Almost midnight

I'd like, after the slog of illness, Christmas, New Year, more illness, DIY, etc, to get back into blogging.

I thought I'd start by getting a little more up to date.

This week, we started Monday by doing Bananagrams before breakfast; the seven-year-old (L) mainly sees words I don't, and vice versa, and the five-year-old (E) was fascinated by how many words she could make by going through the alphabet and sticking each letter in front of AT. It all petered out before I won, which was good.

We did some sewing. It turns out that E is a natural at cross-stitch. She also made a dress for a wooden spoon doll, hemmed and all. I sewed a sort of dreadful buttonhole around the neckhole, which may or may not stop it from fraying. I can't tell. I'm not a good sewer (er...)

We made a menu for their café, where they priced things very oddly, especially E. Thirty cupcakes for the cost of one piece of cake, whole raw peppers on the menu, that sort of thing. But it depended on what we had in the play food baskets, apparently, and that was that.

In the afternoon E invited N from two doors down over to play, and they played separately but in the same room for a longish time. Meanwhile L was doing jigsaws - she's sticking to really, really easy ones, and I'm not sure what she's doing with them, but it involves telling stories. L has grandiose animation feature film plans. We Shall See; she has roped an adult friend in to help, so you never know what could happen.

Today we got up and tidied frantically, which ended up being great. E got breakfast out for us, which was lovely because looking at the kitchen before I tidied it made me feel completely stopped. The children made lunch (potato salad and tuna sandwiches) and sort of cleared up afterwards. They got out the air-drying clay to make iceberg models (?!) and later did a lot with Lego. There was reading. And writing. I can't remember which day they spent ages with L teaching E how to write "POO-BUMS" but it took ages and the lesson, well, stuck.

Part of our evening pickup involves gathering all the piles of paper, sorting them into used and unused, and returning the unused to the paper drawer. I'm not sure how long this will continue before I get completely tired of it. We did find E's map of the Pacific ring, so that was nice.

And the 18-month-old (almost)? She's fab. She's talking, more and more, though I don't think many people other than me and the other two children understand her, most of the time. She dances. She hides and makes jokes. She's very good at stacking toys and shapesorters. She, like her sisters before her, likes to be naked and takes all her clothes off at every opportunity, leading to... well, I'm glad we replaced the carpets with laminate. Very glad.

And I'm still learning huge amounts. If I could learn how to go to bed at a sensible time and get enough sleep, instead of Internet FOREVER, I'd be golden.

Feels unremarkable

We haven't done much remarkable lately. The five-year-old is learning to read, fairly organically. The seven-year-old is reading voraciously, a mixture of Enid Blyton and non-fiction and things she finds lying around. The one-year-old can stand on tiptoe and almost jump.

Weirdly, I haven't read to the older two for AGES. I'd like to, but I am not sure how to invite them to join me; they are always so BUSY. We've done a bit of cooking together, housework, adding up and measuring. I've been teaching the eldest the tricks of spelling and mental arithmetic, mainly when I'm too busy to go and help her "properly" but it all seems to help.

Biology continues to fascinate. I guess just having a body is interesting in itself. Certainly the one-year-old likes getting her clothes out of the way and having a good explore.

They've been interested to see how potplants revive when watered after a prolonged period of neglect. And how mould grows in damp places. Educational housework. Heh.

Photos instead of a post

Painting on big boards with acrylics, to make a playhouse / room divider. This is the door.

We made a 12-hour train-and-ferry journey and had to bring the water bottles and tea stirrers all the way home because as soon as the tea stirrers were spotted, the five-year-old wanted to make this. With enough stickytape, she can make ANYTHING.

Reading goggles. Right.

My Pals Are Here

We went out today, on a train, only an hour late. It has been difficult to go out for ages now, so I was pleased we managed it. No-one had any kind of major meltdown, though because it was to a new place no-one was very sociable either. It won't be new next time, so that's ok.

And then we came home and Linnea started in on My Pals Are Here 1B (workbook part 2). She seems to be enjoying it.

On the way home from our trip out we saw a proper classic toadstool, with a hemispherical red top covered in little white spots. Sadly, my phone is dead and I forgot the old camera, so I took a very bad picture with my ancient phone and it's not good enough to upload. But it was lovely to see anyway.

