We don’t follow any sort of curriculum here or even pay much heed to whether our life is broad and balanced, assuming it sort of has to be in order to work and as our education is merely living then it must be broad and balanced along the way really. I have friends who have schooled children and they have been talking about school reports this last week or so and some are pleased with their child’s report, some are surprised and some are adamant that the teacher has their child all wrong.
I’m slightly disconcerted to realise that Teeny would have completed her first year of school and finished reception and that Monster would have completed his first 3 years and finished Year 2. I’m not going to go and check the National Curriculum and compare them to where they’d be against that as really it couldn’t be less relevant to Monster and Teeny as individuals but I have been thinking about what we’ve been up to since September and how much they have both changed, developed, learned and achieved so I thought I’d do a bit of a round up of where they are both at.
Literacy -
Teeny does quite a bit of writing, she has been able to write her own name for some time and is explanding her repertoire to include other words she feels the need to be able to write down. I realised this weekend when she was asking how to spell words so she could fill in a form that she now knows the names, sounds and how to write most of the letters of the alphabet. She is reluctant to try reading so we haven’t pushed it at all but she is getting all the ground work in there and I could see it sneaking up on her almost that she can do it without realising. We read books every day and she is often to be found at bedtime surrounded by a huge pile of books, running her finger under the words and ‘reading’ them from memory. I suspect that like everything else Teeny has ever done when she decides she wants to read she’ll sit down and crack it in an afternoon 
Monster This has been the year that Monster has really started to read and write. Just in the last few weeks he has read aloud his first couple of books to me, he spots words and happily attempts to read them everywhere. Reading has become something he wants to be able to do, every step up to now has been leading him to this point; putting building blocks in place ready to all work together when the time was right and he needed to call all those little nuggets of skill and information together and read with them. He is practising that sort of emergent spelling a lot too, writing signs and notices and labelling his pictures. Letters are suddenly like jigsaw pieces for them and he can see than when he puts them in the right places great big pictures appear. I suspect that he is not that far from where he’d have been in school anyway with reading and writing as 7 doesn’t seem very old for it to suddenly all click. I confess that while outwardly calm about autonomy and reading it is something I am still relieved to see evidence of happening nonetheless and reading does seem to be the yardstick that so many people want to measure education by. I’d love to care less and have strived to never let Monster or Teeny feel any pressure to read any earlier than they are ready or willing to but it’s nice to see it happening both to validate our choices and because I see the whole world of reading and writing at their own convenience opening up to them like a great big window of opportunity to record their own words and read other peoples. Watching it happen naturally is like witnessing a child learn to speak all over again, that comprehension of language, of understanding and articulating is a joy to behold.
Numeracy
Teeny’s counting is a bit unreliable - sometimes it’s excellent and other times it is still fairly random. She does recognise written numbers and is able to manipulate numbers quite well in her head - I rarely see her using her fingers to add numbers together, she seems to have some mental abacus to use instead. She is also good at looking at a pile of things and knowing how many there are.
Monster - I can again see the benefit of two years along the line and how things leap along when you don’t realise they are happening. I can recall Monster at Teeny’s age now still being fairly wobbly getting through 13-19 when counting out loud. Now he can count indefinitely past hundreds and thousands. He knows about addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. He knows about fractions and can spot patterns in numbers. I was surprised quite recently to realise he could count in 2s, 5s and 10s quite confidently - actually so was he, he’d never tried until I asked him to in the context of something we were talking about. He has a good understanding of different mathematical concepts such as time, area, volume, length, weight, height, distance and different measurements although he wouldn’t necessarily know that is what they are! He knows about money and we have talked about concepts such as mortgages, loans, interest, percentages and even touched on things like ratios within contexts of conversation at the time.
This is where I start to fall apart somewhat at categorising stuff but I’ll have a go although there are inevitably overlaps; Monster and Teeny are at the same place with all the areas below simply because we are almost always together so whatever one experiences so does the other. There are times a conversation or idea or question comes from one of them but the chances are the other is around to listen to that too. It is often the case that Monster has a better grasp or understanding of something due to being that little bit older but it is as easy to talk about them together than replicate everything by noting them seperately.
