Steam Railway

Today we went to Loughborough for a ride on the Steam train, Santa came through the carriages as well but that was incidental... Huge scope for learning, Reuben was fascinated by the steam, looked at pictures of how the engine worked, knows that you need a fire (for burning coal) and at the end wanted to see the engine itself, unfortunately the real fire was a bit scary! He also kept the whole carriage greatly entertained for an hour by making stuff out of paper and distributing it around as well as drawing on the glass and telling everyone about it. Isaac was wide eyed when we started to move (see video) and of course the whole ride was very enjoyable, and I really liked the 1940s feel to the train and station (our engine was older, 90 years old).

Reuben the Gymnast

Reuben, a couple of months ago, asked to go to gymnastics at our local leisure centre and he's loved it ever since. Yes it is structured but it makes complete sense to him, he enjoys pretty much all of it, he is very serious about it and concentrates very hard on getting it right, and he trusts the people who run it to look after him, so it works! Today the children did a little display for the parents and Martin had a bit of fun making a movie "trailer" out of it. Enjoy!

And I have to say that I like this aspect of home education, that you can mix and match the things that the children like, we can have structured, classes, workshops, free play, run around the woods, experiments in the kitchen, anything really...



Video from the Kangaroo Kids Exhibition

Martin and a few of us were interviewed during the exhibition opening party, this is the lovely result!

Art workshop, very much a success!!!

At last what I was looking for, a shame it's a one off. We went to an art workshop for children, in conjunction with the Open 23 exhibition in Leicester, and it was great! Lots of exploration, freedom to use any material that was available and any technique, the children were encouraged to put their work together with other children's work to make new things, or to put it on the wall or stick it on chairs, we loved it!

Reuben is writing!

We were sitting together the other evening doing some drawing and out of the blue, Reuben instead of drawing starts writing letters, naming them as he writes them. I was blown away... it's as if children keep these skills to themselves until they are happy to show them, a bit like learning to talk, then there's no stopping them. Wonderful!

Guardian discussion on flexi-schooling and home education

This was an interesting discussion... Some friends posted a link to an article in the Guardian about flexi-schooling, as interesting as the article was I was really taken in by the stream of comments, here is a link if you want to follow http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/dec/05/rise-of-flexi-schooling?commentpage=1#start-of-comments I'm signed in as Franandrubi.
I usually stay away from internet forums and discussions as they can escalate into personal attacks and various other unpleasantness, I do tend to be quite outspoken and my ideas are not really mainstream so, until I learn the art of diplomacy, I better not get involved.
But this discussion was really interesting, the article was about a set of families who take their children out of school once a week and teach them at home. This prompted a lot of home educators (and home educated people) to leave comments as well as teachers (in strong disagreement) and general comments from people who don't really understand how children can learn without being formally taught, as well as lots of understanding for home education (this is the Guardian after all).
My big issue here was with comments such as most children don't have the maturity or determination for independent learning and I guess that most who have been through the system since they were a few months old probably do not have this skill well developed, but it is a case of the chicken and the egg: I cannot trust children to learn on their own so I control their learning, therefore I create children who are unable to learn independently... If children (and humans in general) were not capable of independent learning how come children learn to speak and walk quite well on their own? Have you ever watched a child try to work out how a video game works? Of the phone? Or the ipad? How come we are not still in caves hunting and gathering? You cannot argue that only adults learn independently, humans, I guess, are born very flexible indeed (as you could be born in any sort of family, culture or geographical location) and an ability to learn is essential to survival, to fitting into any given environment, I believe this is genetic, I believe that human children have an enormous capacity for independent learning. What teachers and a lot of adults worry about is that children will not learn the things WE want them to learn, therefore we have to direct their learning so they will be productive members of our society. From our experience (I have been an artist, a teacher, an academic, a counsellor, and a shop owner... and my partner is a successful businessman who did not do well at school) you make your own way in this world, it cannot be shaped for you. You gain knowledge as you need it, if my children decide to be tree surgeons then we will find a route to get there, if they want to read English at Oxford then we will go down the route for that too. They will shape their life, not us or the school system.

