Making It Up

as we go along

maths

Contemplating home education styles, with a Teach My Preschooler kit review.

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When you mention home education to people one of the first questions (usually right after ‘but how will they make friends?’) is how will they learn to read? Or do maths?

The answer to that is all sorts of different ways, to be honest. Some children just seem to acquire reading in the same way they did spoken language, soaking it up from the atmosphere around them. Most home education households I’ve been in are very book rich environments (code for there are books *everywhere*), avid library users and big on reading with and to their children. This isn’t enough for every child though, and these days there are all sorts of resources available either free or cheap. We’re fans of Reading Eggs (handy affiliate link over there in the sidebar if you’re looking to give it a whirl) but there are all sorts of other apps as well, like Teach your monster to read, Nessy (which is particularly targeted at children with dyslexia).

Or you can go old home ed, as it were, and use actual physical resources. We’ve got a Montessori movable alphabet (like this one at Amazon affiliate link) and recently we were sent a TeachMy Preschooler box set for review.

The Kit contains resources for four types of activity – letters, reading, printing and math. (Sorry, it’s an American company.) It comes in a green filebox within a sturdier cardboard sleeve, ideal for storage. There’s a parent guide too, but I doubt you’ll be desperately surprised when I say we’ve been winging it in how we use the kit 😉

teachmy-box

Inside the box the rest of the resources are in labelled up plastic envelopes. The whole set is very well organised, and feels sturdy.

teachmy-preschooler-kit-contents

I chose the preschooler as I thought that Tigerboy might like it. Turned out that Smallest took to it too, so I’d say don’t underestimate the longevity of this set.

They’ve both spent some time with the printing activity, which is a magnetic writing board, an instruction book and 4 sets of transparencies. I particularly like the transparencies, which weren’t something I’d encountered before.

Tigerboy started out following instructions. (Don’t worry, it didn’t last long.)

teachmy-writing

Smallest had a go at the letters and numbers.

teachmy-numbers

She’s also spent quite a lot of time with the learning to read set. She’s already pretty much there with phonics tbh, but lacks confidence, so this was a good consolidation activity. And it turns out she loves flashcards, so has been practising them regularly, which can’t be a bad thing.

Way back when the big two were the little ones, ‘normals’ was a thing in my home education circle, as mentioned often on Merry’s blog eg here. With the way Smallest responded to this kit, I’m wondering if a box set of normals would be something that she would enjoy. She already effectively does this for herself, but she loves ticklists and organisation, so I’m thinking that an actual list of activities, all kept in one place for her to access easily might well be something that would make her a very happy girl. And Tigerboy tends to crash along and involve himself in whatever she’s up to so he’d probably just join in to a large extent.

There are as many ways to home educate as there are families home educating. The thing to do is find out what works for you, and never be afraid to mix it up when things need a change. If you need more inspiration, there’s a style of home education quiz on the eclectic homeschool blog which might give you some ideas.

Disclosure: the kit was supplied free of charge for an honest review, and amazon links are affiliate links.

XYZBuilds: a review

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I was recently approached on twitter by XZYBuilds to review their new product a construction set for all ages. I was intrigued, so I said yes, and shortly afterwards, a small, but surprisingly heavy box arrived.

Contents as shown.

xyzbuilds box and tiles

I was quite surprised that there weren’t any instructions. But the children didn’t seem to need any. So Smallest got stuck straight in.

smallest building

And Small wasn’t far behind.

and then there were two

Within minutes, they were building house shaped structures, discussing prisms, and cubes and designing nets. They worked out the quirks of building in terms of how to match sides together, and plan ahead to have a net fold up into something solid. They’d have missed out if there had been instructions or suggestions I think.

Obviously I had to experiment with my camera.

xyz tiles closeup

Though quickly I had to give up my tiles, as the other children came to join in.

we may need more tiles

Do you know how rare it is to find an activity that occupies 4 children, age 3 to 15, that doesn’t involve chocolate? We may need more tiles though 😉

They built mansions. Dogs. Cubes and prisms. Towers. A minecraft hammer. And there was planning and cooperation and harmony. It was beautiful to watch.

Smallest was very proud of her Dalmatian, which featured in the XYZBuilds newsletter this week.

rex-yz (They suggested we call him ReXYZ 😉 )

She was very brave in sacrificing him to the needs of her brothers minecraft hammer. And then we put as many constructions together as we could, to see what we’d built.

all the buildings

All of that came out of that small cardboard box. And went back into it. A self contained toy, that stretches the imagination, encourages creativity, experimentation, cooperation. Allows for mathematical and scientific conversation, and is surprisingly pleasurable to the touch.

Did you get the idea that I was really impressed with this? Because I was. And I’m not just saying that – while I was sent the tiles for review, I’ve received no other compensation for this post. I’m just going to say that I think you should take a look at XZYBuilds, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

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

Tickbox home ed

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I don’t know whether Big got the idea from one of her friends or whether she’s come up with it more or less independently, but last night she started to make herself a tick list. Of course, we did have ticklists here briefly, but that was a while ago, and they didn’t last long.

Today though, they are in. Not multi-coloured, but very organised, and completely self chosen. And when she’d finally got it all written up to her satisfaction (which took a while, given I couldn’t get the scanner to work, and then when it did it turned out the pencil wasn’t dark enough, so she had to start over in pen, and she wanted to make sure everything was spelt correctly) she set to to actually do some of the stuff on it.

