Within the blur

Life is fading out of focus - this academic year is nearly done for us and I am beginning to draw together our various activities. My eldest has completed two IGCSEs this year and is aiming to finish a Literature assignment for his "1000 Years of Poetry" course so that he can put it away over the summer. My younger two each did a maths assessment this morning. Having been very excited by the idea of a maths exam, my little girl puffed her way through an hour of angles and I was surprised at the lack of her usual neatness that her work showed. It was only on marking it with her that I reflected on the fact that it was from a Year 7 textbook and she had got pretty much all of it right. (She's 10.) My student contact for the year is nearly over, the marathon is done and there is a sense of completion.

At the same time, my thoughts are turning to the future. My partner and I are in the process of transforming our tutoring into a business and launching my English teaching here in the Dales and I am beginning to put together my part-time teaching timetable for September. I am about to start exam marking and have just this morning seen a working-from-home opportunity in a local sixth form college which I will be applying for. I am considering options for the childrens' studies for next year, including Open Learn self-study courses available from the Open University and finding centres where the children would be able to take a Modern Foreign Language IGCSE and my two boys are busy planning our schedule for this coming Thursday when we will be at the Oxford University Open Day visiting the English and Engineering departments.

The image I have is of a slide-show, where one picture blurs into the next. For a while nothing is clear, it is just a mess of colour. The old picture is going and the new is not year clear. I feel as if I am living within the blur.

Tired

I'm tired. I''m tired of worrying if they're ok and if I'm doing enough, if I'm good enough. I'm tired of worrying that, right now, they are not learning anything.( I remember feeling that way while I changed the baby's nappy and my  eldest watched Teletubbies.) I'm tired of the relentless argument in my head that it really is ok, they really are learning and that they really are at least as educated as their schooled peers. I'm tired of the doubt. I'm tired hearing that the children feel an insidious pressure to go to school, to achieve 10 A*s and that owning a tea-room isn't ambition enough.
When they are excited about grasping vertically opposite angles, or proving the formula for interior angles or writing an essay comparing Shakespearean sonnet form to Spenserian, my confidence flashes for a moment and is gone, like a match flame.
When they are bored, or sneaky, or ungracious, or can't recite their times-tables, the slow-burn of my fear deepens.
I wouldn't have lived any other way. I just wish it wasn't so darn scary. And I wish I wasn't so tired.

Where am I looking?

It's that time of year again. The time of year when the sun is shining, the summer feels tangible, a picnic beckons and formal education feels like too hard a mountain to climb. We are all tired. My eldest is growing weary of revision: he has one more paper to go and he will have completed two IGCSEs. The younger two performed in the Swaledale Festival on Sunday: they played the parts of ghostly children in the poignant and funny, locally written "Deckchairs". I am beginning to panic that we haven't done "enough" this year, that there isn't enough on paper, that the fictional inspector would not be satisfied, that the voices of discontent would be, well, discontent.
I can see that what I often fail to do it to count our successes as weighty as our failures, that new and unexpected opportunities do not matter to me as much as the plans that got left behind. I like to tick boxes, see completed workbooks and have something to show on paper for a year's education.
What I do have to show is three happy, healthy and thriving children. They are increasingly independent and self-motivated. They have all become much fitter and eat more healthily since our move North. My eldest has taken his first qualifications. We have read books, studied maths and science, become part of the local parish church, my daughter has taken up dance, my middle son joined his first football team and my eldest become part of Youth Theatre in Richmond. For my own sake, I can keep repeating their achievements but I'm not sure that it really matters (or is very interesting to read), what matters is that we keep living this life that we have chosen, that the children keep on developing and growing and that I turn my eyes from what we haven't done to what we are, this moment, actually doing.

You are not on the bus!