Scope for learning

As usual, lots happens in just a few days and if I don't write it down I forget... Reuben has been helping his dad with measuring the frames from the exhibition pictures to cost them, so he's been involved in recording numbers and seeing his dad make calculations, he likes to physically measure things with the tape measure (including himself) and he seems to realise that numbers are used for a variety of things (age, height, time, etc.).
We were looking at words the other day and noticed that some words are short and some long, without actually counting the letters we were trying to guess how many there were in the word we picked, Reuben can also recognise words from a small list (things like, show me the word dog) so it looks like he is making sense of it somehow, some things I am sure that he knows but I don't know how anyone could measure his knowledge, luckily we don't have to.
He asked for some reading workbooks the other day when we were in WH Smiths and we gave them a go, Reuben just does them for fun so we have to be creative with the tasks as some are just weird... they had mixed up the letters of the word cow (owc) and other 3 letter words and asked for the letters in the right order to make the word. Where in the real world would you find this? If you have a love of anagram puzzles that might be useful practise but otherwise? But I have to admit that scope for learning is everywhere, as doing the workbooks is Reuben's idea he is not bothered by the weirdness and goes along with it, just for fun!

Art class for children, NOT a success!

I was really not expecting this one... the boys do a lot of (messy) arty stuff in the mornings, they love mixing paints to finger (and foot) paint and adore play dough, which we make ourselves. As I'm often doing something else when they're at the table being artistic, I though it might be fun for all three of us to go to a creative arts class for children. Well... we found one nearby which seemed to be what we wanted, on the website there were lots of pictures of kids covered in paint, lots of words like creative, messy play, exploration, different mediums, etc.
So off we went, very excited. We were slightly surprised at the (vaguely deranged) lady in charge sitting everyone in a circle and singing songs and shaking hands with the children, but who are we to judge? Although with only a 45 minute session maybe we should have just got stuck in. Reuben at this point was still very hopeful so off we go to the table, and here much frustration ensued. The activity had been decided for us (a Xmas snowman card) and we could only use certain materials (and certain colours) in a specific order so things were given to us and taken away throughout. Reuben was very upset by this as he wanted to work out for himself what would work/look nice. For example, we were supposed to stick things on the snowman's face but Reuben wanted to paint the face instead and of course the madwoman had taken the paints away as they were only supposed to be for the background not the snowman... so you can imagine what it was like. And I won't even mention Isaac being forced to sit at a table for 45 minutes without much scope for messing about.
10 minutes from the end Reuben stood up and said: "I don't like this playgroup, I want to go home!" the lady looked at me and said: "I suppose you won't be coming back then?" eeehhhh... no....

Moral of this story? One of the mums put it quite nicely: "This class is great, it prepares them for school". Really? It prepares them for being brain dead? Not once in the whole class was a child encouraged to explore or be creative in any way, it was like little robots being made to do what the adult had decided they were going to do, and in a specific order. I mentioned Reuben being upset by the materials being taken away and the woman in charge said: "If I didn't do that we wouldn't get anything done". Done? What do you mean? Wouldn't it have been better to show the card to the children, put all the materials on the table at the beginning and let them decide how to do it, and if they wanted to do something else entirely, why not? It ended up with the parents doing much of it anyway. So it certainly wasn't art or creative. Is this indicative of most children's classes? I hope not but I have a terrible suspicion that most will be like this, and of course everyone looked at us as if we were mad, as my children aren't mindless sheep who will be forced to do mindless things.

Kangaroo Kids

Lots of things happening this week, the big one was the opening of Martin's photographic exhibition with Leicester Sling Meet, Kangaroo Kids. We really enjoyed the opening party, lots of friends (mostly babywearing!!!) there and the boys ran around like maniacs for over 3 hours.
http://www.kangarookidsphoto.com