Including a page of decimal addition sums. 😯 (and whispers – which she got all right. Maybe it’s clicking, finally!) So there was handwriting, and spelling, IT, and maths, rookie lifeguard fact revision and she wants to go out and buy stationery! And of course this evening she read, and there was computing, much more Wallace and Gromitting (which must be good for something, though I’m not sure what precisely, though at least we do all now know what a stirling engine is and how it works) and I think some television.

Me, I mainly panicked. The increasingly firm letters from HMRC gave way on Friday to get your act together or we’re sending the bailiffs in. The irony being that I doubt very much that I owe them any more than a few sheets of paper, but it’s finding all the bits of paper to fill in the dratted forms, and then there’s the phobia of form filling that I have…

you will understand, I feel, when I explain that I did somehow find the time and energy to clean the kitchen table, put away washing, put washing through, go for a run, do more washing up and various other boring little tasks I’ve been avoiding *before* I made the HMRC phonecall!

So that was a Monday. And I didn’t complete half of what I’d meant to, but the baby barely slept and I’ve appts tomorrow, so I must get on. G’night.

(ps thank you, a huge warm cuddly thank you, to all my wonderful friends who sponsored me on my run. My total stands at £105 now, which is fabulous.)

one handed blogging.

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last post was about Friday. Since then:

soa rolled over twice during a nappy change, and is becoming increasingly mobile on the floor. She also managed to wriggle herself around in the cot and pick up toys that I thought were out of her reach. Am loving watching her figure things out.

Big and I have been working on her General Election lapbook. We had a long session on first-past-the-post voting systems and how unfair they can be. Tim finally got the point across with a menu analogy – if a group of ppl all chose food and three of them chose caramelised red onion sausages, and all the rest wanted different things but they all ended up with the sausages because that had got the most votes that wouldn’t be very fair. We also showed it with a bar chart and a pie chart, covering compass, ruler and protractor use along the way, as well as degrees in a circle, percentages, and revision of division by ten.

I’m aware that we will have to go over several of these skills rather more times, but for me the magic moment came when Big said “this is fun!” 😀

Small had an important moment of personal growth this weekend. Yesterday we were heading out to West Stow Anglo Saxon village and he put on the usual performance about leaving the house, magnified by the fact that it was a Sunday and apparently that makes it even worse. We dragged him out anyway and he had a fabulous time as we all did, and in the car on the way home entirely unprompted he said “sorry for shouting at you, you were right, I did enjoy it.” Wow!

West Stow was great, apart from a 20 minute stretch when I couldn’t find anybody. This was because when we arrived I stayed at the car to feed the baby then when I walked up to the village I couldn’t find anyone. Turned out that they had joined in with the tour, along with Michelle and C, Beccy and R and Zoe and co.

I was a little sad I missed the tour (btw, have managed to detach baby so this part of the blog is brought to you by my touch typing skills 😉 ) but it would have been difficult to join in with soa attached, and I figure I’ll get to do all this stuff again in a few years time when she’s interested 🙂 Tim really enjoyed it – he’s been meaning to go to West Stow for years and years and never got a round tuit before. After they’d done touring we meandered over to the picnic benches and ate, and then all the children hared off into the trees and played. Given that my two hadn’t met any of them before they meshed really well, and we let them run around for ages while Tim queued for hot drinks, Michelle and I sat inside to drink them (meaning I could feed soa inside, a much better idea!) and Tim took Small to buy a roman helmet.

Eventually, after we’d greeted another home ed family in passing, all the adults decided they were tired of freezing solid and we packed up and went into the little museum. For all it’s small it’s rather good, and we enjoyed that too. Quick stop at the shop on the way out and over to the playpark which the kids seemed to enjoy nearly as much as running around in the trees.

I was the first one to wuss out when soa started making feed me type noises and I headed off to the car for another feed. (I’m not shy of feeding out and about in case anyone was wondering, but I am rather reluctant to risk frostbite 😉 ). Rest of the family gathered and we eventually ran for home.

Let’s see, before I pick up squawky again, is there anything I’ve missed out? Yes. We got a Wartime Cookbook out of the library on Friday and I did Lord Woolton’s pie for tea on Saturday. Obviously Small didn’t eat it, but the rest of us really enjoyed it, and Tim (carnivorous though he is) even had seconds! I’d been savvy with having the oven on and did apple crumble for dessert as well, so that made for a really good meal. (Especially as the meat eaters amongst us had sausages with their pie 😉 .) So that gets added to the recipe pile unlike Dublin coddle as recommended in The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less which was a bit disastrous.

(Lord Woolton’s pie followed by apple crumble, meal for 4 and including the sausages came it at under £5 for those keeping an eye on the pennies, while I think the Dublin coddle has rather more potential to be expensive as it’s bacon and sausages. Obviously depends on the quality of your bacon and sausages though, and the price of your veg. Our local fruiterer is very good value and I do like to shop there and get whatever is local – it’s all labelled up accordingly.)

I’ve totally lost the thread of this post, does it show? Think I’ll draw to a graceful close and go off and drink my cup of tea 🙂