Stars

Last night was the end of a very hot day - 29C or so, the first of October! And it was a cloudless night, so at bedtime, instead of sending everyone to bed, we brought them out for a walk around the block and into the (dark, unlit) playground. I actually think we'd have seen more stars from our back garden but it wouldn't have been as exciting.

We saw patterns, some of which we could name and some we couldn't; the children saw their own patterns, and then Linnea lay on the ground and just looked, until she couldn't any more, and gave up. There's something overwhelming about a sky full of stars, how far away they are and how many there are and how clearly we seem to be able to see them - when actually what we see isn't anything like what's really there, the freezing expanses and the burning masses and the warm summer wind settling on our bare skin while we're down on the dewy grass. The juxtaposition is too much.

So today we bought a diary and she's writing one-word entries only about the happy things in each day.

Clutter

(For The Friday Club)

I've been actively decluttering since before the first baby was born to this house.

You can't tell.

But actually, you can, if you used to know what it looked like before. Two adults filled three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a garden shed, and still kept a lot of stuff up in the attic. Now we are two adults and three children, and we have two bedrooms for family use, and a spare room for guests which has a place (only one, but a place) for them to unpack their stuff, if there isn't much stuff, and more room to move in the downstairs rooms than we used to.

It's partially because children NEED more space to move. Their time at home isn't spent sitting still in their house doing things, it's spent moving around their house doing things. They need space to run and dance and spread stuff out on the floor to glue, and enough room to open the front of the dollhouse, and they also need the same sleeping and wardrobe space the adults need, more or less.

So we have gradually decluttered, while never feeling in the least minimalist. We found FLYlady very helpful, if also very enraging, and FreeCycle (now Freegle) has also helped a lot -- we even decluttered the garden shed that way, and someone came to disassemble it. Someone with a phobia of spiders, unfortunately; I helped chase the big ones away. Now the playhouse lives on the foundations the shed used to rest on, and we have a small garden storage cupboard for all the other stuff - and we're about to get an even smaller one, and get rid of even more things. We don't garden enough to need proper grownup gardening kit.

We even got rid of books. Hundreds of books. Metres and metres of books. We went through a phase of leaving a box of books out on the footpath most weekends, a few years ago. Now we've filled the space back up with picture books, encyclopaedias, activity books, cookbooks, poetry books... children's books.

IKEA helps a lot. I might make a separate home-educating-the-IKEA-way post at some point. It's a bit silly how much IKEA stuff we have specifically for dealing with home ed kit.

We got an LCD type TV after reading about several children who were crushed by falling televisions, usually at Christmas; our old TV was a bought-in-his-youth one and weighed slightly more than he does, or as much as I did at the height of my most ginormous pregnancies. That freed up space in the room, and covering it with a big painting made it look visually freer, too.

Clothes with years of wear in them yet are harder. A lot of our clothes aren't quite good enough for a charity shop to sell, but much too good to get rid of. And don't fit. This is particularly true of the kids' clothes, but we have a sort of system of filing them in the attic in boxes labelled by age, and if I ever decide I've finished having babies, I'll give them away (and have another, I assume; that's how it usually works, isn't it?). We do haul them out as the younger two grow into them.

Another big clutter is artwork. The children's artwork is almost impossible to part with. Mine I can just sell or give away, but theirs... it's more difficult. The grandparent on one side has a total of 11 grandchildren, and a limited capacity to treasure art forever and ever and ever, and on the other side they like to take maybe two or three pieces every so often. That's not enough. We are still left with cases and boxes and envelopes of art, ranging from the magnificent to the developmentally interesting. I have a soft spot for keeping originals, too. How do I teach my heart to part with children's art?

And on that note I must depart. In a cart. Don't start...

Not much to blog about

We've had a good time lately. We did lots with fractions - L has been adding fractions in her head for a while without being clear on how she did it, and we did it on paper so she could see what was going on. We finally made it back to the library and got some new books, and somewhere there's a diagram of clementine segment skins under a microscope. Pocketmoney maths is big but complicated.

And we had haircuts, to cover up the look of the most recent self-cutting attempts. I don't much mind them cutting their own hair, any more; my biggest objection was when one of them cut the other's hair, but since I cut my own hair, and theirs, I don't care much if they do it too.