I work as a private tutor. It is work that I really enjoy and feel passionate about. The students I work with have more going on in their lives than their study of the particular subject which I am working on with them and often this will impact their learning. I see a whole range of approaches to education and to learning, not just from the students but from their parents and, broadly, their are two main schools of thought. For some parents, they are in the driving seat, or beginning to coach their child in taking control. The education, the study, is their thing, to be undertaken, engaged in, over-viewed themselves. This is true of families using schools and of home-educating families. For some, they are out-sourcing: someone else has been brought in to deal with this subject and that person - in this case me - is responsible. This is something I have had to struggle with. Where does my responsibility start? Where does it end? And I find that the more the responsibility gets shuffled my way, the more anxious and involved I get. A parent enters their home-schooled child for a different exam board than the one they are working towards and I notice this and provide the student with the correct specification; work with her to locate which areas of the spec have not yet been covered and which have been learned but can now be left; print off past-exam papers and make sure the student knows what materials they need to take with them. Another student desires an A grade because but fails to put in the question practice necessary, telling me that it is futile or that another subject's course-work needed extra time, and then can only manage a U grade on a mock paper. What is my responsibility? What is theirs?
My own children want to go to University and I have put time in to finding out the entry requirements and have put things in place to move them towards being ready to put together a strong application but they hear contradictory messages and are told that they won't have enough GCSEs. They are unsettled and so am I, and I encourage them to access the information themselves. I will take them to another open day, but I will expect them to plan our agenda, prepare what they want to know and to ask the right questions.
Students and children: I tell them that in the end, it does not affect my life - it affects theirs. They are not on a bus towards Higher Education, they are on a guided trek. I have the experience, the subject knowledge and the motivation to journey with them, to show them the way and to model the techniques  but I cannot (not, will not, but physically cannot) move them along this path myself.  It is their journey, their effort and one that they have to engage in. The answers do not come easily, tears will be shed and huge amounts of effort must be expended.
As this academic year begins to draw to a close and young people are filling exam halls, I am filled with this conviction and seeing the necessity of stating this expectation clearly with new and old students as well as with my own children: You are not on the bus! Get up on your feet and get walking. I will walk with you, I will lead and encourage you but the steps are yours. And at the end, the satisfaction, pride and achievement will be yours too.

Leaves

I am trying to support my eldest as best I can in his last minute revision for Biology IGCSE which he takes next week. My plan this afternoon was to take a part of the specification and teach it to his brother and sister and he could join in. Interactive and fun, I thought, and better than sitting with a text-book. He did not think so, and with gentle politeness said he'd rather revise alone. So I took his younger siblings to the wood just behind our house and we collected leaves: big ones, little ones, spiky and smooth ones.
We looked at them, listed their similarities and differences and discussed what leaves do and then got out the paints. We made Lego water and carbon dioxide, dismantled them and made Lego glucose and oxygen with the pieces. By this stage their big brother decided to join us. He looked up xylem and phloem for us and made sure that our Lego equation balanced.

The younger two had had enough by this point so they left and my eldest and I broke up our Lego glucose and "respired it" to return it to carbon dioxide and water. We talked about the energy changes and my son was deeply impressed that something as amazing as the breaking of inter-molecular bonds could happen in something as ordinary as a leaf. It was interesting, I hope it was memorable, and it was a good afternoon's work.

Isles Bridge

A perfect home ed day. Really. It doesn't get better than this.
My eldest son is preparing for his first GCSE exam on Friday and the twin priorities this week are practicing differentiation and keeping him relaxed. We did an hour of maths at the table, packed a bag and walked 10 minutes to the river. Paddling, it seems, is irresistible.

It wasn't long before my middle son had waded to the other side with his sister anxious to join in. My eldest sat down with me while I painted and we talked over the things on his mind and he drew a little. We had lunch and I read to them from the Science book (he is also revising for Biology GCSE) and we discussed genetic engineering and genetically modifed food. There are frost-resistant potatoes with the DNA of Antarctic fish which they thought was "cool" but were concerned about whether they were vegetarian.

