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It's the hard knock life for us!

27th April 2015 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

It can’t have escaped your notice that there’s been a remake of the Annie Movie, this time starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. And today it’s out to buy on DVD and Blu-ray.

In the run up to this launch, Smallest and I had a very special day out in London, at the Pineapple Studios with Richard Marcel, a choreographer from Strictly Come Dancing.

There were a whole bunch of bloggers and children there, ranging from really quite young to ahem, let’s not go there. And we all got involved.

Little ones sweeping.

With some wonderful support from the dancers. I love this picture of Smallest being encouraged to join in.

She only agreed to join in if I did. So here I am in the lineup, trying to keep roughly in time.

It was a pretty intense day, particularly for the teens. But the group worked really well, there was so much energy involved, and that was down to Richard and his team.

Right up until the grand finale. From the beginning of it, to the very end.

Long time readers may well spot some other familiar faces in the group – it was lovely to spend time with some of the Puddle Chicks and also to meet Helen from Casa Costello who is real life friends with a good blogging friend of mine. In fact we chatted lots, despite the noise of brooms being bashed against the floor.

And all of that, condenses down into this:

Please do watch it, it’s really good fun.

We were also sent the film for review.

Smallest fell in love with it. It’s her new favourite film. For those of us not good with change, the addition of new songs and tweaking of the storyline to remove some of our favourite scenes did cause some disharmony. I also felt that Cameron Diaz was rather underused, being neither particularly bad, or overwhelmingly redeemed – missing a trick with an actress of her comic abilities. Quvenzhané Wallis, though, as Annie is excellent. Lots of energy in her dance routines, got the steadfast hope down to a tee. (T? I’ve just realised I don’t know how that figure of speech works. There you go then.) I’m sure that we’ll be seeing lots more of her.

Do I recommend it? it’s good family entertainment. And you too will be able to do the housework to the strains of It’s the Hard Knock Life for us for ever more 😉

A trip to the library

8th February 2015 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

We’re going on a book hunt, we’re going on a book hunt. …

I took a break from defending home education on twitter to go out and do some not-at-home education. We walked to the library. With Tigerboy’s little legs it takes quite a while.

On the way there we discussed how to cross roads. I remembered the Tufty club. Is there anything like that these days? Smallest could do with it.

At the library I returned a whole heap of picture books while the children looked for more. Smallest found one illustrated by Alex Scheffler, and we talked about how the pictures were like Stick Man and the Gruffalo. (I didn’t actually see what the book was called, Smallest refiled it before I got a look at the cover. )

Then we read a book about a mole and some poo. Quite a lot of poo in fact. But quite decorously done. And marvellously educational 😉

We broke the walk home with a visit to some relatives, always nice. And then on the way back, Tigerboy started shouting about seeing a 2, pulled his hand out of mine, and ran back to show me a 2 on a gate post. It was above his eye level so I was really surprised that he’d spotted it. He was thrilled, and traced it with his fingers several times over. Then we looked out for other numbers and ended up finding the best one on our own gate post 🙂

Family meal and bedtime stories (see instagram for #guessthebook clues to titles) and another day done.

Following their interests (home education the lazy way)

12th November 2014 by Jax Blunt 10 Comments

There is a technique sometimes referenced in home education circles called strewing, in which you casually leave educational resources round and about to ~~sucker~~ entice your children into educating themselves. I like to think of myself as an extreme strewer.

I’m not, of course. I’m just disastrously untidy 😉 But today it worked well in my favour.

First of all, Tigerboy found some pieces of a Baker Ross sewing kit, and brought them to me. “Teach me to knit” he said, as he handed me the needle. 😉

So I sat him on my knee and he sewed half way round the pieces of felt before losing interest. I was quite impressed with his manual dexterity to be honest, I don’t think any of the others could have managed that at this age.

And then Smallest, who had wanted to do reading, and writing today, turned me down on pencil work, but demanded to write a blog post, so we loaded up her blog and she dictated. She also did some Reading Eggs and Mathseeds, but turned me down for any actual reading books.

Then the next thing I saw was her first chess lesson. Sat on Small’s knee, they were playing chess online.