But it's nice that I didn't have to, this time. And they all enjoyed the unaccustomed use of a hairdryer.

For SCIENCE

We did an oil-and-water experiment today. The children wanted to do something a bit structured, so we got the balance, found a couple of identical cups and weighed them, and poured equal volumes of oil and water into each one. Then we weighed them. Then we poured them together and mixed them up. And put a lid on and turned it over. And dyed it with food colouring. And got very excited about drawing pictures about it. And...

It was all such a success that we did the thing I read on Patch of Puddles about bowls of hot, body temperature, and cold water. They are still doing that, as far as I know; I have fled the splash zone myself.

Hunter gathered

The conkers were from the park and the figs are from the end of our road. We are assuming it's a fig tree; we haven't asked the homeowner whose tree it is, but online searches and asking friends seems to show it most likely is. We're not going to try eating them, though.

Stuff grows. This is constantly amazing to us.

Tomato plants

Emer is loving this - we eat blackberries and nasturtium petals straight away in the garden, but we bring orange tomatoes into the house and leave them on the kitchen windowsill to riped, and then we eat them with actual real live meals. Well, not live meals. But anyway. Yesterday we served some up in salad for her grandparents.

I call them "Emer's tomatoes" because she helped plant and water them and took a general interest in growing things, this year. We're all very impressed with how much better tomato plants did in their current location than in the previous ones we tried. We'll probably plant them there again next year, possible in the cold frame which we can just remove, unless I can figure out some way of building a greenhouse onto the end of the little playhouse.

Comma

I woke up grumpy today. Then I got grumpier, because there was water in the balance, under a teatowel, which spilt on the laptop. Then I got even grumpier because of all the poo I had to clean up.

Everything is a learning opportunity, however, and at lunchtime I had to write up the following sentences to explain what I'd just saidshouted:

I will probably be a lot nicer after I have eaten Linnea.

I will probably be a lot nicer after I have eaten, Linnea.

Turns out Linnea already knew the difference and could read them properly inflected, but she appreciated the joke, and it cheered us all up.

Briefly, because my headache didn't go away and I still had flat-pack to assemble. But.

Back to school

I almost got up and started in on housework this morning, but I heard the children playing a complicated game downstairs and forced myself to stay in bed until 10am. I drank my coffee and listened to the radio, though I can't now say what was on it, and re-read a Georgette Heyer very slowly. Then I got up and did housework and child-cleaning and got them out to storytime at the library and so on.

It turns out that the game they were playing this morning, and again after dinner this evening, was Homeschool, and they want me to correct their homework in the morning.

Rightio so.

Courgette

The courgette isn't very big but if you click on the second picture you'll see that the plant all but dwarfs the apple tree... Emer is very proud and already looking forward to chopping them up!

From Who teaches whom?

New term! September! New year! In an alternate universe, Linnea is in something like Year Three, I think, and Emer is starting Year One. Actually, they are nothing of the kind, but it sometimes helps to remember what we'd be doing if they were, sometimes. Linnea recently read her first Young Adult novel - a friend had just finished Anna Carey's The Real Rebecca and was going to lend it to me, but Linnea got there first. She really, really enjoyed it, and although it took her longer to read than most of her books - that is, more than one sitting - she persevered over little bursts of reading over several days, and finished it all. She hasn't told me what it's about or what about it she enjoyed, but she kept going back for more and wants us to buy it. Emer is getting more and more like a pre-reader, though I may have the technical terms wrong. She is reading some words and can recognise all the letters and write some things, but isn't reading sentences or anything yet. I've offered to do regular reading practice with her but she's not interested. Astrid can walk, and says all SORTS of things which we know are real words, and today Rob saw her spearing pasta with a fork and feeding herself with it. So that's nice. I wonder what we'll do this year?

Ramona Forever!

Linnea and I are having a wonderful time. I mean, she's ill, and on antibiotics which mean we have to seriously schedule her eating opportunities, but she found a Ramona book (Beverly Cleary) and liked it, so I've been ordering the rest from Abebooks and when they arrive we pounce on them, argue over who gets to read it first, talk about them - it's a wonderful, wonderful experience.

She also sat with me today to watch a signed story and we both loved it.