Science A lot of science, particularly biology just comes about by talking. They both have a good grasp of human biology and thanks to The Human Body dvd an understanding of reproduction. They have a new baby cousin who they have charted the progress and growth of through their aunt’s pregnancy. They are aware of their own health and what contributes to keeping them healthy or not as the case may be. They know about healthy eating and exercise and fitness. They are able to self diagnose hunger, thirst, various ailments and the causes and treatments (I’ve just read that back and thought it sounds ridiculous but actually I know many much older children who still get grumpy or unpleasant and have to be reminded by their parent to eat something to restore their good humour!)
Chemistry is something that no self-respecting child isn’t an expert in anyway. Quite aside from the whole vinegar and bicarb volcano and ‘oh we home educate by doing baking -all that chemistry in simply baking a cake!’, I’m content that they learn sufficient for now in eating an ice cream before the sun melts it, mixing earth and water to get mud to a satisfactory consistency and too much bubble bath in the bath creates shoutable by Mummy volumes of froth! Actually of the very few obviously educational resources we have on our shelves it is probably science kits that we have the most of so they certainly aren’t lacking here.
Physics is something we have chatted about and force, energy, magnets and gravity are things they both can speak confidently about. We have had chats about inanimate and animate objects, energy transferance and other such intellectual sounding things simply by sitting in a traffic jam and watching the wind blow leaves about - earlier, easier to understand and probably something that will give them a far better grounding in actually understanding it than all that stuff about Newton I was terrified with at about 15!
Nature sort of deserves it’s own chunk really although I struggle with seperating it. I’ve talked before about the life cycle stuff we’ve done and again this spring we watched caterpillars hatch into butterflies, frogspawn not quite make it to froglets (although we know what they are supposed to do!) and even more excitingly than last year we now have second generation bantams. Our own bantams laid and hatched chicks, we incubated and hatched more and we’ve dealt with more deaths, some very graphic demonstrations of the ‘nature’ of parenthood in animals and survival of the fittest type issues, yet more examples of birth defects and shortened life expectancy. They have witnessed first hand the pecking order phenomena, mating and hopefully at some point in the next six months we’ll have third generation when our bantams grandchildren are hatched out 
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We have membership to RSPB and visit the local nature reserve at least once a month with other home educators. This has been a huge source of nature encounters for us including the once in a lifetime sighting (according to assembled adult nature lovers armed with cameras, video cameras and hushed tones) of male adders doing their dance / fight courtship ritual to decide on who would mate with nearby females. We’ve done pond dipping, grass sweeping, owl pellet dissecting and more at events at the nature reserve. We had a great couple of hours in the Spring tracking animals with a guide by spotting footprints, tracks, feathers, fur and poo which both the children learnt loads at.
We have also had annual membership to the local small animal zoo for the last year and made several visits to see the animals there which include serval, various monkeys, bats, rabbits, penguins, owls, flamingos, goats, pigs, cows and Teeny’s particular favourite - the lemurs. They have installed a ‘lemurland’ area which allows you to actually walk between the lemurs (with a strict no touching rule) and Teeny has spent ages chatting to the woman who runs the exhibit, learnt the names of several of the lemurs and varies facts about them over the year.
We have visited The British Wildlife Centre this year and had close encounters with all the wild animals in this country which include foxes, bagders, squirrels, grass snakes and adders, various mice and rats, hedgehogs, rabbits and hares, all of the stoat, weasel, polecat family, Scottish wildcats (we loved those ), deer, otters, various birds including peacocks, phesants, birds of prey and more. That was an excellent day out which we attended all the various keeper talks on and learnt loads about all the animals.
A works in (plant) nurseries so our garden is ever-full of flowers and vegetables at various stages of growth.This year we have also had crops of potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, peppers (sweet and chilli) and many, many herbs. Monster and Teeny have been involved at all levels of sowing, growing and reaping these. We also visit the pick your own farm most weeks during it’s open season of June to October and pick whatever looks good from it’s many varied crops over the summer.
