Back to bed

I am so glad that Linnea was at home today and could go back to bed. She woke early, because of the daylight or a toilet trip or something, and was as cheerful and charming as a rabid weasel with toothache until I sent her to bed about noon. She was asleep in minutes and I'm quite certain she will be in better humour and more able to tackle her swimming lesson when she wakes up.

Emer, meanwhile, is buzzing around the house tidying up, painting, making phonecalls, doing laundry, and other important life-enhancing things.

This and that

From Twitter: A: "Here, I found some sums that might interest you." L: "Yay, thanks!" *turns printout over, draws diagram of digestive system on the back*

In brighter news, we have a wireless printer which works sometimes. Sadly, because of childproofing the wireless router, it's stored on top of a wardrobe and I almost came a cropper trying to reboot it today, so we shall have to figure something else out soon. I love being able to print things out whenever I want, though, so I am determined to get it sorted.

And we recently got a copy of The Cat in Numberland and both children enjoyed it so much, as a bedtime story, that as soon as it was finished they asked for it again, immediately. I haven't been privileged to partake of most of the readings, because bedtime is a Daddy thing, but I heard three chapters at various times and they seemed excellent to me. Emer is "just" following the story and Linnea is delighted with More Stuff About Infinity (and also, incidentally, spent three days unable to count past ten, for her own reasons).

We absolutely have to get Linnea to the Science Museum as soon as I can handle a trip of that magnitude. I should look up whether one can borrow a wheelchair while there, actually, as one can at Kew.

She got a copy of Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger and won't let us read it aloud to her yet. She is "looking at the pictures, leave me alone" by herself, first.

Gender conformity

My eldest is all about the pink at the moment... and wants her hair buzzed off with the clippers. The only downside is that some people will think she's a boy sometimes, which makes her blink back tears. She is going away to think about it.

She considered wearing dresses all the time, but decided she would get cold and sometimes not be able to climb things, which wouldn't work for her. And of course if she waits until puberty, her new body shape will probably mean no-one thinks she's a boy even if her hair is shorter than mine.

Meanwhile, she might settle for a very very short bob, much shorter than she has now.

I'm not totally clear on why it's so important to her, but I do remember my little sister having a gorgeous feminine pixie cut (because her face was so finely structured that my mother couldn't resist the aesthetic appeal of it), and lots of people thought she was a boy and it upset her hugely. I never had short hair until after my second baby was born, so I can't really compare my own experiences, but I don't think I'd have minded being mistaken for a boy so much.

It's her head, and her gender-identity, so I'm staying as far out of it as I can; she wants two things which she isn't sure she can have at once, and will have to decide.

Being six may not be as easy as she'd hoped.

Accepting the concept of Death

We have had a very educational few days - terraforming, biodomes, space travel, rockets, fuels, gravity, spacesuits, diving suits, desert plants, evolution, infinity, the lot.

Because my eldest child, who is almost six, has fully and completely grasped the implications of DEATH. It is unacceptable to her, and she insists that humanity figure out a way to solve the problem - and she has also latched on to the problem of a population without death, which can easily be solved with interplanetary colonisation, you see.

But under all the talk of space, which we are partially doing because we as adults find it easier to cope with than addressing her actual fears, because we are cowards, there is the basic horror of death.

And I don't know what to tell her. Because she knows what death is, and doesn't accept it.

Why home educate?

For some reason, I never published this when I wrote it in September. Wonder why not?

Short answers: I think it's a good idea. I think it's the best thing for my children. It's interesting. Everyone seems to like it. I don't think school (the only realistic alternative) would be good for my children right now.

Longer answers: When I was six I spent a lot of time very confused and unhappy about the fact that school kept us all in same-age groups, more or less, doing much the same things at very similar levels, in large groups, with almost no unsupervised or unstructured time. Also, I was bored silly. I asked my mother for an explanation and she wasn't able to give one which was acceptable to me, though eventually she agreed that once school was over I was unlikely to find myself in such a situation again, because offices, laboratories, factories,and most other workplaces are pretty mixed both in age and in activity, so I just had to get through school. Things were easier after that.