The younger two returned to the river to dare each other to swim and my eldest and I read more about cloning and developed the dystopian idea of  football clubs cloning their best players and training them from birth to be even higher levels of brilliance. Who would the parent be? Would corrupt clubs produce clones with defective DNA and sell them to rival clubs? What if the child did not want to play football? My son's DNA clearly hold more novel-writing genes than engineering genes! I left him revising Biology on my iphone app as I responded to the calls of the younger to to watch them swim.
By this stage they were blue with cold, even in the bright summer sunshine, so we headed home and sat in our garden with hot chocolate and cake and read our current chapter book pausing only to gloat when tourists strolled passed, quietly and to ourselves of course, that we actually live here.
The younger two went out to rehearse for their play after dinner, I had some time to head out on a long run and my eldest enjoyed a solitary couple of hours.
Everything I had planned to do was done: Biology and Maths were revised, chapter book was read, art was available and so much more importantly, emotions were heard, attention was given and life was lived!

The Maths Demon

Maths has always been a thorny subject. My eldest is approaching his Maths GCSE in May and is motivated by the knowledge that once this exam is over he will never, ever have to study Maths again. He is apologetic about this, even asking if I am disappointed. but I am not at all worried. In talking it through with him I was able to explain that this is the case for most students: Maths GCSE marks the end of formal Maths study and, unless they take a Maths qualification post-16, most people never go near a Maths problem again.
My middle son is a much more natural mathematician, maths just seems to make more sense to him, numbers are more concrete and the ideas flow. He has worked hard this year and, even though we moved house and life was quite disrupted, had finished his Maths for the year by mid-March. He was hugely excited by the prospect of starting his GCSE studies and so he began last week. We have, however, run straight into the quagmire of misery, confusion and over-burden and I have been confused as to why. Every time I sit with him and work through his exercises he seems quite happy with the concepts but as soon as he is left to his own devices he is lost again. He is not resistant and is trying hard, testament to his eagerness to study at this level. My frustration levels are rising and his morale is falling.
On chatting to my partner about it, we began to see that he is learning so much more than Maths and, as with any multi-skill learning experience, it is too much for him to be putting it all together immediately. My son and I sat together and I wrote a list of all the skills I can see that he is using and developing:
1) Laying his work out neatly. Up until now he has had workbooks and not been responsible for the clarity of the page.
2) Organising his time. Once the initial subject has been explained, he is responsible for finding time in the day to complete the exercises.
3) Aiming towards a big and distant goal. Workbooks were tangible in size and once every page was complete they were done but GCSE has no such physical "size".
4) Concentrating for longer periods of time. There is no doubt that it is a greater workload and he will have to sit at the table and work for longer.
5) Copying a question from a textbook, especially difficult with brackets and indices. Here, I am seeing the value of all the copywriting we have done together and reminded of attempting copywriting in a different language. Without the sense of words and letter sets that already have a place in the memory, copying is hard and even harder when it is dense text on a page.
So, today, I will copy some of questions into his book for him which will automatically set out the page for him and reduce the copy-writing burden. I will write a time-table for the day with short blocks of maths and we will start with a pep talk about his goals which are admirable and tough. He has much to be proud of - starting maths GCSE at just 12  is no mean feat - and that is the most important message he needs to hear today.

Call Centre

We're tired this week. One weekend a month we all travel back down to London; my partner and I both teach and the children spend the weekend with their dad. My partner actually travels down earlier in the week and we follow on Thursday. The children had a fun time as their grandparents were visiting too and they all went out on Saturday night. We drove home Sunday evening and were caught in heavy snow on the last stretch of our journey. Having been making good time we spent the last hour creeping along ungritted country roads praying that the tyres would remain gripping the increasing layer of snow on the tarmac. We arrived home, safe and well, later than we expected.
This month we are travelling down to London twice to make up for both Christmas and Easter breaks. So my partner leaves again tomorrow and the children and I will be back on the road on Thursday. Which leaves me stuck in a familiar home-school dilemma. Do I, accepting that we are all shattered and did not have our usual weekend down-time, declare two days off? Or do I press on to make up for the four days of lost time? The critical Greek chorus are quick to start: the children need to learn that they've got to get on with work even if they are tired; they are not doing anything educational and so will never get qualifcations and, consequently, jobs; Other women manage to juggle late-nights, work, child-rearing, keeping house and still look wonderful and never shout at their children and therefore I am a weak and ineffective failure; I am not instilling discipline or a good work ethic in my children; I am failing in home-education; and so the list goes on.
But, I am getting better at looking at their lives as a learning opportunity. Yesterday I asked my daughter to phone the horse-rescue charity she supports to let them know her new address. She had a quick and pleasant conversation and came off the phone excited, proud of herself and just a little bit more prepared for life in the grown-up world. She had really enjoyed it, she told us. Really? Would she like to ring a whole bunch of other organizations sending junk mail to our old address and ask to be removed from the mailing list? She spent the next half-an-hour happily calling catalolgue companies and charities. She was polite and clear and confident to answer questions. She developed her social skills, topped-up her extrovert personality and saved us a big  job.
My middle son is baking and working on his literacy by catching up on back issues of Top Gear magazine which we picked up from our old address. My daughter has spent this morning cleaning out our chickens and my eldest son is starting work on his online Latin course. It's all happening. It always does. Perhaps I don't need to worry quite so much!

