geocaching

Out and about on a #gbwalk at Ickworth House.

11th September 2013 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

Late breaking decision last night was to meet up with friends for a day at Ickworth. It nearly didn’t happen when Tigerboy sleep in till after 9 and I then had to wake up the others at 10, but they all liked the idea so we scrabbled together a packed lunch and headed out.

There’s a fantastic natural play area, with a wildlife garden, a willow maze and more obvious swings, slides and so on, and that’s where we started. Picnic was eaten in one of three little shelters that are only missing a bench round the wall to make them perfect, then we headed off for some exploration and geocaching.

I’m still stalking a number of Garmin GPS handsets on ebay, and I think one will be a good investment. Our phones struggled with signal today, but we still found two caches as we explored and while I do tend slightly to the opinion that it spoils a good walk, it does encourage certain members of the group to walk further than they might otherwise 😉

I loved the walled garden. Particularly the variegated poppy I found.

And I was interested by some apple and pear trees that are being trained along a wall. We’ve a conifer hedge that I’d like to replace with fruit trees and training them out like that would enhance our privacy as that’s at the busier road end of the house.

We spotted various other tree fruits as well, acorns and cob nuts (?) and various brightly coloured berries. Tigerboy walked around the walled garden and Smallest walked most of the day, given we covered around three miles I think she did really well.

A lovely day out. Great to fit in another great British walk. And as it’s about halfway between us and the beans likely to be somewhere we go again 🙂

Pointless education and missing caches.

5th September 2013 by Jax Blunt 5 Comments

You can take the boy out of the school, but can you take the school out of the parent?

There’s a constant balancing act here, to discharge our legal duty under Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act

7. The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable-

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b) to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

and to reflect what I see as the needs of the real world and my children.

So for example, maths and english qualifications are held to be an absolute must by many journalists/employers/politicians *but* it’s not actually straightforward to get those if you aren’t in school. GCSEs are difficult because of the coursework aspect – many home educators go for iGCSEs instead, but there’s still the issue of finding an exam centre and working out how to jump through the hoops, which for people many years out of the exam system themselves is not straightforward.

But, and it’s a big but, should exams/qualifications really be the be all and end all of education? I can see that an employer wants to know how capable a prospective employee is, but should the education system just be set up for employers?

And, if we home educate at least partly because of our disenchantment with the constant testing and encouraged comparison within the system, why do we (ok, why do I) so easily drift back into the requirements of it?

All of this pondering is brought on by yesterday’s experience with quadratic equations.

Now, confession time. I’m a geek. A computer programmer, sudoku lover, I wander around with numbers and patterns in my head all the time. Shopping I’m keeping a running total of expenditure as I go round, driving I’m working out our average speed. I can’t help it, it’s just who I am. And I love quadratic equations – they are a good puzzle. So I was genuinely confused by the complete resistance I encountered from the highly numerate Small yesterday.

Hours we spent on it. Hours and hours. There were tears. Not mine, although I felt like it at times. And I was the worst kind of parent – after I’d done all the calm, quiet explanation, I shouted and threatened. I could *not* understand why he couldn’t get it.

Eventually, after about 5 hours on and off of this, I gave up. I wrangled him and the two smallest into sun kit, and we headed off out to geocache, as a much more sensible use of a beautiful sunny day. He carried my phone very carefully and navigated beautifully with the compass setting in c:geo (free app) and although we didn’t find the cache it was a lovely walk, we saw a lizard, and finished up with icecream and sand angels on the beach.

Then, once we got home and I’d put tea on, we sat down together and went through the whole quadratic thing step by step. And I realised that I’d been misunderstanding the problem – it wasn’t that he didn’t get the maths, he just couldn’t see the point of it. Right at the moment the point is to finish the year in mathletics, and I turned to twitter to find the wider point

Anyone got any real world applications of quadratic equations that will make sense to a 10 year old? RTs lovely.

— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) September 4, 2013

The tweet is still going strong with 27 RTs, and lots and lots of really helpful answers. The parabolic paths of angry birds are plotted with quadratics. You can use them to work out picture sizes for magazine layouts. There were links to articles on 101 uses for quadratic equations, youtube videos on parabolas and all sorts.

So, quadratic equations are useful. (It should be said that they were introduced via area calculations on mathletics, which does seem to be a fairly real world application, and appears to be used in farmville too 😉 ) And after our discussion last night, Small sailed through that section this morning, and polished off another gold bar with ease. I’ve yet to show him all the real world applications of it, but what I’m still grappling with is how I work out that balance, how do I work towards what society thinks my children need, without imposing the parts of school based education that are the worst aspects of it?