I spent some time in a school with mixed-age classrooms, a one- or two-teacher school, and that was less alienating and made it much easier to learn things, but still not quite right. The large large groups thing was probably part of it.

When I was about eight I met a home-educated child who had her very own donkey to ride around on. Her name was, I think, Sophia, and she was American, or her mother was, and we played a lot together for a while. She taught me to scramble eggs and make chamomile tea from fresh flowers, and had her very own donkey. Which was hers. So jealous.

I don't think I thought much about home education after that for a few years, but my mother periodically mentioned Máire Mullarney approvingly and assured me that school was not the pinnacle and highlight of my life and that if I waited it out things woudl get better, which they did, which was a relief.

Then later on I was planning babies and buying a house with my partner, and we were pleased to find an area with LOTS of schools to choose from.

But gradually, as I thought of it more and more, and the first baby was actually born, I liked the idea (of automatically sending them to school and hoping to continually firefight problems as they arose, through joining groups and committees and talking to teachers and principals and changing schools as necessary) less and less. I found various people living in my computer and read a lot. And decided that since what we were doing right now seemed to work, I'd change my default - instead of the default option being to change everything, from who we socialised with to what time we got up in the morning to what we did all day, the default is now to keep calm and carry on as normal, with the option of doing something else if that seems like a better idea at any point.

Linnea does best in a totally unstructured, unpressured environment where she can do things at exactly her own pace as and when she pleases - or a totally new environment with totally new adults. At least, she has until now, but she's only just five and a half, so things will change, I'm sure. Emer is a bit easier to handle, because she can take suggestion and instruction even from adults she actually knows. And she doesn't mind being praised half as much.

I like being able to accommodate their ever-changing physical needs. Children need more sleep, or less sleep, or more rest, or more running around, in hugely varying amounts from day to day, depending on the weather or what they're learning or whatever. I like not having to get anyone out into the rain in the dark to walk to school in the middle of winter. I like their ability to just do things, without any adults interfering or knowing what they're doing, and suddenly they appear with Something Finished, sometimes even with evidence, happy with what they've achieved.

I like that their friends are aged 1 year to 8 years old, if you don't count their grown-up friends. I like it when they teach grown-ups things.

It's hard to know what they like or dislike because they are young enough that their personal basis for comparison is meaninglessly small. But they are happy.

Plants!

I never thought I'd manage to grow anything at all; all my pre-child attempts ended in brown, crispy failure with moldy compost at the base. But so far we're doing quite well:

These are the tomatoes we planted a while ago; they are growing all the time! We had a go at separating one pot into three little pots, which might have worked better without the children's help, but what's the point of that? You can also see the edge of the shop-bought chives and my basil, which seems to be growing from seed just like the seed-packet said it would.

This is the avocado we started from seed last year sometime. We thought it had died, over the winter, but moved it from the dark kitchen windowsill to the front room where everything else is, and it's putting forth new growth just as though it didn't intend to crumble. The hardest part is not overwatering it, now, I think.

And these are outside - they are probably the radishes Linnea planted, but I don't know for sure, because I've never grown radishes that I can remember.

I'm pretty sure these are hyacinths. We didn't plant them, but they have obligingly come up anyway, and make us believe it might be Spring. Maybe.

And I will never get the hang of Blogger's image stuff, but I will also never get the motivation to figure out a useful alternative. I kind of miss having our own server and writing my own blogging software. But we don't have that kind of free time any more...

OK, I listened to the radio this morning, I couldn't help it.

Tip for Graham Badman: Basic sums:

Of the entire UK population, 0.2% of children are known to Social Services.

Within that entire UK population, there are all the Elective Home Educating families, of whom 50% are known to the authorities as Elective Home Educating Families and 50% are not known.

Of the 50% of EHE children who are known to the authorities, 0.4% are known to Social Services.

