Monster & Teeny

But then I guess you already knew that. In much the same way as politicians use spin to tell us what we want to hear, spin is used to sell you things you don’t actually want or need. I think one of the areas that spin is used the most is Education. And I utterly include Home Education in that sentence. I regularly use spin to convince people of the benefits of Home Education - it’s not that I don’t think what I am saying is true, or that I am trying to market Home Education to people particularly but a bit of spin does allow us to get on with what we want to do, how we want to do it while reassuring people enough that we are not members of some weird cult or abusing our children and glossing over some of the less traditional ideas we have.

We’re not known to the LEA and I would defend to great lengths our right to remain unknown, after that our right to educated Monster and Teeny in the way we see fit without visits to our home, meetings with the children, presentations or ‘proof’ of our educational provision. However, if I had to do it I know I could. I know I could fairly easily convince an LEA bod that we ticked all of their boxes and then some. I could spin what Monster and Teeny spend one morning a week doing, without any intervention or guidance from me, into encompassing every area of the National Curriculm. Yes, ladies and gentlemen without the aid of a single workbook, curriculum, lapbook or even time spent sitting round a table, let alone a safety net I could fit what we do into boxes, label it, colour code it, timetable-er-ize it and present it, neatly packaged into bite sized gift wrapped chunks of spin, satisfying anyone that we were providing that all important age, aptitude and ability appropriate education.

Long, long ago when I was still full of questions about Home Education worked, full of doubts about how I would possibly cover every ’subject’ let alone deal with issues like pythagorus someone gave me an example of how they spent their morning:

We decide to do some baking so we get out a recipe book and read the ingredients list, writing down our shopping list of items we need to buy. We walk to the local shop where we purchase the items on our list, having added up the total and worked out what change we will get. We stopped at the park on the way home for a play on the slide and swings to run off some energy playing with some other children we met there.

Once home we weighed out out the ingredients, followed the recipe and baked our cake. When it had cooled we iced and decorated it.

In just that brief exercise you have your literacy (reading, writing) numeracy (weighing out, paying) physical exercise (walking and playing in the park) socialisation (with other children in the park) science (baking - adding ingredients together to change form, adding heat from the oven to cook) and art (cake decoration). Add in all the conversations you’ll no doubt have along the way, maybe some observation about the weather, the wildlife you might happen across in the park, some discussion and negotiation about what recipe to use for your cake, what colour to ice it, some long words chucking in educational terms and a sprinkling of photographs of children doing the writing, baking, running in the park, icing the cake and there you have a near perfect example of activties that meet all the criteria of even the most picky of inspectors.

Even with our autonomous approach if I wanted to I could easily pick out examples of everything the children do which meet the ’standards’ required. This despite the fact everything they do is at their own volition with me occassionally suggesting or offering or introducing ideas and activities. I could spin so many of the things we do into ‘projects’ or ’studies’ along with supplying huge photographic evidence, reading lists of the many books we have, art inspired by it, supplemented with the many and varied conversations we have - a perfect example of this recently would be our chick hatching. Which has spawned all sorts of activities, knowledge about bird life cycles and development, chick inspired art, plenty of practical animal caring and rearing experience, learning about their needs, alternative ways in which chicks are reared and treated. Monster narrated a piece to go in our local HE newsletter about the chicks hatching and between them they came up with the idea of a competition to name our fifth chick which they judged and picked a winner for. In very traditional ‘which came first?’ mode clearly if we’d not introduced the eggs and the incubator into the house this would never have come about but that was all we did - all of the ensuing developments from the chicks hatching to the various inspired activities the children have done since happened without our direction or interferance. But if I needed to I could rewrite that to perfectly document our chicken and egg insprired curriculum for the Summer Term at MonsterTeeny Home School and present it with lesson plans, timetabled schedules of what we did when and have it all look very contrived and successful.