We had a trip to The Eden Project recently which possibly fits best under this heading. We made our annual visit to the South of England Show where we looked at farm animals, talked to people about agriculture and farming, animal husbandry and more. We live a 15 minute walk from the beach and spent a lot of time there year round.
History, Geography and World Affairs
When you don’t categorise stuff it seems to overlap even more and it’s so hard to break down things into tidy areas. So I’m putting these two together as very often when Monster or Teeny ask about something we end up discussing how it used to be, how it came about etc. We are still at the stage where something like a timeline would be lost on them and ‘olden days’ could mean anything from cavemen to when I was a little girl but they are slowly filling all the gaps inbetween. Recent things that spring to mind have been monarchy and parliament or presidency - just today Monster asked me how he would go about becomming prime minister. We’ve talked about lines to the throne, which inevitably involved a foray into feminism and inequality. We have talked about how different countries have different ways of being run, how democracy works (or is supposed to work!), concepts such as freedom of speech, protests, lobbying and more.
Fairly recently we had a big discussion about terrorism, brought about by a reference to September 11th 2001. That expanded into getting books from the library to look at the event in more detail and we all learnt something about how history is recorded as a result.
We spent a lot of time in London earlier this year and did the rounds of various museums including the Bank of England museum, museum of childhood, Museum of London and more. We have also visited our local town’s museum several times, the nearest city museum and several local town museums. We also went to an exhibitions of photographs of or village over the last 100 years or so. These all helped fill in various gaps of both how the country is run (things like economy), how life was like in days gone by locally and nationally and highlighted certain key historical events like The Great Fire of London. Monster and Teeny’s Great Granny was evacuated during the war from London to Cornwall and their Grandad was a boy living in remote North Wales having evacuees arrive there so they get first hand accounts of things whenever trips down memory lane are taken at family gatherings.
Very recently we went to a great English Heritage two day event - Festival of History at Kelmarsh Hall. This was a great way to bring certain periods of history to life, watching reenactments (mostly of battles), talking to people ‘in character’ and walking round the settlements of how they would have lived in those periods.
We live near to a Roman Palace and have taken several trips there over the last year including special events such as signing up to be Roman soldiers and participating in tasks such as testing Roman food and drink, making Roman arts and crafts and more.
We joined the National Trust this year and have been making the most of free entrance to various castles and stately homes. Among others we have visited Bodiam Castle and Petworth House in Sussex, St Michaels Mount in Cornwall all of which have been eyeopeners to what these buildings have seen during their lives.
Both Monster and Teeny watch the news most days and are aware of world affairs, asking questions when they need more information and often squirreling away what they have heard for future reference.
Art and Creativity
This is easily the biggest part of Monster and Teeny’s daily pursuits. If they had to grab items to save in a fire I would guess it would be paper and pens. They are both, but particularly Monster driven to commit things to paper. It is obviously theraputic for Monster and he often expresses feelings and emotions through drawings. Aswell as basic pens and paper they have access to different art materials and use watercolours, oils, pastels, crayons, felt tips, charcoal, chalk, arcrylic and more including various papers and cards to work on. As mentioned in a previous post Monster had an art display up at both our local libraries to much critical acclaim. His latest project is a mural on his bedroom wall 
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They both enjoy modelling, clay, plasticine, even the wax coating from a babybel cheese if they get the chance We have also experimented with papier mache, mud, sand, melted wax crayons and most recently cut up coloured squares from paint colour charts to create mosaic pictures.
We visited the Tate Modern and the Tate in London this year so they could see various famous works of art on display and Monster has an interest in architecture which often comes up in conversations and has led to dashes to the top of tall carparks to view rooftops and towns from above.
Also much used are resources such as geomags, lego, foam blocks, marble run pieces and more to create buildings, landscapes and figures.
