate evidence of achievement against that plan goes against the heart of how they home educate. This is because these parents educate autonomously, relying on the intrinsic motivation of the child to guide them. It’s a familiar concept to those within Montessori schools, but not terribly familiar to anyone working within the mainstream system, where children are motivated by smiley faces, certificates and prizes.

So what does it mean, autonomy or intrinsic motivation?

Intrinsic is internal. It’s what drives a child to learn to walk and talk – you didn’t have to give your toddler smiley face stickers to encourage those first steps did you? They just wanted to be like you and everyone else around them. And if it is not interfered with, the intrinsic motivation to learn will continue to drive a child on, following their own interests, and acquiring a variety of skills along the way.

This is autonomous education in action. It is efficient – how many adults remember slogging away at something at school or work and forgetting it seconds after it was tested, and yet picking up a hobby effortlessly and hanging on to those skills forever? That’s because the hobby was something you wanted to do, whereas work and school are motivated by external reward. But it’s kind of difficult to plan or measure – it’s pretty indisputable that over time children will acquire skills, but there’s no way you can plan in advance to know what those will be.

Will the skills be broad and balanced? To be honest, possibly not. Some children have wide ranging interests, some don’t. But anything they actually need to do, they will, in most circumstances, learn at some point, and it’s not as if education has to cut off when you are 18 or 21 or indeed any arbitrary age. Mine didn’t. I did a degree and it gave me no work skills, I did a pgce and stopped and then I got into social work. While in social work I started an nvq which I didn’t complete, then I did a distance learning course which got me into computing. I worked as a programmer on and off for nearly 10 years and during that time I was offered training by employers or I learnt myself from other programmers or from books, and even got a well regarded certification that way.

All of that was motivated mainly internally. Yes, I stood to gain better jobs by getting better qualified, but it was my decision to want the better jobs and put the effort in, no one told me I had to or patted me on the head to do it.

If we can recognise that an adult might learn that way, and that a toddler learns that way, why is it so difficult to believe that a child could learn that way?

Maria Montessori recognised it. A good Montessori teacher doesn’t tell a child good work when they draw a picture, they say instead “thank you for showing me”. It is up to the child to put a value on the work they do, not the teacher.

John Holt recognised it. It runs through his works, try reading How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

Graham Badman didn’t recognise it. His review says:

First, what constitutes ‘autonomous’ learning. Could it be, as many home educating parents have argued, it defies definition but provides the ultimate opportunity for children to develop at their own rate and expands their talents and aptitudes thought the pursuit of personal interest. Or, does it present a more serious concern for a quality of education that lacks pace, rigour and direction. I come to no conclusion but believe further research into the efficacy of autonomous learning is essential

Does autonomous education lack pace, rigour and direction? No. It doesn’t lack direction. It is directed by the desires of the learner. Pace and rigour? I’m not entirely sure what that phrase means. Many children (and adults) learn in fits and starts. When you are first interested in something, you focus on it to extremes. Then you might ease off a little, consolidate, or take a break by focussing on something else. That presumably looks like learning lacking pace. But it’s efficient, and I’m not sure why learning should have pace and rigour to it anyway.

I suppose the real question here is why does autonomous learning scare ppl so badly that they deny its existence or denigrate its efficiency?

Is it because the independent learner is precisely that, independent? They will not squish into a hole, they’ve never been told to close the book they are reading because they’re not up to that standard yet. They have an indomitable thirst to learn and they will learn from all around them, not just government approved texts. And they may not learn that they are supposed to be good little workers, movitated by the drives of capitalist society. I can see how that would scare any number of government employees in any number of countries. I’m slightly ashamed that it appears to scare those in mine.

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Filed Under: home education review, It's where it is, Montessori minded, political stuff Tagged With: autonomous learning, Graham Badman, home education review, instrinsic motivation, Montessori

Trying to be more available

26th June 2009 by Jax Blunt 6 Comments

so obviously the kids were completely self entertaining yesterday. Sigh.

Well, I was mainly more available, apart from the hour or so I spent shopping for clothes that would go over the bump without sweltering me – got a great denim dress for £5 in one charity shop and a lovely bright ethnicy one from the hippy shop for considerably more 😉

Bit of a crisis all round in the afternoon when the media centre turned itself off and refused to turn itself back on, meaning that I had to watch Federer streaming on the netbook. It doesn’t stream well, and the screen is a bit pathetic for it, so all in all not overly successful.