Whenever I talk to people about Home Education, which is pretty darn regularly, they start off with all sorts of concerns / questions / issues. Gradually by way of calm, contained utter belief in what we’re doing I am able to answer all of those questions. Yes, we socialise, yes the children are learning, they are happy, healthy, inquisitive, intelligent, articulate little people with passions, interests, plenty to talk about, excellent communication skills and questionning, challenging minds, we are providing them with an education - depending on how I choose to spin it which at will certainly not fall short of what they would receive in school, with the right spin I can demonstrate that we cover every topics taught in school, just in baking that cake and walking to the park. What I find myself frequently left with as the last resort question is ‘wouldn’t it be easier for you if they were in school?’ because once you remove the potential damage to the children either educationally or socially that is about all you are left with. Clearly I have my days when the idea of waving them off with a lunchbox for seven hours at 9am would be really quite attractive, but I know I’d be missing them dreadfully by about 930am. One of the best things about Home Education for me has been doing all the great stuff I’d have loved to have done as a child but couldn’t because I was in school. Keeping tadpoles, hatching chicks, going to Legoland during term time when you don’t queue for one hour for every ride but instead can manage 6 rides in one hour, walking through the same woods once a week watching the seasons change, sitting on the beach during a surprise hot spell in April, splashing in the puddles during a surprise wet spell in May, spending an entire afternoon making animated plasticine figures, curling up with bowls of popcorn and watching 4 films back to back, driving a 300 miles round trip to attend a birthday party for an afternoon. I’ve never been so free, I’ve never had so much fun - this to me is what childhood should be about and I am just so lucky to be getting to have another go at it as a grown up and spending it with the amazing, fascinating, interesting, wonderful people on the journey with me still enjoying their first crack at childhood. And with a little bit of creativity it is possible to make all this fit into the little boxes we are required to fit it into. Result!

I was talking to a friend the other day about how some of the people who know me through various connections only know certain aspects of me and actually if they were all sitting round describing me to each other they may not even recognise they were talking about the same person. Once you get past initial first impressions and physical attributes you realise that actually the real essence of a person, and how much of it they show to you, or how much of it you have the vision to see is based on all sorts of things.

Clearly there are some people we are predisposed to see the best in, or able to ignore the less desireable traits in them because we love them, or have a long history with them - people we are related to fall into this category, but also that sort of familiarity can show us all of someone’s worst faults too. The digger you deep in getting to know someone the more likely you are to turn up the unpleasant things that they hide to the world at large. The danger with long relationships with people is you are unlikely to recognise when they have changed, when the box you put them into no longer actually fits and it is only your view of them that makes people look that way rather than something they are actually demonstrating - parents often have clouded views of their children, based on them as very young children, which they cling to as defining them, long after they have grown up and are not like that at all any more. Couples who have been together for years still look at each other and see all the traits of the young person they once knew, even if they have long since grown old and all of those attributes of youth have long gone to the rest of the world.

The shorter the amount of time we spend with people the more we are at the mercy of what they want us to see about them rather than who they really are. Workmates are people we see in a very specific environment, behaving in a certain way and conforming to a set of behaviours, a code of conduct that forms their work persona. There are the stereotypes that we all have in our minds about people too, if the person in the newsagents is always ready with a smile and a joke every morning when we collect our paper we assume they are a cheery, fun sort of person on the basis of that brief encounter. There are traits which have to be demonstrated in certain situations which can form our view of people - people in caring professions appear to be compassionate, selfless, nurturing; people in positions of authority or have had great levels of education or training tick some boxes just from that and we can end up surprised by the personality that sits alongside those things.

Also though, we respond to other people, we often feel that some company brings out the best or the worst in us. I have friends with whom I am very silly, friends with whom I am sensible, friends with whom I will have intelligent and informed conversations, friends with whom I just sit and talk rubbish. There are people who know my insecurities and I would share a confidence, others whom only ever see the confident, assured side. We bounce off other people, showing different sides of ourselves depending on the situation we are in and how they react to us. If you are clearly shocking someone with your ideas or behaviour you may go all out to shock them even more or you may modify yourself accordingly - they will be left with very different ideas of who you are depending on that although on a different day you may well act totally differently anyway.