And she has been learning, of her own accord and with great determination, to do the laundry. Sorting loads is still tricky - we had to do a colour-run remover session yesterday. But even so.

Same ole same ole

Not a lot happens, in home education. We live our lives. We got a new toy - Fraction Cubes - and Linnea is learning to add fractions with more accuracy than she had before. We have been drawing plans of the upstairs of our house, so that we are ready for the Great Bedroom Shift, when we rearrange so that what was planned as a two-adult bedroom arrangement is turned into a two-adults-and-three-children arrangement, rather than a series of bodge jobs, as it has been.

Managing change creatively is one of my biggest challenges. Linnea resists change, hard, and is upset and alarmed by it, pretty often. Emer is learning this from her, though it's not as serious, it's just mimicry. So things like getting them to help draw up the plans on A2 paper with oil pastels can make a huge difference. As can doing the change gradually and where they can see every stage of it.

We started today, by getting rid of things to make space. It went ok.

New resources!

I just discovered Khan Academy. Given that the seven-year-old spent today wandering around saying stuff like "I want to do number bonds!" and has been craving what I think of as tedious repetition in maths, this is brilliant. One grows tired of setting these things oneself and for some reason long sheets with dozens of exercises on a page don't appeal to her, she wants dozens of exercises but no more than three to a page, if you see what I mean.

Emer found it dull, though. Emer, in fact, has been wondering whether she might like to start school. We Shall See. Now that Linnea is getting actual sleep almost every night, instead of having prolonged anxiety attacks, or attacks of anxiety, rather, we have far more options available to us.

Emer's big thing of the day was reading to me. She read me almost all of a Big Bear, Little Bear book - she has it almost word-perfect, which makes me think she's genuinely reading some of the words as memory-joggers. I hassled and harassed her big sister into performing "reading" for me, and it's lovely to see it happening naturally for Emer, now that I've learned to leave well alone.

And Astrid can take one step, and says "Up" and "Ush" (push) and all our names and everything.

Fractions

A quick check in conversation shows that both my children understand quite a bit about fractions. I must try to find some slices-of-pie toys for them to play with.

I'm not sure when it becomes important to bring manipulating fractions from conversation to working on paper. I remember learning how to do it at school but not what I already knew.

Tell me again why I think this is a good idea?

Days like today are so tiring. Things didn't go the way I wanted, and I repeatedly wished I could just hand at least one child over to someone else for six hours a day, to someone who was at least being PAID to be at odds with her. If I could get rid of all of them for a while, at least I could stare at the wall and drink tea.

But of course that's not the real right answer.

It's tough right now. I have two school-age children with very different social and academic needs and preferences, and balancing them is extremely challenging. They go through emotionally difficult patches at different times, to different intensity levels, and part of my job is to keep one child's traumas from having a serious impact on the other children, without neglecting the needs of the upset child, either. Meeting the enthusiasms of two people at once, while meeting the needs of an almost-toddler, is tricky, too. I'm not sure whether dealing with upset or interest is harder, actually. One of each is hardest, I think.

I'm beginning to think that I need to be more scheduled, because something in me says that a schedule makes everything easier. But will it? If I'm getting 5-6 hours sleep in 3-4 chunks on a good night, will scheduling my day really make that much difference?

I have a week of solo parenting coming up now. I might try to use the time to figure out where I'm going wrong.

I mustn't forget to bring the cardboard mobius strip in from the garden, either. It's huge, and it will rot in the rain.

TWO! Two reading children!

Aha! My eldest reads like crazy, though we are now beginning to keep up with her intake ok, but the middle child didn't much want to until lately. It turns out that in spite of not wanting to she can read the names of almost all the characters in the "Floppy books" (Oxford Reading Tree) and a few things like "a," "the," "and," etc.

I have bought a bunch of Key Stage materials so that I have some idea of what other people will expect them to know. Looks like they know pretty much most of it and I can see about filling in the gaps if that looks appropriate. We Shall See.

There's nothing in there about their areas of special interest, though, because I got the stuff in WHS. Human Anatomy, Sewing, Growing Food, and Cooking aren't part of the under-sevens tested standards, it seems - literacy and numeracy are the big ones.

Ah well. I've never been very big anyway.