Then Big and I had a bit of a fallout over the learning journal/ book review. To recap, she told me that she wanted to learn more about Victorians and improve her spelling. In an effort to polish off two birds with one stone and keep slightly Montessori with it at the same time, I suggested a learning journal for her to document what sort of things she’s been learning about which would allow us to work on her spelling when I checked through it. So she read Mill Girl (My Story): A Victorian Girl’s Diary, 1842-1843 which seemed an ideal thing to write about, and I wasn’t sure why she was dragging her heels over it.

Turned out that she didn’t know what a book review was. And was not in a cooperative frame of mind about it – even threatening never to read another book if she had to write about it. I recap again, these were the things *she* asked to learn about – and she doesn’t consider it learning if she doesn’t write things down with me working with her. Even bigger sigh. So we talked through what a book review might be and she wailed and stropped and wrote three or so sentences, mainly with dire spelling.

I bought her a spelling dictionary and a workbook because she said she wanted to improve her spelling, but now she doesn’t want to do even that, she is so terribly afraid of getting things wrong (don’t know *where* they get this perfectionist streak from, honestly!) that it makes her kind of difficult to even talk with about this stuff.

Obviously more thought required. But for now, no more book reviews. On the plus side she is covering pages in her diary that she bought for herself, so I do know that she is writing, just not anything that she’s showing to me.

We recovered the evening by going to a Brownie fun event in the playing fields of a local high school. Children thoroughly enjoyed spending 20p on a variety of stalls and not winning much of anything, then buying a book each on the 50p stall while I funded their food and drink courtesy of the BBQ stall. After an hour of standing in a very cold wind my back was aching unpleasantly so we called it a day and came home. And that was another day.

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Filed Under: Big, Montessori minded, reeling, writhing

The personal stuff

12th June 2009 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

Went to doctor’s about Small this morning, referral to community paediatrician set in motion. Not sure what they do, but there you go.

That was after I’d slept in, I’m not sleeping well during the night, so given that I’d arranged for Tim to get up with the children, when he did, I turned over. And slept for another two hours, then shot upright, utterly confused as to where I was, and ended up having to sprint to the doctor’s. Hohum.

Back shortly before lunchtime to be greeted by the HE review. Will save my reaction to that for a separate post. But it took up a couple of hours of my day, that would have been so much better used up doing almost anything, banging my head against a wall, housework (hahahahahahaha) or even, oh I dunno, facilitating my children’s education?

Yes, well. Then I had lunch, and moved over to sit away from the netbook and nearer the offspring. They were playing with the castle and their figures, and after refereeing a discussion as to why Big has more figures than Small, we did get slightly historical when he wanted to know where his blue clad soldier was from. Sadly the best I could tell him was that it was from the American Civil war, as I don’t know myself which side wore which colour, but that lead us on to a discussion of the American Civil war and of the different structure of America (the united states aspects of it) so that was good.

Turned on the tennis, and got to watch Murray going through, which was good. Then we got ready to go to the beach, and of course it rained, so they drifted off into playing Travel Battleship. For once Small actually won a game, so that went down pretty well 🙂 Did discover that he isn’t all that firm on his capital letters though, which is surprising, given how good his reading is.

Finally made it to the beach a little after 5pm, after several diversions to get buckets and spades, snack packs and sketching pads (for a nature journal type thing). Kids spent 40 minutes scrabbling around in the sand and then we walked along to the leisure centre to hand in the rest of the swimming forms, arriving at precisely the wrong time as a classload of children came out of lessons to pick up certificates and so on. Never mind.

Discovered I’d kept the children out a little late, at least I’m assuming that’s why I got the attitude from Big on the way home. And the way home always seems so much further than the way there! It did give time for me to walk along hand in hand with my little boy, who suddenly remarked out of nowhere “if all the babies had been good babies, you’d have a lot of babies now”. Or something like that. I can’t remember exactly how he phrased it, but it completely took me aback that he was thinking about it all. I agreed that this would be baby no 6 in that case, which he thought would be a lot of babies. Odd conversation, but just goes to show that Small thinks about things that I thought went right over his head.

More battleships once home while I was getting their tea ready, and then I reminded Big that she hadn’t written in her learning journal today. “But I haven’t learned anything!” she protested.

Really? Nothing at all? Nothing about how to play battleships, or about the American Civil war? Not to mention the further reading of the Mill Girl diary?

“But I didn’t do any work!”