Finally there is the self fulfilling prophesy. There is the phenomena where if you label someone as something, consider them a certain way, treat them accordingly for long enough then they will become that, or at the very least that is all you will see in them and all they will offer in return. I’m sure we’ve all felt wrongly appraised before and ended up questionning our own self view - am I really like that? I must be if that’s what they see in me. We are all a walking bundle of anomolies too, none of us fit a mold completely, we are all able to take an action that can surprise everyone, sometimes even ourself.

So where am I going with this? In small children self image is a fragile thing - heck, in plenty of adults it is too, they use people they spend time with as mirrors, gauging themselves on the feedback they get. A child who is told they possess negative traits will simply display more and more of them and become that thing overall. A child who has his positive traits reflected back and talked about will do the same. I’m not saying that by telling a child they are a maths genius you will create one - the trait has to be there already, not just a figment of your imagination or hope. A child who spends their time on pursuits they enjoy with people who bring out the best in them and is encouraged to celebrate themselves and what they are great at will have that as their self image. If that is their self image then it will be what they show to others. All very simplistic I know and of course not as straightforward as that necessarily but the idea is nothing groundbreaking - the carrying it out might be though.

The best environment for me is one in which I am with people I know love me, people I know think well of me and people who are easy company, allowing me to show aspects of myself without worrying what they might think of me or whether the odd bad moment will change their good opinion of me. I need time alone too, to not feel constantly ‘on show’, to be left to my own devices without my time and energy constantly directed in a certain way. I need to not be labelled, to not be considered ‘the X one’ to not be cluttered up with negative views about me or squashed into a box. I dislike spending time with people who only know one facet of my personality - who would describe me in just a couple of words and think they’d captured who I am with that. I don’t want to spend time with people who judge me, who see the surly, or the silly, or the bossy or the prone to mistakes when I’m carried away with something side of me only. This is the environment my children spend most of their time in, with me, or other people who love them, see the best in them and celebrate them as individuals, allow them to follow their interests and passions, don’t compare them to others, fret about where they rank alongside others, allow them to demonstrate their less desireable traits without judging or blaming them or considering that those are the traits which define them. But of course constant behaviour modification is also dangerous, so allowing them time to experiment with different ways of acting is equally important - I’m sure at the various unsupervised by me times that the children have each week (at activities like Badgers or Beavers, or while I am at work and they are with family and friends) they show different sides to themselves, act in different ways and quite possibly are people I wouldn’t always recognise from someone else’s description - such company can bring out the best or the worst in them and them working that out and dealing with in for a small amount of time each week is ideal. But the idea that who they sat next to and bounced off would play a bigger role in who they were percieved to be - and eventually who they became, that keeping up with their mates or bowing to peer pressure about what to watch on TV, play in the playground, be interested in or what was cool or popular would be far more dictated by others than found within themselves, that opinions would be formed on them which would lead to a tag or a label which would follow them through their school career is shocking. I understand how parents get a school report or attend a parents evening and don’t recognise the child being described, are shocked at how different the personality described at school is to the child they know at home. I know that the ‘true me’, the one I know best is the one I am at home, with my family or close friends, in my own environment. I imagine that the ‘true Monster’ and the ‘true Teeny’ are also the children they are day to day, with me, at home, playing with their own toys or with each other, watching what they choose on TV, deciding what to play with next, what theme to have for their birthday party. I may have a bearing on these choices but not much of one, whereas I see them change even as I close the door behind me or drop them off at Badgers or bring them into a room filled with other people. Providing home is where they are happiest and best I can’t see any reason to prevent that from being where they are most - yet another of the many reasons why we HE.

This week we’ve been mostly learning about chicks. Lots of learning from books for me, lots of reading stuff on the internet, lots of learning from just watching them. The best ways seem to be simply watching the chicks and applying common sense - I’ve read that you need to change their water everything from once a day to six times a day - we’re watching it and changing it when it gets full of wood shavings or kicked over. I’m also learning loads from people who have done this before, like everything it only takes a bit of experience in something to gain confidence, already I feel like I could give advice to someone about it all.