Dragon

Sometimes it just works. Unexpectedly, the usual amount of vague ideas, lack of "proper planning" and even a little resisitance still all come together.
We have a large box of art stuff, largely different types of coloured pencils, plus pastels, crayons, more pencils and lots and lots of half-used pads of different sizes and weights of paper. Every time I try to clear it out we get stuck with all the still untried possibilities. (But why are they still untried?) So my art curriculum this term has boiled down to opening the art box and using the stuff in there.
So that is what my daughter and I did yesterday. She really just wanted to carry on drawing her pictures to send to a friend (surely, my doubtful voice says, that is just as much art as my idea?) but agreed to give it half-an-hour. We settled on dragons as we have some delightful dragon stencils and I gave her the challenge of doing four pictures, each with a different material and different paper, and I joined her.

It was fun. She developed a character for one of her creations and was inspired to write a poem. She thought it would be "cool" to have a poem in which each line started with the letters that spell out "DRAGON" and my son let her know that this was an acrostic. We played with words and she wrote her poem and then copied it out onto her picture, which now, along with seven other dragons, decorates our mantlepiece.

Dragon

Deep in the wood,

Residing in a black cave,

All his skin green;

Guzzling a young deer,

Orchids scattered everywhere,

Never more to return to the land of men.

 Middle son had, meanwhile, been baking, so we switched chapter book for Poetry Tea. devoured awesome, warm cherry cake and shared poems. Eldest son read us a poem he has written for his English course and a story which he has just heard has made it through to the second round of a national competition. We were reminded of the Geographical Fugue and listened to it on youtube.

Sometimes it just works.

Schola

"The first task of any school should be to protect its privilege of offering free time - the Latin word schola  means free time - to understand ourselves and our world a little better."
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

Activities

One thing that we have been keen to change as a family is the sense of always rushing from one activity to another, hurrying out of the door five minutes later than I intended to join one of the busiest stretches of the M25 on our way to book group/swimming/climbing ...
Activities always sound so interesting, so educational, so sociable. They tick boxes for me as a home-edding mother, evidence (ammunition?) in those conversations that doubt my educational choices. But we feel run ragged; what the children really love is to be told that we have nothing planned, that their time is their own. They don't really want to be all that busy.
So we plan to slow down.
But I am afraid that they won't have friends or social opportunities. And so the activities are creeping back in, already!
My daughter is going to try the local dance class, as good a place to meet other girls as any, surely. My middle son has his first football practice on Sunday. My eldest plans to join the local amateur dramatics society - I just need to hunt down the youth contact who I have heard such good things of. And then there is church, and Pony Club, and horse-riding. Plus trying to find some "play-dates" and going for a walk with neighbours or extending and invite for tea and cake.
It scares me to not be busy, to not spend a lot of time with people. But it exhausts me. So we'll choose not to: we won't go to Pony Club just yet and we'll not try to fit in swimming too, or invite anyone next week. I'll cope with the nerves and anxiety and I'll make a note in my diary to review it at half-term (only six weeks away) and I'll choose to let my family begin to experience the space we've longed for.