That doesn’t mean that you didn’t do any learning! She was really quite impressed at the idea that you can learn without working – perhaps this is what I’ve previously failed to get across to her, that incidental learning is just as important if not more so than sit down learn it out of a (text)book. Anyway, she was very excited to take her journal off with her, and wrote about battleships in bed, before asking me to check the spelling. I said that we’d do that together tomorrow 🙂

Small took his journal to bed too. When I went in to turn lights out I asked what he’d been doing, and apparently it’s a list of things to do tomorrow. It starts with researchbluesoilders (yes, I’m going to work on spaces with him 😉 ) which refers to the blue soldier that led us on to discussing the American Civil war earlier, and then goes on to the science questions he wrote down the other day. So I guess he really does want to find out about fire and ice.

Should be an interesting day tomorrow. Don’t you love child-led education?

And just to bring it back to the review, but only briefly, how could I have described all of that back in January in a statement of intent? If I was following a curriculum, no matter how broadbased and inclusive, would we have the time and energy to drift off into discussion of the American Civil war based on the uniform of a toy soldier? Or would I be telling them that that would come up in a few years time and not to worry about it yet?

Food for thought.

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Filed Under: Ages past, Big, Doodling, drawing and decoration., fainting in coils, Jonny had two apples, Montessori minded, reeling, writhing, Small steps

Meet Jax, the entertaining educational machine.

10th June 2009 by Jax Blunt 3 Comments

As promised to the children, my alarm went off at 8 am this morning. Given that I didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight, despite being in bed before it, then woke again at 5 and did that horrid drifting dozing thing for a couple of hours, it took me several minutes to force myself out of bed. Several minutes too long – I heard Big hit Small as I was putting my dressing gown on 🙁

Not impressed with her, and wouldn’t listen to her excuse in which it was all his own fault, probably for existing. Instead, I separated them as soon as they’d finished breakfast, had them dress one at a time, and then set them to getting on with some of the stuff that they got yesterday.

And that was the pattern for the morning. Big moaned, wailed, rolled on the floor and generally performed, but was eventually persuaded to write up a few sentences about Victorian toymaker advertising in her learning journal. Small, during this time, worked his way through some of the CD-ROM that came with the usborne french book. He was very happy with that, and didn’t require any prompting or assistance.

I was quite cross with Big. I do not see myself as her teacher, but it would appear that for things she wants to learn, which are separate from things she just does, she does see me as her teacher, and as such, it’s my responsibility to make these things happen. School really wasn’t a good idea after all, if that’s the impression it left her with. Never mind, I have a long term plan for weaning her off the concept, and it started today with me refusing point blank to tell her what she needed to write, and insisting that she wasn’t allowed to copy either.

Once she’d done that, I read through it and wrote out the miss-spelt words on a separate sheet for her to copy several times. I doubt that it’s the best strategy for learning spelling, but it will do for now. And after that she copied two of them out again to get rid of the capital letters in the middle of words. Hohum.

Then she moved on to maths. This was a better attempt than normal, although still protracted and painful. At least she removed herself to the bedroom so that she could work at a desk for the duration! Small moved on to the Journey To The Moon (Maths Adventures), which turned out to be quite fun for him (at least, I assume that’s why he worked on it for an hour and a half 8) ) but in desperate need of some proofreading. I thought he was struggling to multiply by 10 at one point, but when I reread the question carefully I saw the problem “if you run 3 kilometres in a morning, how many miles will you run if you run 10 times as far?”. Given that this is a very basic book, I don’t think they actually meant you to do the conversion!

After that, Big read the funny poem of the day to herself from Read Me and Laugh and eventually moved on to making a list of things that would be handy for an exploratory beach walk from the Usborne Nature Trail Seashore book. Once she’d got the list, she hunted for some of the things that we already had, and made a list of shops where we could get the others. So lots of writing today. We were hoping to get to the beach, but a Suffolk downpour (bit of a shower for you northerners) put paid to that for the day.

When Small had eventually had enough maths (thought he was going to go through the whole book in one sitting!) he did some reading, and then we had lunch 🙂

Oh, and excitement of the morning was a small bird cannoning into the french windows, and shooting off again, leaving a trail of little white feathers behind.

The afternoon started with a musical interlude, with Small choosing Bat Out of Hell (which obviously I had to sing along to, love that album!) while Big preferred The Immaculate Collection.

After that I read them both the poem of the day out loud, and then Big started to play computer games, with Small as her cheerleading section. As they seemed to be fairly well settled, I took the opportunity to go to bed!

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Filed Under: Ages past, Big, Jonny had two apples, Montessori minded, Puters!, reeling, writhing, rhythm of the day, Small steps, speaking in tongues

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