It’s also been amazing watching them, real fodder for the nature / nurture debate. There is clearly loads of instinct there, they know to cluster together for warmth, they know to head towards the source of light and heat when they’re cold and move away from it when they are too hot. They know how to peck - at pretty much anything at the moment granted, but the reflex is there. They can spot something different and give it a peck to see if it’s food - my freckles being a great (and painful!) example. They are flapping their wings and strutting about and showing early signs of flight already despite there being no other birds around to teach them this stuff or even lead by example. But they have done the imprint thing with us, cheep loudly and get up and come towards us when we go near their brooder, will jump on a hand to be lifted out of their box and as I initially put them close to my chest when they were first born they will scramble up my body to get to my chest now. They show no sign of fear of our cat but I assume if they were in the wild with other birds they would have learnt to move away from other creatures.

Monster and Teeny have got loads out of this already. We’ve previously kept caterpillars to hatch into butterflies and watched tadpoles devlelop into frogs and earlier this year we watched lambs being born, but this has been the most exciting project and they were lucky enough to watch at least one complete hatch each. They’ve been handling the chicks lots and are very confident and gentle with them, enjoying the caring for them of changing their water and getting them food and playing with them as we let them have a couple of periods of running around our lounge each day. I could have gone down the homeschooling route and got them to do various chick related tasks but aside from getting various books to read with them - either fiction featuring chickens and eggs or junior reference books with details about chickens and eggs I’ve done nothing either than talk to them about everything that is happening, give them reponsibilities for helping and been very honest about the risks and possibilities. We have one deformed chick - it only has one wing but is otherwise fine, so that sparked lots of conversations about deformities generally and how it might effect it. Birth defects in humans is something we have previously talked about and we were aware that there is a high rate of deformities in chicks so were semi-prepared for the chances of one of our eggs hatching thus. There has been plenty of chick inspired art here, lots of video clip and photo taking by the children as well as us and the usual debates surrounding the naming of a creature including Monster and Teeny deciding on a competition opened out to our friends to come up with a name for our fifth chick once we’d all named one each. They chose the winner with the chick being temporarily called ‘Competition’ by them in the meantime.

I’m sure there will be learning opportunities and dramas aplenty in the coming weeks as we learn whether we have cockrels or hens, decide which, if any we keep and work out where we are going to house them if we keep them and then there will be all the further education for all of us in just what being chicken keepers entails. This has been a great example of just how we home educate, constantly introducing ideas, concepts and experiences, learning together as we go using a variety of methods and dealing with challenges and new ideas along the way. I’m loving the parallels of chick rearing to parenting generally and we all get to saw aww a lot at cute bundles of fluff with the promise of fresh eggs one day. Win: win! 

This morning we have two yellow chicks (called Freddie and Punzel) one black chick (as yet unnamed), a second black chick breaking out as I type and the fifth and final egg has cracks

Earlier this year we borrowed an incubator from a farmer friend and tried to hatch some chickens eggs. We were given 18 eggs from the same friend, all allegedly fertilized but nothing happened. We read rather more widely about it and went to another farm advertising free range eggs to get some more to try again. This time we started rather smaller with just half a dozen eggs, one of which we discarded after about 12 days having been candling them every few days after day 6 to check progress and turning them all 3 times a day.

Today is day 21 and unlike humans who have a very wide possibly due date right on schedule four out of the five eggs have developed cracks this morning. You can clearing hear cheeping from the eggs so we seem on track to have at least 4 little new lives entering the household in the next few hours. More photos to follow but here is a look at what we currently have:

I’ve just deleted a comment on the post below suggesting that breakfast round the table as a family instead of sugar coated wheat and dry bread eaten off the floor would be better. I do agree with freedom of speech but in the same way as if someone came into my home and pissed me off I’d chuck ‘em out (and indeed have done so in the past - don’t mess with me, I can be dead hard ) if you want to exercise your freedom of speech then *my* blog is probably not the place to do it. Make me laugh, challenge me properly or indeed leave me sycophantic and adoring comments by all means but don’t come here with your nonsense!

