Monster & Teeny

Monday I was suffering with a really sore throat so spent lots of time on the sofa drinking tea and avoiding doing lots of things I had on a to do list .

Monster played on his xbox for a lot of the morning, Teeny played with geomags. I don’t know if I have waxed lyrical enough on geomags really, I know I included them in my list of HE essentials. At our house they are one of the most played with toys / resources, coming out pretty much daily. The children use them to make figures, jewellry, patterns, flat designs, 3D designs (using the panels), they tell stories with them, experiment with the magnets, the geometric designs, counting and various other maths type skills and little do they know but the simple act of putting them away again is also educational as they have to seperate the colours and shapes of the panels, put the balls in one place and the rods into 7s to fit in the box. I love geomags, they have been a huge hit in our house.

Teeny and I made soup for lunch from scratch. I’ve never made any sort of soup before but had a yearning to try, was feeling poorly and had all the ingredients for a recipe I’d found in a book at my Mums for cheese and crispy bacon soup. We also made pumpkin soup too for the following day. The children both tried the soup but didn’t like it, I thought it was nice but too potatoey. A good first attempt though. Teeny helped with things like weighing stuff, grating cheese, peeling vegetables etc. I let her do the odd slightly risky thing like stir hot sauce or check in the oven to see if things are ready with the intention of gradually letting her build up so she is cooking herself before too long.

After lunch Teeny brought me a workbook she’d pulled off the shelf at the weekend. It was a number one and although it was designed for her age and was certainly not ‘irrelevant’ it was in the classic workbook style of being (IMO) both patronising and repetitive so it wasn’t long before she totally lost interest. I’ve yet to find a workbook - not that I have done any sort of lengthy research which gets the mix right of imparting new information and being challenging without simply turning a child’s brain off with it’s dullness. So she wanted me to complete it while she watched, I explained that I didn’t need to learn how to write numbers or draw three balls because I already learnt that when I went to school. This seemed to surprise her, I don’t think she’d quite computed before that I went to school when I was a little girl. Teeny is very keen to be ‘just like Mummy’ in every way so this was a bit of a surprise to her to learn that not only is she not going to be ‘just like Mummy’ in this instance but actually that is because she doesn’t want to be! I remember Monster first coming to terms with the idea that he and I could have different opinions or ideas on something and both be right, or be happy with the fact we thought different things - it was a big moment for him and I think Teeny might have had her first such realisation at that point. It was interesting to observe Monster - who was making 3d shapes with some foam pieces and deciding whether they were squares or cubes at the time with me trying really hard not to wade in with a load of mathematical explanations which would have turned him right off the ‘game’ he was enjoying, muttering the answers to Teeny’s book and coming over a couple of times to help her. He was also doing some weigh bearing and stability testing using some plastic animals to see which of his structures was strongest and experimenting to see how he could strengthen them too.

In the afternoon Monster and Teeny played with the foam blocks together and then went off and played in the bedroom together. No idea what they were playing but it sounded fun!

Monster and I went to Badgers in the evening where he made his name in braille and came away with a basic understanding of what braille was about. We were given the sad news that his Badger group will be closing due to problems with the leaders but I have since signed him in to the nearest local group which sounds very busy and active and several of the other Badgers will be going to that one too so he is looking forward to starting there after Christmas.

Tuesday - Teeny and I did some more peeling and chopping and cooking together as she helped me make beef stew in the slow cooker, Monster did more xbox playing. He tends to play xbox for most of the morning if we are home all day, which is probably once or twice a week and then maybe for up to an hour another couple of times a week. He is very good at putting it to one side when he has had enough and he has really changed his approach to a challenge as a result. He would previously get very upset if he couldn’t do something right straight away and for ages there were bits on there he wouldn’t even tackle as he’d not managed them the first time he tried. He has worked through that and enjoys both the starting again element to beat his own records aswell as the knowledge that with practise he is improving. He will now attempt all of the timed challenges which previously through him into a panic ending in a strop and if he doesn’t manage it the first time he is quite prepared to keep trying until he does. He is also getting some sneaky reading in and read the word ‘exit’ at the park last week having recognised it from xbox games. I think we did right to wait for getting something like xbox and there are times when I am limiting it but overall I think it has been A Good Thing to introduce to the house.