Chelsea

A Day Out in London! It's a long time since we had one of those.
A London wide art installation.

Always a chance to be silly!

Meeting a Chelsea Pensioner.

Handling a musket - or was it a rifle? We all learned loads of history through a talk on the wars of the Nineteenth Century.

And more eggs!

Sharp

New sharpeners: sharp pencils, sharp colours.
Children's self-expression valued: what they draw matters, how they draw matters, having sharp pencils to draw with matters. They matter.

Creating a path II

My middle son is not such a natural writer, he does not have such a natural affinity for words, he does not particularly like to read and seldom spontaneously writes. It’s not that he is reluctant, but just that it isn’t something he feels passionate about.
He is a funny and happy child and likes to put humour into his writing; he tends to write as if he is chatting to a friend and tends to put in jokes and asides. He does not delve much into ideas or expand on his topic but his is quite happy to free-write for 10 minutes. He can write (or at least print) very neatly and is happy to do copy-writing, although he would always prefer a shorter passage and it takes him quite a time. His spelling in freewrites is very original but he can usually spot and even correct mistakes.
I would like him to write in joined-up writing and then to work on writing a bit quicker but still neatly. I would like to see his automatic spelling improve. I would like him to develop his ideas and write more about one topic or point. I would like to encourage him to write about factual things (his interest in cars or what he learned about in his history lesson or how to play his favourite computer game) in a more ordered and logical, “followable” way.
I think this last goal is a good one to focus on. I think that talking through the topic with him, encouraging his ideas to be more step-by-step and slowing down his free-writing would be the way forward. Perhaps I will start with post-it notes, and then alternate sentences, then move on to him writing three or four sentences before I interject, or me adding words to his sentences to encourage more idea development and I think lots of good conversation before-hand will be key as I try to understand what he wants to write so that my writing makes sense and encourages him.

Dialogue

My kids are amazing. Every mum says that, and I'm sure yours are too, but today I have really seen and felt and enjoyed that.We are continuing on our journey of Dynamic Revision and one suggestion for this week's assignment was to write an imaginary dialogue. My little girl chose the cat and the dog. She wrote from the dog's point of view and I from the cat's. It made us both think about writing in character, how would the cat reply to our dog? Not very nicely. It's not what I would say, but our grumpy feline wouldn't mince words! With my boys we chose people from the chapter book we have just finished and wrote "behind-the-scenes" dialogues, what might have been said but we, the readers, were not privy to. We extended our sense of audience by reading the conversations aloud to a lunch-time visitor. My children have been witty, careful and fun. Their spelling and punctuation wasn't too bad either! Much more that "good" pieces of work, these were fun times, a joint effort, a connection between mum and child. It is experiences like these that make me love home ed!

Winter Sunshine

Sunshine in the park.

Partnership

Partnership writing:  a Bravewriter idea. The family on-line course is refocusing me, reminding me that it’s about being alongside my children; about figuring out what they need and how I can support them in their writing. It’s about letting them dictate or doing conversational freewrites where we take turns to write back and forth or by taking time to read what they have written and engage in their work or seeing what they are doing well and building on it  andseeing their areas of weakness and looking for activities to strengthen them. Alongside – my children’s cheerleader, partner, guide.

My eldest gets in quite a state about maths. He can motivate himself to write 20,000 words in a month , finding the time each day, holding the entire story arc in his head, making himself sit down and type day after day but maths is another story. It is clearly painful and his description of it as pointless and dull does not seem to me sufficient to explain the depths of anguish he genuinely seems to feel. Maths has always been something of a problem especially at this time of year. I have noticed that all maths books seem to be arranged in the same way: number comes first which is simply adding up and the like and then comes algebra. This totally throws him. He can’t see the point and finds it hard. This is the time of tears and of wanting to give up. Once we’re through this we hit shape and space, which seems to make so much more sense to him: home strait, all the way to summer.