Anyway, best we get it out of the way here and now. I’m Nic and I don’t have a table. There I’ve said it.

I know this fails me on so many levels. How can I possibly be a proper home educator without a table. Where do I sit the children to do their maths workbooks? Where do I hang my world map if not over the table? Where do we sit our hama bead boards, our laminator, our large pieces of card in order to create autumnal colleges with collected dead leaves, where do we do our home made playdough-ing, where do we weigh out ingredients for (wholesome) cookies and where the hell do I sit and write my report for the LEA if not at the table?

Also I can’t possibly be a proper parent without a table. Well I could maybe be a parent but Id’d be a slovenly one, for where will our sense of ‘Family’ come from if not by eating three square meals round a table together while discussing topics of the day? Where will my husband sit and eat his marmalade on toast while reading the paper of a morning, where will I gossip with my friends when they come over for coffee mornings, where I ask you will I sit with my head in my hands when my life collapses around me?

Well it won’t be at the table cos we don’t have one.

That’s a lie actually, we do have a table, infact we have several. The children each have their own table and chair (because that’s the sort of insular, fight for yourself, standalone, you’re on your own matey, just you and yer table type mentality we have in this ‘not family’) which they sit and eat at if they so wish. Often (and you might just want to sit down before you read this next bit, at your table if you like) they pull their tables up to the telly and sit and watch it while they eat. AND IT’S NOT BABY EINSTEIN THEY’RE WATCHING EITHER AS THEY TROUGH THEIR CHICKEN NUGGETS! We also have three other tables - one used to be a kitchen table and two used to be pushed together to form a banquet style long table down the centre of our dining room. Back when we had a kitchen bigger than a postage stamp and we had a dining room at all. Now they nestle together, in the style of an IKEA warehouse in our garage, slightly cold, slightly cobwebby, dreaming of the day when once again we will become a real proper family and sit round them eating.

I know that the chances are the person who made the comment will never come here again, I know that they probably are far too busy, with their tableist ways somewhere worshipping the table, trawling the internet and righting wrongs, spreading the word and fighting the good fight, maybe you even sell tables in your spare time, hell maybe you are a long distant descendant of Chippendale or perhaps you just work for IKEA (or maybe it’s more subtle than that, maybe you are in the business of fine linen napkins or placemats or something, a sort of ancillary table accessory type trade) but if you ever do come back maybe you should scroll a little further down the page and look at the pictures a bit more closely. Maybe you should read some of the words, maybe you should get more of a feel of who we are and what we’re doing. There are things I could / would / should do maybe but actually when my children are fully grown I imagine that not having had a table will be something that hasn’t scarred them too badly. And as for their breakfast itself? Well it mightn’t be perfect but the dry bread was something my daughter got for herself and was very proud of her independance, and the sugar coated cereal isn’t the very healthiest of choices in the world but is what my son eats and enjoys. And the setting them up for the day with breakfast together would probably be rather more of a priority if we didn’t spend pretty much every moment together anyway. I firmly believe in family, togetherness, healthy eating and given the space I might even go for a table (someone sent me a great link just yesterday for a Tardis tablecloth which would be fab) but I don’t parent in soundbites, our family doesn’t tick off breakfast round the table and then head off our seperate ways and if I genuinely believed life would be improved by a flat surface with four legs then we’d find a way of having one, but thank you for stopping by, I take your comments on board and I bid you a very good day.

Way back in the mists of distant time, well 2005 a few of the early blogringers did a photoday meme. You can see our’s from April 2005 here our photoblog day from last year can be viewed here  and today we did it all over again. I tried to pick a day which represented as typical a day as we get, so I didn’t want to pick a weekend, or a day when I’m at work and today seemed a pretty representative day having a good mix of the sorts of things we get up to fairly regularly with a few extras and a few omissions.