We watched a film together while we ate lunch which led to more film watching. Monster played with the floam for a while and then they made a load of props and repeatedly watched and played out the ending of Were Rabbit. They did some dancing to the music at the end which is an overture of the music through the film. We have the OST cd which we got for Monster’s Wallace and Gromit birthday party and he remembered both the titles of each piece of music and which bit of the film they were from and changed his dancing style accordingly - very amusing to watch! They ended the day with some drawing.

Wednesday We met up with SIL, J & M and another HE friend with her two daughters at a local gardens. It was a nice day weatherwise and we had a great time charging round in wellies with the children playing various chasing games and looking at trees etc. We looked at a tree which sheds it bark and talked about bark and knots and branches and I had a really good chat with the HE friend about camps and socialising for Home Educators.

We called round to Lucy’s in the afternoon for a play and a chat. On the way home in the car we had a big discussion about weight, gravity and whether the pull of gravity was affected by the size of a planet or not. One of those conversations which is mostly about them testing or rehashing things they already know along with asking a few questions to clarify things.

Thursday We went to a local attraction with a planet earth museum type walkthrough, a cactus garden, a big dinosaur area and an indoor amusements area. It has a fab outdoor area too with a Sussex in minature landmarks walk, a big dinosaur walkround display, various lakes and water features, crazy golf and a big playground but the weather was way too horrid to venture outdoors for more than a quick walk round the dinosaurs. The children enjoyed walking through the Planet Earth bit with them picking out various things to dwell on and ask questions about. It is quite interactive with plenty of buttons to press and noises to listen to. We ate lunch in the amusement area with the children playing and then allowed them a vote as to what to do next. They decided to come back to our house to play.

After a bit of a shake down about who was playing with what they eventually all played seperately with something different.

At the park earlier there were loads of santas and their grotto was set up ready to open at weekends so Christmas was in the air. A had already made a couple of compilation cds of Christmas music so the children stuck one of those on and spent a very happy hour dancing like crazy in the playroom to Christmas music.  

Friday My Granny and Mum came over, which was great as it meant I could do things like get loads of washing done while they sat and chatted and played games with the children. They also all looked at the pictures of Monster’s birthday party, Halloween camp and general pictures from the last couple of months all of which impressed my Granny with just how much socialising and friends my ‘poor home educated children’ have. Teeny and I made a banana cake which necessitated a walk to the shop to buy eggs and was quite nice - not often I get to walk along with just one child and that always seems to be their cue to ask loads of questions and make great observations about the world around them.

Lucy arrived with R & R too so we had loads of all sorts going on. My Mum played snakes and ladders with Monster and Ms R, then they got out our marbles runs. We have a plastic one and a wooden one which is just blocks with holes and grooves cut into it with very small metal marbles. I showed Monster how to construct a good run working from the bottom up which is backwards to the way the marble will fall. We’ve gone through phases of playing with the marble runs loads in the past but I think this was the first time he’s really grasped the idea behind it. I also showed him how to slant things, make higher drops for the marble to run faster and change direction so he spent ages experimenting with those ideas.

We also talked a bit about resistance as Monster has a remote control car in which the batteries are running out so it runs very slowly. He wanted to know why the wheels laboured more when it was running along the ground than when he held it upside down, so I explained about how it is harder to push or move against something aswell as moving the weight of the car. I got him to run on the spot and then lay down and run in the air, push his hands out into the air or push them against a wall and finally stand in the doorway and push against the sides or just stand and raise his arms and we talked about which was harder.

Finally we had a ‘watch out the window’ moment as a van pulled up to sort out the lamppost outside our window which had been on in the day and off at night, so they all stood and watched that together too, waving at the man.

Saturday A fairly lazy morning with some story reading, some film watching and some plasticine modelling. The children also pulled out a toy till, pretend food and play money and spent a while taking it in turns to be customers and buy things. Monster also has a set of scales with plastic numbers you hang on each side to balance (so 4 + 4 weighs the same as a 7 or a 6+1 type of thing).

We then donned wellies and headed off up the downs to collect logs for firewood. There were loads there today and after speaking to the man who dumps wood there last week he had obviously kept us in mind and carved lots of the logs up smaller so most of them were suitable for chucking straight in the boot of the car rather than chopping up with the axe. Which meant Monster could help with the collecting and loading too. We left there and went to see my Dad for an hour or so before coming home.