The first game rather predictably ended in tears. Then Small left her to it, and she spent the next hour or so taking pieces. I’m not sure what site they were using – it was pretty good though, as when you clicked on a piece it showed you all the possible moves, so she was learning lots about the pieces just by experimenting.

So, crafts, chess, reading and maths. Alongside the usual playing, eating, talking, stories and a bit of TV. Sounds like a pretty full day really.

Montessori moments with the movable alphabet

9th October 2014 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

We got another part of our new Montessori equipment out this week. This time it was the movable alphabet. (We have the red and blue version of this Small Movable Alphabet Letters from Amazing Child Montessori on Amazon.

The movable alphabet is used as part of the Montessori techniques for teaching reading and writing. Its use would usually come after the sandpaper letters which is how letter sounds are taught to begin with. Smallest has skipped that stage by using Reading Eggs and Alphablocks online. However, I want to reinforce her concrete understanding rather than it all being completely abstract, so I thought that the movable alphabet might go down quite well.

I was right.

The first stage in using the material is to have concrete items that are phonetically spelt – so I found a toy cup, a toy tin and a pot. For each one I asked her what it was, and then if she could hear any sounds she knew in the word. (It’s important to note that using this material comes before reading. In Montessori development, children often write before they read, and using the alphabet is a shortcut to that.)

Smallest identified the sounds sequentially, which I thought was interesting. When I worked in the children’s room in Yorkshire, children would often hear the vowel sound first, and struggle most with the end sound. It doesn’t really matter how a child decodes the word though, it’s just important that they do.

It also doesn’t particularly matter if they muddle up c and k to begin with. Or use an upside n for a u. This isn’t about spelling everything perfectly first time, it’s about hearing the sounds, building the words and (eventually) reading them back.

When she’d spelled out her words, I suggested she might want to write them out. (She’s using a STABILO EASYgraph Left-handed pencil in case you’re wondering.) It turned out she didn’t want to copy them, she wanted to draw around them. Which is fine too.

I can see that this activity, along with all the other reading activities she’s already doing, should help everything to come together to make reading and writing become a natural activity for her. She really enjoys working with the various materials, and it helps that they are all new and special to her 😉 I’m hopeful that I can get her writing alongside her reading, and maybe with a rather better pencil grip than the one Small still has.

If you’ve enjoyed this Montessori post, you might like others in this series.

Getting hands on with Montessori education

23rd September 2014 by Jax Blunt 5 Comments

So, last week I took delivery of a very large box of Montessori materials from the lovely Anne-Marie from Child Led Chaos. And this week I started to get the resources out.

The first one out of the box was the Trinomial Cube (amazon), for no other reason than both Big and I adore it. Turns out that that is catching, as Smallest has spent hours with it already. As it contains the binomial cube, you can start by presenting that (some hints on trinomial presentation here here although that’s not quite how I do it), so I did, and it took her just two days to get the hang of that. (Not all of two days. Although I would guess she probably spent a good couple of hours on it, having me present it over and over, and trying a variety of ways to get it to fit before she cracked it.)

As soon as she’d got the hang of the binomial, she wanted to do the big cube. So we had a few goes at that.

I foresee many more hours with that one 🙂

And before all this had started, of course we had to clean down the table after breakfast, and sweep the kitchen floor so that it’s clean for the mat to be rolled out. Lots of incidental good habits in Montessori practices. After only a couple of days of it, she already rolls the mat up and puts it away without being reminded.

Tigerboy is loving all the new stuff as well. He’s spent a lot of time with the Latches Board (amazon) although oddly I don’t seem to have any pictures of him with that. But his real favourite is the Tower! (always with a !) which in this case is a not pink tower. It isn’t a classic montessori version of this, being natural, and nesting, rather than being solid blocks. This does make it more complicated to work with, as it’s possible to hide a block as you’re building the tower. He doesn’t seem to mind.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of materials, but already, just a couple of days into use, I can see that both the little ones are responding so well to having the montessori influence brought into the home. It gives me a structure as well, which is good, and I’m really looking forward to reorganising the living room, so that we can have shelving with the materials available for easy access. For the time being, I’m getting them out early on a morning and putting them on the kitchen table, which means the children have to ask me for them, not ideal, but a lot better than having Tigerboy disappear with an important part!

If you’d like to read more about montessori, try our homemade spindle box or a post about Montessori methods and the materials

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