Monster’s day starts in pjs with breakfast and a bit of X box

Teeny’s day starts with breakfast and a smile - she takes after A there - both Monster and I are far less morning-y

My day started with a very large mug of tea and a quick browse online

While outside it rained 

Teeny did some drawing in a workbook - she is ignoring the actual questions and spending time colouring in things or making up her own games to play with it

while Monster did some more x boxing

then I made lunch, dug wellies out of the garage and we all got togged up ready for a damp walk. My wellies have been garaged for so long a family of spiders had taken up residence. I’m not too worried about spiders particularly but I did wear socks and made Teeny wear them too so that if we did squash any leftover squatters we wouldn’t be able to feel them inbetween our toes!

And we drove to a local-ish woodland (NT area) to meet my SIL and her twins and another Home Educating family with a 4yo boy and a 9yo girl. On the way we listened to a fairly ecclectic mix of music including the Kaiser Chiefs, The Proclaimers, Tracy Chapman, Catatonia, Take That and They Might Be Giants, so there was plenty of singing and in-car dancing going on to that. At one point we had a car infront of us sporting an EO car sticker so we speculated a bit about why there were no children in the car and what exciting adventures they might be up to.

We arrived during a brief lull in the drizzle and headed off with children running ahead through the woods to feed the ducks who had an impressive brood of ducklings at various stages of size, independance and cuteness

We headed back to the carpark where we stopped for a picnic lunch, sheltered by a handy canopy of very leafy trees

By then the rain had really set in again but we decided to have a quick wander in the woods again before calling it a day which allowed some time for puddle splashing - an activity in short supply these last few weeks!

climbing on gates

running very fast

and enjoying a bit of going away from the grown ups slightly to have some independance while keeping us in sight, just in case

By the end of all that we realised we were now actually really quite wet so we posed for one more snap before stripping off wellies and muddy jeans and getting back into the car to sing again all the way home

We arrived home ready for some dry clothes and some hot chocolate and were very pleased to get a text asking if we were home from Lucy & the R’s  who came round to join us for hot chocolate

Some of the children went off to play with the musical instruments in the playroom

while others, hilariously, decided to stay with the grown ups and indulge in a spot of glue sniffing!

We were then treated to a magic show by Monster which we all had to keep our eyes closed for large amounts of

and involved your standard pulling a white rabbit out of a top hat type stuff

  we were instructed to turn off all cameras and mobile phones but I blatantly disobeyed in order to bring you these pictures

Not to be outdone Teeny did her own show involving some impressive sword work

Shortly afterwards my camera battery died and had to go on charge so you’ll have to believe me without the aid of photographic evidence that A arrived home, cooked large amounts of toast for the children, Lucy and the R’s left and I sent Monster off to get changed into his Badgers uniform before the battery was charged and ready to go again

not to be outdone in the many costume changes of the day stakes Teeny headed off to return as a magician herself

Monster and I headed off to Badgers. A slightly early getaway time coupled with light traffic meant we were over ten minutes early so instead of steaming up the car windows and sitting in the carpark we parked at the beach and ran down to the sea for a quick photo shoot. We do go to the beach a lot but I’ve never really taken the children there when the weather is not so good. Before children A and I would often walk down to the beach in real extreme weather like storms, wind and heavy rain as it’s just so exciting, dramatic and energising there in those conditions. It wasn’t raining and the tide was pretty high and crashing down so we dashed down and even managed our only self timer shot of the day

Then we went to Badgers, D went in (you can spot him waving out of the window to me) and I sat in the car reading for a blissful, peaceful hour

Back home again and Teeny was already in her nightie although seemed far from otherwise ready for bed, still twirling and dancing around

It didn’t take long though with the promise of three bedtime stories each so they chose from the current pile of library books which 3 each they wanted while I turned our eggs currently 7 days away from hatching (we hope!) in our incubator

Then 3 stories for Teeny

followed by 3 for Monster, who then picked up a Dr Who books and sat for a further hour or so looking through that!