Monster has been wanting to make some animation films for ages as we have been playing with the video clip function on the camera and using youtube for putting little clips on my other blog which he really likes. He wanted to make a plasticine animation a la Wallace and Gromit and had in mind some sort of recreation of the Were Rabbit film. I talked him down from quite such an ambitious undertaking and he made a simpler plasticine figure instead of a snail. We had originally talked about making something which could be moved in a couple of basic moves to take still shots of but his snail was not so suitable for that so we decided to use it in an animation instead of animating it. Monster came up with the idea of it making a trail and I came up with the idea of it being his name spelt out (oh bad autonomous educator!). I moved the snail, he wrote the letters and A took the pictures, then I sat and played with windows movie maker and finished it off. I won’t show it here as we wrote his real name with the snail trail but he was very happy with it.

Sunday  Monster was very keen to do more animation having seen the finished clip of the snail and this time I managed to get across the idea of making a figure which could move. We chose waving as the motion, Monster made the figure, a backdrop and some props and did the moving while I took the pictures. We then talked about a logo for his films and a blog to host his projects. He knows that I refer to him online as ‘Monster’ which is a nickname sometimes used in real life for him so he was quite happy with the idea of Monster Movie Productions for his blog and his films and set to creating a Monster logo for it. He copied the spelling rather than the writing (as in he looked at it and said ‘m’ then turned and wrote an ‘m’ rather than copying the formation of the individual letters). Then I created a blog and a youtube account for him and we finished the film and loaded it on. All of his future works will be on there.

We had roast dinner at lunchtime and spent the afternoon watching films, playing with toys, drawing and A and I pulled out everything from the under-the-stairs cupboard, chucked one bin liner away and gathered a big heap ready for listing on ebay. 

Monday My Dad called round first thing so we had a nice hour or so with him before he headed off and we got ready for MM. Teeny was at her most challenging so we had dramas about getting dressed, wearing shoes and finally about getting in the car. She exhausted herself so much with all the upset she slept all the way to MM. Monster had been fairly quiet but I’d thought it was just not bothering to compete with Teeny, but once we arrived at MM he just slumped.

Teeny and I did some painting while Monster sat on a sofa for a while, I think he chatted with one of the other mothers for a bit. Then Teeny went off to play (outside, barefoot, with a rusty barbecue behind the hall - what it is with my children and rusty barbecues? ) so I kept an occassional eye on her popping my head out every so often while making a poster with Monster. There were some lovely huge pieces of card and pens so we decided to do a storyboard of something and I suggested starting with the beginning of time and coming through to today. We had nine sections and took it in turns to draw something. Monster told me what to draw for most of mine with the exception of ‘Man on the Moon’ which he chose to interpret as something quite different anyway! Then he dictated what he wanted me to write under each picture to describe it and then he sat and coloured it in. I moved away slightly to chat and he had a good stream of adults and children coming past and asking about his poster so he was explaining it all the everyone.

We came home and I made a couple of phonecalls I’d been putting off so felt relieved and virtuous having got that done.

Then it was Badgers for Monster. The Badger group that he attends seems to be somewhat under threat. It changed leader just as we started there in the Summer term and as well as personal problem leading to a bit of inconsistency the leader seems to really struggle to get an assistant. There needs to be a certain adult to child ratio for it to run each week. There are also slightly dwindling numbers of children there too - when we started they had a regular 15 or so children, now it seems closer to 7 or 8 most weeks. I usually sit in my car outside the hall which started as a security thing for Monster who was not ready for me to jut drop him off and leave but has actually become something I quite enjoy. It is probably the only hour of utter peace I get all week. Nothing is expected of me, no one can talk to me, I know one child is at home with A and the other I can glimpse through a window having a great time with friends and I am free to sit and read a book, listening to music, twiddle my hair and drift away with my own thoughts or whatever I want. I love it! The Badger leader has asked me before if I’d be interested in becoming an Assistant Leader but I’ve explained that the main purpose of Badgers for Monster is that he gets to be somewhere without me for a while every week so if I was there too it would defeat the object. Also I’m not really willing to give up my hour in the car! This week she’d rung to say she was in desperate need of another adult there and would I possibly come and sit in the hall instead. So I agreed, but am ever hopeful it won’t become too regular a favour.

It was actually quite nice as a one off though to watch Monster interact with the other Badgers and see what his role is within that group. I am used to seeing him very confident, loud and a strong person within most of the groups he is in, where he is often the oldest, so at Badger where he is the smallest and the youngest and gets quite mothered by some of the older girls he behaves quite differently. No less confident but nowhere near as rowdy! Nice to note he has already learnt something about modifying behaviour according to the situation and people though.