Of the 50% of EHE children who are NOT known to the authorities, none are known to Social Services (because any who ARE known to Social Services are automatically added to the list of children known to the authorities, ie the first group of 50%).

Therefore, of the entire population of EHE children, 0.2% are known to Social Services, just like everyone else.

Making Art

Linnea wanted a photo taken of this. It is apparently Jay from the Green Balloon Club, with spiky hair and glasses. I hope the poor lad never finds out.

This is Linnea's pre-dinner artwork; tortilla with cucumber rain, sweetcorn sunshine, ginormous butterfly and a sailing boat.

And this is a house with enclosed garden, made with the new Geomag stuff, including an aerial so that the house can connect to the wireless internet.

Monday

Today started with the usual post-weekend clearout. The housework took about three hours, all told. Then the children did some painting and I had some tea. And then we did some sums, and started listening to Peter and the Wolf until it got too scary, and now they're dancing to various classical CDs, apparently doing "ballet."

Oh, and they ate a lot of chives, because the pot is on the table they use for sums and things.

The trouble is, I've forgotten what else they've done. Some CBeebies website stuff. Some drawing and colouring. Paint-mixing. Tidying up and bedmaking. Making stuff from cardboard boxes.

Is there a way to remember everything they do in a day? Assuming I have a way of figuring out WHAT they are doing? Fairly often at least one of them is doing something I don't know about.

Though sometimes I find out later, I suppose. With squidge.

Reading progress

Linnea read something today she found so funny she couldn't stop laughing. Peter and Jane again; "Here you are, Jane. This is some water for you."

It really needs an illustration to give the full effect. For the first time, Peter and Jane show some normal human traits. Yay.

(Halfway through book 2a, which we have read one word at a time previously, but apparently not read for content).

Emer is starting to think about learning to read and write. She asks me to spell things and tries to write them down, but needs some reminders of some of the letters. I need to find the camera and its cable so I can photograph the post-it note on which she wrote my name today (so that I can have a tick-chart; unlike Linnea, Emer ADORES tick charts and wants one for every event in her life. This is going to make my life so much easier; hurrah for bribery and the reward system!).

They need to get over their love of anatomy, though, because they're frightening other children by forcibly showing them books with lots of diagrams of internal organs and skellingtons and the nervous system and so on. Uhoh.

And Emer is a little confused about the unborn baby's relationship with food. It prevents me from eating as much as I used to at a sitting, so perhaps the baby is feeding me through the special tube in its bellybutton? I assume she will eventually accept that this is not actually true, but I couldn't persuade her today.

But what about me?!

My children simply love being at home. They are often too busy to go out. In fact, their social lives are pretty lively - they seem to see different groups of children three or four times a week - so I can kind of see their point.

But actually, I'd rather go out a bit more than we do, for my own amusement. If only they enjoyed being DRESSED a bit more. At the moment they can stymie me by just stripping off and refusing to get dressed again; in summer I could walk out the front door anyway, but in this weather it's not really plausible!

Roll on Spring.

(The tomato sprouts are up to an INCH high now, I'm shocked. The children are kind of pleased their plants are higher than my plants. But they don't want to put shoes on and check outside to see how the radishes are doing).

And I'm also thrilled that Emer has decided she wants to learn to read. I have no idea whether she IS learning to read, or just to recite, but she's enjoying whatever it is she's doing, and I doubt it's harming her. It's very cute and a lot of fun.

Green fingers, black fingernails

My basil, growing from seed. I never had potplants growing up - we didn't live in that kind of household - and my record with them since has been fairly uniformly poor. I once got a spiderplant as a gift and forgot about it; weeks later I found it still sitting in its plastic carrier bag stuffed under a bookcase, making little spiderplant babies. I potted it up and it promptly keeled over and died. Then we moved to a house with a garden and I accidentally eradicated the mint. I kept the strawberries going a bit longer - I like strawberries - but they're pretty much gone now too.

