Making It Up

as we go along

Puters!

Questionaut, biology and yet more lego

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So Big went away last night, dropped her off with a home ed friend, so that they could spend the day at UEA doing biology. By all accounts they had an absolutely fabulous time – she was full of it when I picked her up tonight. So that was excellent.

Small managed mostly fine without her, apart from one brief moment today when he bounced off into the bedroom and then came back looking solemn.

“I forgot she’s not here” he said.

Let’s have an awww….

The rest of the time though he amused himself on the computer. As usual. He’s spending vast amounts of time writing programs on Scratch though I don’t think he’s been uploading them. Must remind him about that bit. And he remembered Questionaut and has spent lots of time on there as well.

Which led to the surreal conversation last night, when he was able to tell me that 50 add 25 is three quarters of a 100, but not what the actual answer is.

*headdesk*

Actually, if he can’t really do arithmetic, but is really hot on concepts, does that mean that he might be some kind of mathetmatical genius? (I can live in hope, can’t I?) As Tim said, if I ask nicely, maybe Small will explain probability to me. He certainly has a better grasp of it than I do!

Smallest has had a difficult couple of days. She is full of cold, and consequently her eating and sleeping arrangements have been all to pot. Tim and I particularly enjoyed the hour or so of bouncing happily on our heads at 2 am two nights ago. Or not.

She is oh so very close to walking. Has done a single step independently lots of times now. And last night she even used a spoon to eat some of her yogurt! With her left hand again. Aunty K is going to be thrilled that we’ve finally another leftie in the family!

And the lego? The extra goody bag arrived following our LegoHeroFactory outing. Small was absolutely beside himself to discover it contained Furno. Furno is apparently THE hero to have. So one ludicrously happy boy, especially when Big immediately said they would share them both.

Thank you, Lego Hero Factory. You are definitely my hero 🙂

Back to school.

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That would be the school situated in our living room, with a school day that goes nearly all round the clock 😉

Home education for us is very home centred right atm, due mainly to soa’s needs and requirements. We are going to introduce a weekly music group as of next week, which will mean we see ppl every week which will hopefully be a good thing, and of course there are still the weekly sessions of Brownies (soon to be guides I think), Beavers and swimming to fit in. Means that we leave the house three days a week, no bad thing. Must follow up on swimming club for Big too.

Anyway, the formal education part of the day has been reintroduced as of Monday. Big has her weekly planner that lets her choose what to do over and above maths, handwriting and spelling, and the routine of it seems to be helpful to her. Her basic skills seem to be improving along with her overall temper. Having said that, she is full of cold atm so her self control isn’t particularly good. She is very much enjoying the Sharon Creech books that I got her for Christmas, she’s started with Bloomability.

Small is proving to be a bit of a challenge atm. He is very oppositional – a direct request usually gets a direct response of no, without a pause for thought. Indirect requests don’t fair much better, as they are either ignored or misunderstood. I’m working on finding new ways of dealing with him, but it’s an uphill battle right now, mainly I think because of my continual tiredness. If he’s left to his own devices, he forgets to eat or drink, neglects other basic needs, and spend the entire day exploring the internet. Hm. Not ideal really, so he can’t be left to his own devices, meaning we get back to those confrontations. All by himself though, he’s exploring the tree of life, Scratch, learning how to use a calculator and doing mental maths and working on email netiquette. So his education isn’t being quite as neglected even if it’s a rather eclectic mix!

He made us laugh the other evening – he was asking how to divide a series of numbers by 4, and I didn’t know why. Turned out that the nutritional values of the caramel sweets he’s been eating were listed for four chunks and he wanted to know what the values were for one…sweetie maths!

soa, as previously noted, is gorgeous 🙂 Her current education is to practise smiling, and the entire family enjoys encouraging her 😀

Quick round up.

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While soa is happy in her bouncy chair. She’s increasingly awake and alert during the day, and also increasingly happy to be separated from me for more than a minute at a time. It’s not many minutes though, so I’m typing rapidly!

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.

A tale of two children.

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My children are very similar, and very different.

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 🙂

Still trying hard.

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Didn’t get through our routine bits yesterday due to an early morning appt for Tim and myself, but did on Mon and today. Regular maths is giving Big confidence to attempt sums while out and about – she worked out the cost of two bits of fabric in the remnant shop as was this afternoon, and got it spot on, even if fingers did have to be employed at one point.

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?