Tuesday In the morning Monster and I went into town. We popped to the library to return some books and went to a couple of shops to purchase a few items to include in our HomeSchoolShoeBoxSwap box. This is a great scheme run by a HomeSchooler from the US for HomeEd families to collect together a box to send to other HomeEd families to tell them a bit about where they live, who they are etc. Loads of value in collecting and assembling the box and then of course the excitement of getting one in return to open and find out about where someone else lives. We were paired with a family in Florida in October and despite my very good intentions we were probably not a great swap family to have due to us being away and generally very busy. We will do it again in the new year and I’ll be sure to include the children more in what we collect and send - and the whole educational opportunities of researching more about where our swap family live. But we assembled a good box containing plenty of leaflets of our local area, local attractions, some leaves, some shells and pebbles from the beach, a couple of sticks of rock, some teabags, some photos of us and UK landmarks, a long letter talking about us, our lives and our country and some pictures by Monster of various things including him playing X box, our house, London and it’s landmarks. We got that parcelled up and on it’s way to America and spent the afternoon at home.

Wednesday A lovely morning cuddled up together on the sofa watching films and then we wrapped up warm and headed off to some local NT woods to meet SIL, J & M. We go to these woods a lot and the children are familiar with them and happy to go off down one path knowing it leads back to another. It is a relatively small area of land but has many paths meaning you are still able to have a nice long walk. We walked into the nearby village stopping to look at the church on the way. We explored the gravestones with the children picking various ones to be read out and asking how old the people were when they died. Then we tried the church door on the offchance and found it open. So in we went. Monster and Teeny both remembered various things from a visit to a church earlier in the summer so we chatted about the names of bits of the church and the various ‘furniture’ inside, admired the stained glass windows and sat on the pews.

We left the church and walked through the village to a house which sells and displays a massive variety of pumpkins at this time of year. There were all sorts of giant specimens in lovely shapes and colours aswell as an array of carved traditional orange pumkins.

We wandered back for lunch and then went back into the woods for a last walk round. On the way back we collected firewood for our fire at home.

The children are taking a real interest in our open fire this year. We are trying really hard to save energy generally, from financial and environmental angles so we are trying to get them both to turn off lights, keep doors and windows shut when the heating is on, talking about gas and electricity and they are both learning how to lay and light our open fire in the evenings.

On the way home we called in to see my Dad and brother for a couple of hours.

Thursday Em was staying with Lucy so we’d arranged to get together with all of them today. The weather was still being sunny and very mild for November so we met up at a local park for an hour or so.

When we’d all got cold and hungry enough we decamped to Lucy’s for lunch, playing and chatting. The children had a whale of a time playing inside and outside, topped off with a bone discovery session right at the end of the afternoon. They started appearing in the house with a variety of bones we were all trying to identify that they were digging up from the garden. Eventually we realised they were all either chicken leg bones from drumsticks or pig rib bones from pork ribs buried from barbecues in the garden of years gone by! It was great to watch them all holding bones against themselves and trying to work out which bit of a body they were from though.

Friday After a rather chaotic morning which saw us charging around on a mercy mission to tow my Dad’s van, off to the post office to pay bills and withdrawing cash to fill my car up with petrol we collected Ali and F and headed off to Wilderness Woods where one of the Mums from MM had arranged an Autumn Walk complete with guide to point out various signs of wildlife, leaves, seeds and fruit of various trees, things like fungi and other signs of Autumn and tell us about coppicing, deciduous and evergreen trees and the differences between them and loads more. We collected a bucket full of bits and pieces from our walk including some sweet chestnuts which we plan to roast on the fire.

There was a fantastic wooden playpark at the woods which all the children made full use of. Monster particularly loved the zipwire and had a great time whizzing along on it. I was persuaded to have a quick go at the end and could quite see the attraction

Saturday A nice quiet family morning at home followed by some log collecting in the afternoon.

We dropped the logs home, changed out of muddy wellies and then went over to my parents for the afternoon. There was only Dad there but we had a lovely couple of hours with him. Home for X Factor and early nights for everyone.

Sunday In the morning the children and I cuddled up and read The Gruffalo a couple of times in preparation for the afternoon. We met up with Barbara & Chris, Bob and Katy, Karen and Dom, Stella and Rich and Kirsty and all their assorted children for a Tall Stories production of The Gruffalo. It was quite a journey for us but well worth it as the children really enjoyed it. And actually I think A and I did too. It was a very similar sort of production to Pumpkin Soup which we saw last year by these people but I had been slightly underwhelmed by that and found this better. After a very easy journey there we had an almost twice the time journey home so the children were already asleep and only just roused to be changed into pjs before falling straight into bed. A and I had a (very) late dinner.