So this year we bought some seeds at 3 packs for a £1. I got Basil, Emer got Tomato, and Linnea got Radish. The day I remembered where the plant pots and compost were, we had lost the pack of radish seeds, so they both planted tomatoes. The larger pot is Linnea's because Emer really liked the little pot. This is how sprouted they were nine days after planting, that is, yesterday.

And this is Emer's pot, which was somewhat stirred during the planting phase, which may or may not have an effect. Same day, though.

My basil ten whole days after planting. I'm pretty excited - it didn't die in the night!

Emer's tomato is about 3mm longer than it was yesterday but still very difficult to get a photo of. There might be another seed thinking about growing, too.

And Linnea's tomatoes are curling up in little sprouts very nicely! Emer was delighted by the little springs and wanted to touch them...

So I warned her to be gentle, and she touched one sprout in each pot very carefully. In this you can also see the pot of supermarket basil I have failed to kill over more than two months, and the little aloe vera we were given on Friday at ERAPA and have still not slaughtered. Part of this involves banning the children from watering anything unsupervised ever, but I can live with that.

I do really think that living with potplants and deliberately growing things hugely enriches people's lives, but I don't know how well I'm going to do at it. I don't enjoy the gardening parts at all, just the living with growing things parts - I'd be almost as happy (though less smug) if someone else had kept my basil alive all this time, for example.

We shall see. The children do seem to enjoy the dirt and sowing parts.

Clutter, chaos, binning and binding

We have been trying, for, um, easily eight years, to declutter our small, overcrowded house. We're having a measure of success, too. But I think I accidentally got rid of our ringbinder mountain and possibly also the plastic pockets lake, and now I want them so that I can file the kids' work away in case I'm ever called on to have some.

This is relevant today because they both drew lovely diagrams on a little human figure outline I got ages ago when one of them wanted to draw clothing. Emer did a mouth, a line to show where food goes, a tummy, and a HUGE STRIPE to indicate ENORMOUS RAPID GROWTH, which is what happens when you eat food, you see. Possibly this is only cute if you are her mother, I dunno. Linnea did nose, and lungs. Not sure why. Anyway, there's those, and the amazing map Linnea did a while ago as part of her passport, and also some completed maths worksheets (though Linnea has also recently taken to doing them in her exercise book (I always want to say copybook) and also she ticks the answers off herself, no longer needing me to do that bit). So there's a little stack of Demonstrable Learning Stuff type stuff and if I don't put it somewhere I'll lose it.

Perhaps I should go into the attic and dig around up there, see what I find.

Also, the crank-operated pencil sharpener works brilliantly as far as the children are concerned, and if we could only stop smashing the sellotape dispenser that would too. It's really, really heavy, but the axle is prone to breaking. Oh - and hole punches are addictive. I had forgotten that, but of course I remember now... Not as addictive as the feeling of cutting one's own hair with nailscissors, though, as far as I recall. The scissors are still mainly out of unsupervised reach.

Sex Education (Because it's quite separate)

First, I'm not even THINKING about how they worked out that the Khyra case says something - anything - about home ed, rather than about the failure of social services to continue to monitor and protect known at-risk children. But I'm not surprised; I read the Badman review, after all, and it was very difficult to read through the disconnected illogic of it all, even if I had been able to assume that the research referred to existed or was accurately represented.

What I am thinking of is the way sexual and reproductive education is separated out from the rest of health and anatomy education, which I think is a Bad Idea(tm). A while ago my children specifically wanted to find out more about Where Babies Come From, so I had a look - we already had Grey's Anatomy and some written specifically for very young children, but that wasn't what they had in mind. So I looked in all the local shops and failed miserably. I also failed at the library. I found lots of books about the body but they all just glossed over the whole Dirty In Yer Pants Bit.

In the end, a friend sent us a copy of a text used in Irish primary schools, funded not by the Irish education system but by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency; in general, school texts aren't state-funded in that system anyway. The PDF is here. We really likde it - the drawings were clear, the text was unambiguous and not in the least coy, it was very matter of fact and normal.

