Psychology, Ecology, Sewing and Shakespeare

Started our weekly "study sessions" with Hazel and Romy this week in the library. Hazel did some psychology with Emily and Romy while I read library books to the adorable Tansy, then I took over and did some history with the big girls. Emily really enjoyed the psychology and learnt about conditional and unconditional stimulus and response. I think my history efforts were a little less fascinating, mind. We're going to work on Cromwell and the civil war, loosely based on a King Cromwell book I found in the This is History series, which has associated teaching resources from Hodder Education. Over the course of several weeks, the book leads up to kids writing a mini biography of Cromwell, an approach which I fancied us having a go at. I'm sure it will get better once we get into the meat of it. Actually, the page above has helpful teaching stuff for a number of the This is History books, including King John, Empire stuff and one called "Dying for the Vote".

At home, we started a sort of introduction to Shakespeare. I like some of the ideas in this "Shocking Shakespeare" scheme of work, so we'll have a go at some of those. That site does have a fair bit of good stuff for literacy; we adapted their Spooks & Spirits unit at the end of last year and turned it into a gothic literature-ish study and added bits about Edgar Allen Poe etc. I've only just realised the site is specific to Hertfordshire schools.....well, we're nowhere near Hertfordshire, but who cares?

In science (mainly just biology atm) we've also started a new topic, looking at ecosystems, food webs and adaptations. Emily created and sorted some food webs and investigated the desert ecosystem, finding out what the challenges of living there are and how camels and catci have adaptations to help. The plan is to do the same for the other major world ecosystems...investigate the habitat and then look in more detail at how two different animals or plants have adapted to it.

Found this BBC Learning Clips site which I hadn't realised existed; hundreds of useful video clips on there for all sorts of things. Emily watched a couple about cacti and desert adaptations there.

Emily has done more computer programming-y work with Gramps in her regular Monday afternoon sessions. Last week they had fun with an old Apple emulation thing and carried on their work with Just Basic. Emily's very taken with the idea of using one of Gramps' old, unused computers as a "sacrificial computer" for which she can try to create blue screens of death and other such evil nasties!

Meanwhile a pattern arrived for a halter neck top which Emily wants to sew. We'll go and choose some material for it next week and get started on that. I haven't sewn an item of clothing since needlework O level many years ago, lol, and Emily's never done a full size garment before, so that should be interesting! Next week we're also going to investigate Chinese New Year...we have our seasonal tree to decorate in that theme and we're also going to a Chinese New Year party next weekend, so that should be fun.

Ha - now this blog post has just turned into a long list of "we're doing this and we're doing that". Will have to take more photos to upload and find something more interesting to say!

Ice Princess & Academic Dithering

Ice skating has dominated the week. Went with Hazel and Romy to begin with, and after an initial problem with too-small skates, Emily spent a happy hour clinging to the rail at the side and slowly going round the rink. Emily and I went back for a second time later in the week - the rink was full of big teens going very, very, very fast and hanging around in groups at the edge chatting, bless 'em, but Emily gathered up her guts and spent another hour and a half pottering around, gradually getting more and more confident. She's now able to do a little bit without holding on, albeit still within hand distance of the rail. Lessons are very expensive, but I'm wondering whether we can stretch to just a couple, enough to get her really moving and away from the edge. She doesn't want lessons - Emily says she'd rather figure it out herself. She did that with swimming too - took a very long time, but she did eventually teach herself to swim well :-)) We shall see.

Work-wise at home, we did some more biology, finishing up the end of our work on cells, cancer, cell division etc. More computer programming with my Dad, which is going down very well indeed. Emily presented him with a long list of what she wants to learn, computer-wise, over the next few months (!):

• I want to learn how viruses spread and how they work.
• I want to learn to create applications that work inside a webpage.
• I want to learn how to fix windows when it *Dies*
• I want to learn how to make actual software- things like maybe a file converter, a video player, anything. And make it look professional as well.
• I want to make some kind of an anti virus program. (Loads of people have done it. Why not me?)
• I want to learn about how the system registry works.
• I want to learn how to edit programs (exe files ) (if that’s possible)
• I want to learn html.
• I want to learn more about what you can do in cmd.
• I want to learn more about how windows itself works.
• I want to make a program run every time the computer starts. ( I know its to do with system registry…)
• I want to learn what a computer is like without windows… MWAHAHAHA
• I want to learn what all the F buttons do (F1, F2, F3 ect)
• I want to learn about how worms work.
• I want to learn about rootkits
• I want to cram as many programming languages into my head as possible!!!!


OK....well, that will keep both of them out of mischief for a while!