Monday - A bit of a non starter really. We were still very much recovering from our wonderful week away. And sadly going down with a horrible cold which we were all at different stages of feeling rough with. This was coupled with me getting a really nasty infection in my wisdom tooth - which resulted in a trip to the dentist, the hospital and a dose of antibiotics later in the week to clear up.

Monster made a clock from a ‘make a clock’ kit he’d had for his birthday and we had an otherwise low key day with lots of TV and lots of quiet playing. We built a lego house together, made some invitations for Teeny’s birthday party next month and I managed to get the hall booked to host it in too.

Monster had Badgers which was a Halloween party theme so they just played games for an hour which he said was ‘brilliant’. He came out with a bag full of sweets he’d won which he promptly shared out between him, Teeny, me and A.

Tuesday I was in more pain from my tooth and the children were still at various stages of the cold. So Monster spent most of the morning playing X box and Teeny and I did some very leisurely tidying up of the playroom. The sort you start and begin to regret and wish you’d never started! Lucy texted to ask if we up for lunch and a play so we headed round there. Monster went off to the park with Lucy, R and R while Teeny and I stayed behind and read a couple of books together as she was not quite ready for the park and seemed to require a bit of one to one. We caught up with them and had a short play until the cold drove us back to Lucy’s to eat chocolate!

Wednesday - our normal getting together with SIL, J & M and Lucy, R and R was amended to bring everyone to our house to play for the afternoon so that I could nip to the dentists and leave the children with SIL and Lucy. We had our usual interesting and in depth chats while the children created bedlam and chaos around us

Thursday - A worked from home so he could take me to the hospital for an xray on my tooth, then we took the children to Asda for a few bits and pieces including a birthday present for a friend. Lots of playing with geomags and xbox again.

Friday -  We had Lucy, R & R round and determined to do something altogether I dug out some jigsaw puzzles as well as the geomags thinking that if Lucy and I started to do them then the children would probably join in. Sure enough I was right and the geomags were soon aandoned so they could all help make maps of the world and the UK with us. Lots of geographical chat followed including pointing out various places Lucy and I had visited or we lived at, places we’d all been together (like Kessingland) and discussion about counties, countries and continents. I popped out briefly as part of a dry run for when I start working soon and Lucy will be one of the people helping look after the children, which went very smoothly and reassured us all that it will work out just fine.

We had a delivery of coal while I was out and the coal lorry knocked over our lamppost outside our house. I phoned the council and then the various external agencies who look after streetlighting in an outsourced manner and reported it which caused a stream of men and vans with traffic cones, fluorescent vests and noisy machines to come and remove the lamppost, dig out the base, fill in the hole and disconnect the live electricity. We watched each step of it, herding various children out to observe and ask the friendlier of the men questions about what they were doing. I’ve seen such things happen on Auntie Mabel and I’m sure it could be seen in a book but how much better to watch it happen for real.

In the evening Monster suddenly expressed a wish to learn to read. He’s toyed with the idea before but never with any real passion or ambition. He seemed slightly put off by the idea it isn’t something you just ‘learn’ in a sit down and do it in one session sort of thing, but made a very good effort at reading a Dr Seuss book and subsequently has been making real leaps and bounds and showing lots of interest in letters and words so I think this really might be the start of it.

Saturday - An early start to pay a visit to friends who have just had a new baby (nearly 3 weeks ago) and deliver a birthday present to the new baby’s big sister. We stayed a couple of hours, baby worshipping, cuddling and cooing, dropped in on The Portico for another hour or so and then came home.

Sunday - a quiet morning at home with A and Monster in the garden enjoying the autumn sunshine, chopping firewood etc while Teeny and I did some baking. We went to SIL and BIL’s in the late afternoon so I made parkin to take with us for a traditional Bonfire Night treat. After lunch we headed over there. The children played in the garden, SIL and I made apple loaf and some lovely spiced citrus punch (which the adults spiced up a bit more with some brandy) and as darkness fell we had some fireworks.

When we got home the pub across the road had just lit their massive bonfire and was kicking off their TWO HOUR display of fireworks. Teeny was all fireworked out  and Charlie and the Chocolate factory was on TV so we sat and watched that while Monster and A dressed up warm and stood in our garden observing more fireworks.