Then recently they wanted some books about the body in general. Those were easier to find, and I asked for recommendations, and bought two Usborne books in the end - See Inside Your Body and First Encyclopaedia of the Human Body. The first book is aimed at younger children and has no reference to reproduction at all. The second book shows the female internal reproductive organs and a really nice ultrasound of a uterus with a fetus in it. Neither book has even a hint of a smidge of a genital - you know, the bit children can actually see on their own bodies and wonder which bits are what about.

My own children went through phases - we have diagrams of eyeballs on the wall by the stairs, had huge drawings of poo and teeth with wiggly tubes between them, etc. All that is normal. But it's still unusual (not, I would say, abnormal!) that they spend twenty minutes or more contemplating the diagram of their genitals in the Busy Bodies book and some visitors are embarrassed to read it to them when asked -- for the elderly embarrassed I've started asking the children not to ask them.

I can't help wondering what damage it does as a whole society, this othering of a huge part of our bodies and our lives. Though perhaps something's working, since the UK's teenage pregnancy rate is apparently down almost 4%.

School Start Dates

My eldest child became of Compulsory School Age when she was 5 years and 4 months old. So the forms arrived to apply for her school place recommending she start aged 4 years and 4 months, in reception, which was when almost all her friends did. My next child is therefore due to start school, according to the recommendations, when she is 4 years and 2 weeks old.

She's not legally obliged to until 5 years 2 weeks, of course.

I've been avoiding reading a lot of the politics and recent revelations about how badly the current system is failing very young children, because it doesn't affect me, but today I happened to see a few articles about it (while my children were busy being first Real Mammoths, then Kittens, and at one point Mothers, which involved a lot of dancing and singing) and I realised that among other things, I am comparing my success as a home educating parent against my academic achievements at [a given child's age]. This is totally unreasonable, because neither of my children are me. Though uncannily like in short-tempered moments, perhaps. But definitely not me, nonetheless.

And so in real life, it's quite likely that they are no better and no worse at whatever it is that gets measured than the children who have been in school all this time. Certainly when their school-friends meet up and they compare abilities I haven't noticed my children losing any My Talent's Bigger Than Your Talent competitions. And they are world-class Real Furry Mammoths.

Perhaps I can, now that the house is tidier again, take some deep breaths, write up a report or two for my own comfort and convenience ("For your own comfort and convenience please do not sit on the grass," etc) and maybe get a couple of folders to store their work or copies thereof. And then I can go back to normal again and do the stuff we want to do. We have a lot of cash register roll to colour in, when I find somewhere selling it one roll at a time.

Cowardy custard

Well, I've decided - I'm going to do as much as I can to make sure my children do stuff I can recognise as school-type learning (literacy, numeracy) without actually coercing them. I had a look at the local government website Education section recently and it's nothing like as friendly as it used to be; in places it is outright hostile to home ed and I just don't have the courage to keep going as we were.

Luckily this coincides with a newfound willingness on the part of the school-age child to do work which is recognisably work. And a sudden interest in tick-lists and sticker charts.

But I don't want to get into the fight. I am very conscious that if we are inspected and found wanting, I have very little formal education of my own to wave at people - just a (readily accessible to the relevant authorities) history of mental illness and dysfunctional family. The website actually claims that there are studies and research showing that children not in school are at greater risk of abuse, so presumably they are working from the Badman recommendations, which is where that information lurks (unless there ARE such studies? anyone?) and advises people on what signs to look for and how to anonymously report someone for not having their children in school.

I wish I had the kind of background that made me confident I could just speak my piece about my motivations and abilities and my children's well-being and best interests clearly and be actually heard, but I don't. I'm not in a very low position here, but I'm not in as strong a position as a lot of people I know, and I'm conscious of that.

So I'm record-keeping, instead. Which isn't something I wanted to feel obliged to do.