At one point during the week, I was preparing some work on glaciers for Emily to do, following on with our mountain theme in geography - and then I hit another doubting session. She's not really interested in glaciers. She knows what they are. However, according to "those who decide what our children should learn" she ought to be able to label diagrams of a glacier and know the terminology associated with it. Great, if she were interested. She's not. So, why? I failed to find on the net or invent a way to make it fascinating for her. In the end, we didn't do it. And that set me thinking again about what she "should" be learning, why, how, when and what the point of most of it is. I learnt all about glaciers at school. Other than a general knowledge of what one is, I didn't retain any of that information and have never since needed it. Because geography wasn't "my thing" and so far, it doesn't appear to be Emily's thing either. But then again, she is interested in environmental science. So who knows? And does any of it really matter, aged 11?

And then that set me thinking again about the whole exam issue and whether or not it's important for Emily to do bloody GCSEs. Half of me thinks they're all pretty pointless. The other half of me thinks that, since Emily's not the most confident child in the world, being able to tick a few boxes might be worth it to save her the future stress of having to jump through different hoops to get onto the course of her choice, or having to "perform" in an interview with the odds stacked against her. But then again, another half of me (I'm good at maths) thinks that the Open University courses etc might well serve the same purpose but at less expense and less hassle. Yet another half of my schizophrenic home education personality thinks that it would be good for Emily to knuckle down (in due course) to serious study and examination in subjects which do delight her such as psychology, biology and law. And another half nags at me, pointing out that possibly having (say) three GCSEs, none of them in maths, is worse than not having any at all. If you're going to have them, hadn't you better have forty seven all at A****** grade? Otherwise people will pay more attention to the ones you *haven't* got or the ones where you only got a B or a C. Won't they?

ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGH!

For now, we've decided not to decide, again. Emily's only 11....but then again, I don't want to be faced with her doing loads of exams crammed into only a couple of years - don't think we could afford it and I don't think we could handle the organisational stress either. So if she were going to do any, I'd rather she staggered them over quite a few years, which doesn't really leave all that much time to make those kinds of decisions.

So, I'm sticking my head in the sand again. We're going to carry on doing the subjects Emily enjoys, probably scale down the efforts with the subjects she doesn't enjoy and....wait and see. My heart says a huge NO! to any kind of school related hoop jumping. My head says that's fine for a confident child who can blag their way onto any course or into any job they please by sheer force of personality...but possibly cruel or irresponsible for a child whose confidence level varies so greatly. We've opted out of the system thus far. Why on earth would we want to opt back into it for GCSEs or A levels? Conversely - why would we want to put unnecessary obstacles into Emily's path? Sand. Meet head.

Snow Leopards and the Moon

Our bacteria didn't grow. Zilch. Nothing at all. Wonder what we did wrong? We do have another sachet of agar left, so we'll have to have a think about doing it again and seeing if we can get something to grow this time.

Last week's "work"...let's see. Emily carried on with mountains-ish stuff for geography, watching the Mountains episode of David Attenborough's Planet Earth and then researching snow leopards. The Snow Leopard Trust had some interesting materials about snow leopard conservation and the challenges of protecting a predator in areas where people depend upon their livestock for a living.

Science was biology again, looking at what cancer is and how it develops. Lots of great stuff at The Centre of the Cell including a neat animation about how cancer occurs and a game based around developing cancer treatments.

In history last week, Emily continued with the modern theme, looking at the moon landings in more depth. We read from this lovely book by Stewart Ross which looks at moon mythology, science and history and watched some footage related to the moon landings. Emily also investigated some of the theories about the moon landings being a fake and told me all about the various photographic and film anomalies and their suggested explanations.

We didn't do much on Thursday, I don't think, as I had to take the car back to finally get its MOT finished, which took several journeys and most of the day on and off. On Friday, Jacki and her girls came to visit us - the girls made delicious chocolate chip cookies and together they all sewed plump little felt chicks. Over the weekend, Emily surprised us both with this fantastic cake - I love how she can now just waltz into the kitchen alone and produce - with or even without a recipe - such lovely bits and pieces :-))

Emily and I are both thrilled that Hazel has offered to teach Emily some GCSE-ish psychology with Romy once a week. In return, I'll do some history with Romy and Emily, which will probably be less thrilling...but I'll do my best. It will be good to get back to seeing Hazel and Romy regularly....it's been far too long. Next week we're off ice skating together before our educational efforts begin, lol.

We seem to be doing quite well, education-wise, at the moment. I'm still fretting over Emily's free time, though. Because Jon and I have to work during the evenings, we don't get to spend enough family time together - bizarre, really, given that we're all at home all day long. It seems that working from home can sometimes be a recipe for less family time, not more :-(( I wish we were in a position, financially, to be able to draw a line at the end of the day and have free evenings, but we're constantly playing catch up with real life work so it's just not happening at the moment. Must work out a way to make this happen. Invent 48 hour days or something. There must be a way.