Physical Activity
Monster and Teeny are very active children. They have swimming lessons weekly but the rest of their exercise is simply in being children. They run, climb, jump, dash, leap, clamber, rush, skip, jog and bounce their way through every day really. They often spend half an hour with the TV turned up loud dancing to music, or running as fast as they can round the garden. Neither of them are particularly fussed about ballgames or other accessories although Monster is keen to crack riding a bike soon. We do a lot of walking, either as a means to getting somewhere local or for the sake of walking. Teeny is keen to do athletics but nowhere has sessions for under 7s but aside from that neither of them are interested in proper dance lessons, gymnastics or ball games or anything similar.
Away from home
Monster has been going to Badgers now for 2 years and gets loads out of it. Teeny joined him at the beginning of 2008 and has done two terms there now. They both get loads out if and it is a well run group with good ethics and ideas. They have a circle of friends there and get to do group activities and bounce ideas off each other, work on collaborative projects and generally have a great time for an hour and a half each week. Teeny also started Rainbows in January and that is also something she gets a lot out of. She has slowly but surely made friends there and although she probably enjoys the activities more than the social side of it it is another nice environment she spends time in each week.
Monster was attending Beavers but stopped at Easter and is not keen to join Cubs when he turns 8 in September. He is on the waiting list for Sea Scout cubs and is also on a waiting list for a drama and performing arts workshop which may begin in September. He is toying with the idea of various additional activities but may well end up sticking with Badgers and swimming for now.
While I am at work for 11 hours a week Monster and Teeny spend time with a variety of people including at home with Daddy, at home with Grandad and at the houses of various friends with children. This is something that has been a fairly new area for them to be comfortable with but having taken it at their pace and waited until they were ready and happy with arrangements it has so far gone without problems and they have enjoyed spreading their wings.
IT
Both Monster and Teeny are fairly computer literate within the confines of their reading / writing abilities. Even if they don’t completely understand it they are both aware of the facility to google something! They have a DS lite each and are very proficient with those, both have digital cameras they are very able with and both have a way better understanding of the mysteries of the dvd recorder, tv and other electrical equipment than I do! I suspect like most children of their generation this will simply be something they grew up surrounded by and is therefore second nature to use and understand.
Special Mentions
I will surely have left out all sorts of important things, both genuinely important to me and not remotely important really but included in the NC too. Currently Teeny wants to be a zoo keeper so I do notice a bias in all she does towards that type of thing - she often plays with toy animals, chooses to watch TV or films inclucing them, will be excited at the prospect of a visit to somewhere with animals, chooses to play an animal in any imaginary games, draws pictures of animals, chooses books with animals in to be read to her and can most often be found at home hanging out with the chickens or our cat.
Monster does not have any clear leanings currently. He continues to lurch from passion / obsession to passion / obsession - the latest is Ben 10 which then influences his appearance, language, games, art work subject matter, conversation and choice of activities. This has always been the case since toddlerdom and the age of Toy Story and Buzz Lightyear. The character may change over the years but the level of enthusiasm for it never does. Quite how this will translate into how he operates as he gets older is anyones guess but he is certainly fine tuning his skills in concentration, memorisation, styles of art and appearance and demonstrating excellent clarity, single mindedness and attention to detail.
It has been an amazing first ’school year’ for Teeny with huge leaps into independance with her swimming lessons, Badgers, Rainbows and more. She has matured hugely and clearly benefits from being with Monster. She is a content, happy, enthusiastic and sunny child who show massive promise to carry on just as she is and be anything she wants to be.
Monster continues to thrive on his Home Ed lifestyle with this being the year he really came into his own and proved this is the right path for him, achieving successses in the things that are important to him above what many adults have managed. He is suddenly demonstrating that not only would be be level with schooled peers in most areas he would outstrip them in several others.
I am proud. Proud of Monster and Teeny and the amazing people they are growing into being and proud of us that we chose to follow this path which may not be the accepted one or even one that is right for most, but is so far panning out to be pretty near perfect for us.
and Teeny (6)
have never been to school or nursery. We began to think about Home Education about 6 years ago and have gradually combined education with our day to day life. For now we follow no structure, no curriculum and go wherever life - and our imagination - leads us.
This blog is an occassional record of where life has led us....