A #GBWalk at Wicken Fen with the National Trust

3rd September 2013 by Jax Blunt 6 Comments

Last Sunday we went to Wicken Fen nature reserve, to join a National Trust #GBWalk bloggers event.

I love Wicken Fen. It’s just at the limits of my drive for a good day out, but it’s completely worth it. It was the first nature reserve the National Trust owned, back in 1899, and at that point was just 2 acres. It’s now approaching 2000 acres, and the Trust has a vision of growth for it, though that isn’t without controversy.

If you aren’t familiar with the East of England, you may be wondering about what the Fen is. Basically it’s a wetland – where there is land, but it’s flooded. There’s very little of it left, because in the 1600s rich landowners came out from London and brought Dutch engineers who drained the land to make it into very fertile farmland. The Fen tigers (terrorists (or freedom fighters?) basically) fought back and made themselves so problematic, blowing up machinery and disrupting the works that the Dutch moved on, leaving Wicken flooded.

(I apologise if I have any of the finer details of this wrong. We had lots of bits of talks throughout the day, but as I was wrangling four children throughout, I wasn’t taking notes. Feel free to correct me with references in the comments.)

Anyway, we didn’t actually go to the fen for a history lesson, though I’m never averse to getting one. We went to get out and about, and take part in the Great British Walk. So after coffee and biscuits, walk is what we did.

One of the benefits of fenland is it’s flat. Very flat. The Trust has put in raised walkways around much of the closer bit of the reserve making it surprisingly buggy friendly. I’d got the buggy in case of small legs getting tired, though I did have Tigerboy in a wrap as well. The first wander however was at a very slow pace, and I think he could probably have kept up if I’d let him try – we explored around for a bit, then stopped to do a mini creature hunt. This wasn’t very successful for us – I don’t think we caught very much at all. Smallest was happy though as she was drawing, so she rode in the pushchair to continue.

We saw a bird hide, where I displayed complete ignorance and identified a young moorhen as a duck. Gah. Well, it was brown, rather than black, and I’m really not that good on birds. Kept my mouth shut after that 😉 Then we sauntered back to base for a very lovely lunch.

After lunch, there were a number of activities laid on for us. The first was a boat trip round the Lode – a manmade waterway. Our guide was an absolute mine of information, explaining the way the reserve was managed, the history of the usage of the land, about plants and animals we could see as we were going. He also talked about how families lived off the land, hunting and fishing, and how he’d been fishing there since he was 8. Local lad, in case you couldn’t tell. I loved this part – Tigerboy fed as we were going, and we’d been paired up with Daddacool and Claire from Being a Mummy, who are bloggers I very rarely get to see, but always enjoy spending time with.

Next activity for us, geocaching. Now, many families we know have been huge geocaching fans for years. It’s never really appealed to me – good way to spoil a nice walk 😉 but what I hadn’t counted on was the level of excitement exhibited by the 10 year old when he was handed a gadget to do his walking with. Walking? He sprinted, into the distance, so Big went off with another adult, while I did my best to keep up with him. We’d been set a treasure hunt where there were three boxes to pick things up from, to make a something at the end. Huge hit with us, so looks like we’ll be indulging in that as a hobby – I *may* be stalking a Garmin on Ebay, as I don’t want to risk handing my expensive mobile phone to an overexcited Small.

(I honestly don’t know why I hadn’t realised how much he would enjoy geocaching. He probably wouldn’t have done a few years ago, but it’s just right for him now, and I’ve discovered there are lots of caches within easy distance of home. And of course there are plenty at places we go to too, so there will always be an incentive to get active. Excellent stuff.)

And our final activity of the day was pond dipping. I expected this to be highly unpopular, and was very wrong again – Small was absolutely thrilled with it, and wants to do it again. I can probably get nets can’t I?

So, our Great British walk was a family success, and I enjoyed catching up with a couple of friends (Hi Liz!) Huge apologies to the other bloggers I didn’t get chance to chat with, but being rather outnumbered with children, I didn’t try to meet new people particularly. If this glorious weather we’re having holds, you could do worse than getting yourself and family outside for a Great British walk, and if you do go, let me know how it goes for you. And don’t forget to tweet it with #GBWalk 🙂

Disclosure: we were invited to Wicken by the National Trust, plied with lovely food and coffee, given some goodies to take away (including a pedometer which is inspiring further exercise in the boy, thank you!) and will be receiving travel expenses. I have not been paid for this post.

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