Yay, fear.

Still, so far I don't think the children are wise to me...

Home School Table

It's a named table. "Mummy, I want a sandwich to eat at homeschool," said Emer. I thought it was part of a game. But no, she wanted to eat while looking out the front window.

However, it's also where they like to do maths worksheets and dot-to-dots and puzzles and drawing. The light is much better than in the dining room. So I have a little basket of stuff nearby, to make it all easier. The current Peter and Jane books, some folders of worksheets of various kinds, some exercise books, workbooks. If they sit down to do it at all, Linnea does it for between one and two hours, which seems like rather a lot to me. I may be biased.

Linnea has been reading far fewer pages-with-new-words and putting a lot more into reading with inflection and expression. Today for the first time she managed to read three pages (um, something like 15 words a page, at a guess) without needing to repeat herself at all; she was happy that she'd got the sense right first go.

I, speaking as the one who listened to many many repeats of every-bloody-thing the other day, was delighted.

Also, she's going back to the parts of old maths worksheets she found "boring" and doing them, for whatever reason. That's good too. I like whole pages to be filled before I throw them away. In fact, I'm running low on good websites for worksheets and dot-to-dots and mazes and things. I may have to buy books of them instead.

Other recent highlights include "Mummy, let's play Banks!" wherein I had an account at a bank which would only accept deposits in square numbers and only allow withdrawals of funds already in my account, in bank-determined numbers, and Emer illustrating things from the Book of a Thousand Poems (oddly, although I have a ton of poetry and a ton of children's books, I have limited books of excellent children's poetry, and the excellent one I DO have has no illustrations at all, which may be an advantage).

I need to persuade the children that inside the house is both bad and boring, so that I can go to a big shop and buy stuff. We have a good pencil-sharpener now, but I still need a sellotape dispenser and some nice tape for it (for some reason we only have awful stickytape in the house at the moment, all yellow and inclined to shred) and big sheets of card to mount pictures on and things. I'd like a good look at some Usborne books too, body books and astronomy mainly.

Today's most difficult question was "Why does big shops opening mean little ones close? Tesco is the biggest supermarket we know," rapidly followed by "Can't the little shop owners all work in Tesco?" I'm open to further ideas on how I should have answered that.

Oh, and there's always "Why doesn't that word have E for Emer?" but the answer to that is "Because it's a pointless and inferior word, my dear, and you must disregard it."

Reeling and writhing and fainting in coils

We got a new table. Before it was in place, Linnea started opening the leaves and shouting "Let's play Home School!" Emer has decided Home School is the name of the table, like Dining Table for the other one. Linnea likes to sit at the table and do things which she thinks are schooly, often including telling Emer what to do. It's all most bizarre.

And Peter and Jane are lovely, but it doesn't matter how much inflection you use or where, they are not a fun read after the twentieth repeat. Unless you're five.

What do they know?

I don't like testing the children, but I do it anyway, because I am deeply insecure about not actually knowing what they know.

So I checked Emer's actual ability to count today, and she's got it - not recitation, but symbols representing quantities, adding one to get the next number, and so on. So that's ok. She is fuzzy on numbers greater than five - she used to be able to recite quite high, but I think linking them to concrete countable objects meant reciting didn't work any more.

Linnea still can't read but nonetheless read some Calvin and Hobbes aloud the other day. I'm finding it all incredibly frustrating, but my current tactic is to leave her to it, keep doing the Peter and Jane when she wants to, and let her watch her phonics DVDs as much as she likes.

Emer isn't much into writing or letters and Linnea has no current interest in numbers for their own sake. That's ok.

But sometimes I wish I had a performing seal or two in the family. I'd like, you know, an academic show-off. I'd know where I stood.

Picture!

Linnea knocked this collage together this morning to make me feel better. There are a few more, but she spent over 20 minutes on this one so it's the most impressive to my mind. I must work out how to solve the problem of her needing an adult to help find the end of the tape. Better tape?