Making It Up

as we go along

mathletics

Getting back into the (home education) groove.

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It feels like absolutely ages since it’s been anything resembling normal here, and for once that’s not just a feeling. We went to Christmas camp in the second week of December, and since then, there hasn’t been a day when the whole family has been well. Honestly, it’s been weeks of misery and illness, and it means there is no pattern to the days. As the younger members of the family are the healthiest, this has started to let boredom set in, along with mischief, so this week, despite feeling like really I’d still like to be spending all day in bed, I’ve pushed for what used to be called normals around the blogring.

Normals, for us, are a bit of maths, bit of reading/ English, maybe some history or science or coding. For the younger children, some art, drawing, sticking, whatever, and educational apps, along with read alouds.

Picture books obviously get plenty of attention 😉 Today during the day we read My Big Shouting Day (which I’m hoping is mentioned in that post, or that’s just a miscellaneous link 😉 ) and then at bedtime there was the Gruffalo’s Child. (I do love that book.) Smallest did some drawing – mainly of birds, and lots of playing on minecraft. She’s made a developmental leap there, and suddenly instead of sitting with Small giving him direction, she’s able to build and do things for herself. She caught? found? a dog, but made it grow too big and it died. And instead of sitting and crying, she went out and found another. Then she wanted to name it, but sadly technical support had gone out to the library with Big, so she was left with me.

And I know next to nothing about playing minecraft. I know a bit about installing it and modding it, because we’ve done that before, but I’ve never played it. So we struggled with it for a while, and I even put out a desperate plea for help on twitter, but failed to sort it out.

We were picking the nametag up from the wrong place. Obviously.

I suspect that Smallest is going to learn to read and plan and type now, because she’s motivated to continue to do more and more on minecraft. I’m going to have to buy her her own very soon – they spent tonight building her a skin? (No, still no idea.)

In and around this, she also did some reading and maths (Reading Eggs and mathseeds) and fought with Tigerboy over his new Glockenspiel. Which was nice.

Small has restarted maths after a bit of a break. He’d reached the end of the year 9 work, and I took a look the other day to see what if anything, mathletics offered next. There’s an IGCSE course, but there’s also year 9 extension work, so he got going on that. Surds. Indirect variance. All sorts of things that were hurting to my head, but we got there, and he’s powering his way through again. I think it might make my life easier in some ways (though harder in others) if he and Big sat maths together next summer, so we’ll gradually work towards that.

Big picked up her maths book again, and we’re working towards GCSE. Or IGCSE, whichever we find a centre for. And tomorrow she’s picking up the other text books too. This is absolutely her choice, and I will do whatever I can to facilitate it.

I need to look into slightly more formal art – I’m looking forward to seeing the Toucan Box art awards stuff at some point, which I think will be ideal for Smallest and Small. It would be nice to get Big maybe an art club or art lessons, need to explore opportunities there. And Tigerboy is frighteningly capable at almost reading – he was doing the Bob books app on the iPad mini yesterday and when you suggest what sound he should be looking for, he can find it, although he just stabs madly otherwise.

He’s a little learning machine basically, this morning he was experimenting with truth and falsehood. He was trying to persuade me he needed milk, and I said that we usually do that for going to sleep, or if he hurts himself. OK, he said, and trotted off. Then came back, moments later, claiming he’d bumped his head on the kitchen floor and needed milk desperately.

Yes, well. He hadn’t, and readily admitted that he hadn’t when I asked him. Funny little boy.

And that’s been the last couple of days. Plenty of learning facilitated all over the place, plenty of playing and family too.

Pointless education and missing caches.

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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

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?

sandangel

Opportunity cost, decluttering, maths and stuff

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In the shadow of the news, we decluttered some more today. We sent books to New Zealand, gave away outgrown clothes to the Red Cross and freegled a very faded ring sling. And on twitter I met up with @Shelterbox, who are also working in Peru, Bolivia and Madagascar. I didn’t know about any of those other disasters. I confess I have been trying not to watch too much news, but I don’t think any of these have been headlining. Surely with 24 hour news we should have room for more information – it almost seems like we get less.

And it all gets me to thinking. When I choose to send books to New Zealand, it cost money that I can’t then spend on anything else. I can’t spend it on us, can’t give it to another charity, it’s assigned once. Likewise with the books themselves, and the clothes I give away. We have choices, finite choices, and we can only ever do what feels like the best choice at the time. I wonder how the ppl on the front line in charities make those decisions. When they make that decision to go to Japan, does it pull funding from other places? Are children in other needy areas a little worse off because of this? How do they spread the money around?

I’d hate to have to make those decisions. I’d hate to be the person redirecting staff from one place to another. I guess that’s why I’m just at home with my kids, and not running some major charity :/

Weighty matters. Most of the day actually passed in a flurry of mathletics, a try out of an Orchard Toys maths Magic Cauldron game, walking to the leisure centre, rookie lifeguard and walking home again to cook. Big gmail chatted with a friend while doing her mathletics (get her multi tasking) and Small got frustrated once again by website policies that mean he needs to be 13 before he can sign up. And the baby pootled around, as she does, and indeed as she is right now.

I cooked, did I mention that? I cooked toad in the hole, using a Jamie recipe. It was remarkably successful. Small ranked it right up with pizza, and even had seconds. Given that I hate cooking things I don’t eat, but I don’t eat meat, it was a rather nerve wracking experience, but definitely one I will be repeating.

Some of what we ate we bought in the coop on the way home. I gave Big yet another lesson in economics – we looked at the prices in the vegetable section. They have stickered, pre wrapped vegetables, £1 each, £1.50 for two. The broccoli was equivalent price £3.33 a kilo. The choose it yourself broccoli was £2.10 a kilo. Even if you bought two stickered items, the loose broccoli was cheaper. Which annoys me – they are driving ppl to assume that the stickered items (mainly pre-wrapped) are a better buy, and thus driving ppl into buying more packaging and rubbish. And yet most ppl probably don’t even notice the terribly small equivalent prices, can’t or won’t do the maths to work out the pricing to see what they are spending. Grr.

And as we went around the shop, we saw the increasing number of charity branded items. Buy a pink pen for £3.06 which donates 25p to Breast Cancer Research. Or how about buy a cheap pen for a fraction of that price and donate the difference to Breast Cancer Research? If you need a pen at all that is. It’s all charitising of the worst kind. And it’s really really annoying. More to come on this topic I suspect. Not least as I received an email on it all today as well. Still thinking.

Dimensional discussions in a two child house.

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Big is out for the day. She went out on a late breaking sleepover last night, and is now off to a toy museum with friends.

Small, on the other hand, is exploring the concepts on mathletics. He was looking at 2D and 3D shapes, and then asked me what a 4D shape would look like, so I mentioned time.

Tim came in and referred to Flatland (courtesy of the relevant episode (links to synopsis) of The Big Bang Theory), so we read about it on wikipedia. When I read out about the square being imprisoned, Small said “I’m surprised it wasn’t imprismed” 😆

And along the way, I’d fbed the first bit of the discussion (“Small just told me his favourite shapes are 3D shapes. Then asked what a 4D shape is. I’ve only had one cup of tea, too early for multiple dimensions!”), and Stella dropped in with a link to a discussion of 10 dimensions. We got to 7D before Small lost interest (about 8 minutes in) and I still haven’t had my second cup of tea or breakfast!

So the next time someone asks you about efficient full time education, tell them it just never stops. These are not the type of Sunday mornings I imagined pre children. Not that I’m sure what I did…