Internal Workings

Of a PC, mostly. This afternoon, Emily did some more computer science work with my Dad. They looked inside an old PC and discussed which bit did what and they also talked about their plans to build some logic circuits to operate traffic lights.

With my Dad, Emily also wrote a small basic program which lists every prime number :-))

Friday was spent visiting home ed friends (having cadged a lift from my Dad), where the girls practised finding surface areas and drawing, cutting out and making shapes from nets. At the weekend, Emily variously read, baked (yum!), Simpsons-ed, drew, karate-d and computered. On Saturday we braved letting Lucifer and Lilith out into the garden without their harnesses for the very first time but with supervision. They absolutely loved it, stayed out slightly longer with supervision on Sunday and then today were allowed out all day on their own, although we brought them in when it got dark. Beautiful little things, they're really loving their freedom and big brother Severus is an absolute angel playing with them in the garden. Big tabbies Romeo and Juliet have yet to notice that the babies are out, I think, as they spend most of the day asleep and only tend to go out in the dark until the summer comes.

This morning I took the car back to an 8am appointment to have its steering column sorted out, only to be told that they didn't have the parts and it couldn't be done until Thursday. I was deeply unimpressed, to put it mildly. No car this evening has meant Emily missing kick boxing too.

While Emily has been pondering the inner workings of a PC, I've been pondering the inner workings of our home ed style and in particular my own battles the autonomous approach. When she's not actually "doing something" with me or actively being with friends, Emily spends *a LOT* of time on her computer. Waayyy too much time, many would say. I find myself fretting over this and nagging her to get off the computer and go and do "something" else, but then I find myself nagging myself to stop nagging her. I daresay, had technology been at today's levels, I probably would have been the same at her age and so might her Dad have been. I think I'm possibly turning it into more of a problem than it should be....but then again, another part of me thinks we must be failing to provide anything else exciting to do.

With me and Jon both up to our necks in trying to earn money every spare minute of the evening and weekends apart from when I'm consciously doing things with Emily during the day - and no siblings - it's not as if Emily can run off and play "with someone". She probably likes the company when she's on the computer too, because it's in the same room as ours while we're working. She does a lot of different things on there - sometimes just playing Sims or some other game, but often finding out about things which interest her and she does a lot of creating art work and videos to put on You Tube too. It is true that her IT skills are phenomenal and her artistic skills are soaring ahead too, both of which are due to lengthy computer time. So that's all good. But surely...? Shouldn't she be reading, or playing a game on her own, or playing in the garden, or, or, or, or....?

I guess I struggle with concepts autonomous educators might take for granted sometimes. It's a combination of worrying about Emily being an only child, worrying that we have to work all the time, worrying that she might be lonely, worrying that she might be bored, worrying that she doesn't have this marvellous, all-consuming away-from-the-PC hobby that so many home educated kids do seem to have. Worrying that she's only on the PC because she can't think what else to do. In truth, Emily does do plenty of reading, garden playing, cooking and all the rest of it. We have equipment, craft stuff, books and all manner of other paraphenalia coming out of our ears, should she want to use it, which she sometimes does. And, allowing for normal preteen moods and a slight lack of social confidence, she does seem happy enough, most of the time. But - arggh! I wish I could stop fretting!

Slime and Bacteria

Lots of hands-on chemistry and biology today. Emily received a glow in the dark slime kit for Christmas and she worked her way through that with great hilarity. The glow in the dark one really does glow in the dark and makes delightful fart noises when squished as an added bonus ;-)





She also made a less firm, sloppier clear slime to which she added drops of food colouring; they spread through it to make a really pretty stained glass effect.



The explanation in the kit about polymers was woefully inadequate, however, so we spent some time this morning looking up a decent explanation. Later this afternoon, Emily worked on this polymers basics internet scavenger hunt thingy (pdf file).

In biology, we mixed up some agar and Emily thought of four places to take swabs from, to see if the bacteria will grow. She chose a tongue (mine, not hers, because she didn't like the thought of scraping hers, lol), raw meat, some mould growing near the side door (it's that kind of house...sigh) and the toilet bowl. Nice. We'll have to keep checking on the petri dish to see what's happening.

Meanwhile, Emily has also been working hard on some IT research today. She's blinding me with science about tracing IP addresses and programming pop up boxes. Eeep. It all sounds very impressive but I'm a bit lost!

Took the car in for its MOT first thing yesterday morning. It failed, of course. Something to do with the steering column being loose - it's a Rover and the garage couldn't get hold of the part needed so sent me back home to try to find it from a scrapyard. Jon found and bought it online and it arrived today. The part wasn't expensive, but it's going to cost over a hundred to have it fitted since it's apparently a long job and involves resetting the tracking too (or somesuch) and they can't do it until Monday anyway. Bit stranded until then, since the MOT is way overdue and I'm nervous of driving the car illegally, especially since it apparently invalidates the insurance if you're driving without a valid MOT. Dratted car.