So yesterday had us having one of those, “You just have to try harder...  if you were in school...you don’t know you’re born,” type conversations. Not really a conversation:  me telling him and him gradually shutting down and feeling more and more a failure. Finally the voice of sanity managed make itself heard above the panic that my son will never get a maths qualification, will fail in life and it will be all my fault. Sanity reminds me that he is my little boy; and I love him; and he needs my help. He needs me to partner him: to sit next to him, to model solutions, to talk it through and to explain: Partnership Maths!  He needs me alongside, not the adversary but the friend, the supporter, the cheerleader. 15 minutes a day I have promised him throughout February. Alongside.

Wonder wheel

 My kids are amazing! Almost every mother believes that about her own children - and rightly so - and mine have been particularly amazing this week.
I like to be "educational" with the children, not all the time of course (although that is an educational philosophy debate in itself ...), and so I planned to watch the first episode of the new BBC documentary "Earthflight" with them after their swimming lesson. However, while they were out, the local delivery network brought a birthday present for my middle son, 11 just a week ago, of K'nex. As soon as he received it the box was open, the tray for pieces on the table and he was away, puzzling over the instructions, fitting tiny plastic parts together and constructing a ferris wheel. I got on with a few admin jobs and wondered when to switch the tv on. I went to find my eldest and he was busy on the computer creating another animation with increasingly complex special effects. My daughter was out in the street cycling with the two girls she is friends with who live in our road. All of them engaged in exactly the kind of industry any mother, any teacher, would want to see children taking part in. And I am convinced that what they choose to do meets needs in them that they know, or maybe only sense, that they have that I could have no clue about. I am not so arrogant or sure of my "educational ideas"  that I believe them to be better, more important or of more value that these self-selected activities. I went back to my admin and left them to it!

Christmas. Holidays.

It's been a long, hard term. It's been a tumultous year. I am desperate for the Christmas holidays. So, we have started them early. How often have I had that experience of arriving at a longed-for break only to feel too exhausted to enjoy myself or to succumb to some lurking germ. So, I made a conscious choice to start slowing down. We finished Chapter Book and filed away the children's work. We have got out the art box and sat all together at the table drawing and painting. We have stopped over a cup of tea and read one or two poems. We have stayed in bed longer in the mornings and I have even stayed up late completing a jigsaw. It's 8.30 in the morning, the children are chatting upstairs in their rooms and I have drunk my first cup of tea, eaten toast with chocolate spread and am enjoying some quiet time on the computer. I'm still in my PJs. It's nearly the holidays and I'm relaxed and ready.

Chapter Book

Already it is time to be looking ahead to January, and that inevitably means looking at the term just gone and asking myself what went well, what we enjoyed as a family, what we long for more of, and what we can't wait to be rid of. Reading a chapter book has always been hugely important to me and to the children. Through all kinds of literature we have learnt so much, not only about historical events, geographical places, mathematical ideas and classic literature; not only about good writing, story structure and well-crafted sentences; but also about being a family, the value of all stopping and being together at the same time and the extra-special feeling of a long hug on the sofa with mum and the dog.
But somehow it hasn't worked so well this term. The book I wanted to read in September wasn't in the library and, although I placed a reservation, was a long time coming. I picked something unknown by a famous author and it didn't take long to realise why it was unknown! We tried and old favourite of mine and my eldest son's, but the other two children found it boring. Having a looser time-table and working more hours myself meant that we found it hard to make the time to read. 
However, in just the last few weeks, we began "The Eagle of the Ninth" by Rosemary Sutcliff, a book I had had on my "to read" list for a long time. After a slow start (oh please, not another to give up on) the story got going and is now racing along at an exciting speed. Today, for the first time, I had a request to go straight on and read the next chapter! Reading it has reminded me how important this shared experience is, how much I love reclining on the sofa, the dog's head in my lap, one son listening in stillness, two other children drawing and colouring, interrupting with the occasional question or observation. It has been warm and precious and not only contributed a huge amount to our knowledge of Roman Britain, but has deepened our emotional connection, soothed scratchy relationships and reminded me again of so much that I love about our lifestyle of home education.
Books for January are already on order!