Monday & Tuesday

Inventive Blog Post Titles R Us.

Emily and Jon went to the library bus yesterday morning, but came back unimpressed. They'll have to go later this week on the one and only day the village library proper is open. Emily now has a long list of book she wants to borrow (or reserve, more likely, since it's only a small library). I'm hoping that this year she will read a wider range of fiction. She loves the Jacqueline Wilson-esque angst and issues books but there's a whole world beyond that. More time in the day for reading would help too.



Yesterday afternoon we raced through some maths, converting scales to real distances and vice versa. One of the things that happened during my blog absence was that we decided to hold off on formal maths for a while. Although she's perfectly capable, Emily has a bit of a mental block about maths and tends to panic over it. She's at the same kind of level as a schooled child her age would be, but unless she's going to take a maths GCSE, which seems unlikely, we're debating the need to venture into maths beyond the level that most of us use on a daily basis. Fractions, percentages, ratios, decimals, all the primary level stuff, sure. Calculus, advanced algebra, trig and the like? Not unless it becomes clear later that she's going to need some kind of maths qualification in order to get where she's going.

We also steamed through some English word roots work; we're working our way through English From the Roots Up - in typing this I've just found some online flashcards and matching games to go with the book. Would really like to get back to learning Latin at some point, but we struggle with consistently doing any one thing which is a bit of a problem when it comes to language learning. We'll see.

Then we moved onto history. At the moment, Emily's studying modern history as in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Yesterday afternoon she created timelines for the major world events of the 50s and 60s - 50s being a recap because we did all that before Christmas. For each decade, she's doing the timeline, studying one event in depth (for the 50s she chose the Coronation, for the 60s it's going to be the moon landing) and researching the music, fashion and cultural trends of the decade. In theory. In practice, it's been going on for ever! Some useful websites for this were Connected Earth which has a fab downloadable cheat document for hassled parents ;-) and Topic Box which has lots of useful links. I've just spotted that Connected Earth also has a History of the Internet unit which might be right up Emily's street.

This morning I felt poorly, so Emily amused herself while I amused a parrot; this afternoon she had a session with my Dad using small basic to do some programming and turtle graphics. My Dad has been providing lots of physics education for Emily over the last few months - he normally has the pleasure of her company each Monday afternoon, but he was poorly this week too so it was moved to today. They've done all sorts of complicated stuff with amazing equipment - very impressive! Just before Christmas he taught Emily a load of card tricks using various mathematical principles and she performed them for us on Boxing Day night, very memorably :-))

Tomorrow's education will consist of car mechanics.....well, I'm taking Emily with me to get the car MOT done and they have a viewing bay - does that count?

The problem I'm facing at the moment, home ed wise, is being spoilt for choice. I keep coming across so many fabulous internet sites but I usually don't remember to use them, can't find them again or get bogged down in a topic that we really should have moved on from (or from which we should have moved on, with my grammar hat on). I wish I could be better organised and plan ahead more, but with so much else to do we're (as usual) flying by the seat of our collective, shiny pants.

A Fresh Start for 2010

Five months since my last post and less than twenty posts all last year -- this year, I'm going to get back up to speed with this blog.

I can't begin to cover what's gone on in the last five months, so we'll just draw a line under that and start again. We all plodded along happily enough and we have two new additions to the family, brother and sister kittens Lucifer and Lilith, now five months old and about to start adventuring in the garden once this dratted snow has finally gone.

We celebrated Emily's 11th birthday on the 2nd January and she enjoyed a birthday sleepover party the following day. She then promptly fell poorly for a couple of days, so we didn't get back to work last week with the exception of Friday when we did finally get something done.

Emily's future ambitions are now heading away from vet and towards feline behaviourist or (human) psychologist. She continues to grow up rapidly, with an impressively expanding range of both talents and preteen mood swings. I continue to go through the occasional panic about whether or not we can provide a good enough education to allow her to fulfil her ambitions....but then if I didn't sometimes feel that I'd be unwisely arrogant, I think. It's good to be kept on your toes by these doubts sometimes. Motivation is an issue at the moment when it comes to home education "work" and has been for the last six months or so....where once Emily was full of beans and keen to get on with whatever we were doing, it frequently becomes a battle nowadays as she'd rather read, sleep (!) or play on her computer. All productive enough in its own way, sure, but we don't work function well in that completely unstructured environment for long.

Meanwhile, Jon's mediumship is going from strength to strength and he's working out what his future plans are in that arena. I'm working on a non fiction book proposal and making a real effort to kick start my writing in other directions too. I have a feeling that 2010 should be a good year for us, if we can all pull our socks up and get on with it.

It'll all work out :-) We just need to get back into a proper routine....although if I were paid for each time I'd said that on this blog over the last five years, I'd be a rich woman :-)