Six secrets of a smug home educator

Cor blimey I was impressed with myself, home educating a 3/4 year old. It's easy to come off as an insufferable know it all when you discover home education. NP (that's the old nickname, she's chosen a new one and will be Diana henceforth) is 9 now and we've been through a whole bunch of stuff since those earnest early days. How about a look back now from the other side of early years HE? 

1) I'm really not talking about your kid.

If I bang on about square pegs, institutions, etc it's mainly because my kid was a pain in the backside about attending school, or I had a personality clash with a teacher who was my polar opposite. School might have been shit for us. It might not be for you. Everyone's got their own reasons for what they do.

2) I'm really not saying that you, personally, are a shit teacher.

I know you work hard and have skills beyond my understanding. Good for you. Let's move on.

3) It isn't all fluffy clouds, rainbows and self direction.

Sometimes it's arguments, tired people and raised eyebrows all round. Sometimes it's really shit and then you have to have a word with yourself.

4) Flexibility is the ultimate goal

You do structured home education with a colour coded time table and it's wonderful for a day. Then the 4 year old has a strop about cutting out pictures that start with the letter "s" and won't do her Jolly Phonics. So you unschool and strew and hang out at parks for hours with lovely people and it's all great. Then you panic, install a curriculum and blow it all to hell....Unschooling part two commences...and decommences....and then you "incentivise" learning...and it goes well and then you have curriculum and workbooks and they're half done or not done or thrown at the wall and then all of a sudden she can read and write and do maths and all the other things and you wonder what the f*cking hell was the thing that did it.

(my money is on *all of it*)

5) Socialising is probably the main thing we did for 4 years.

For hours at a time. I'm not kidding you. It was great. And exhausting. Can we go home now and do workbooks? No? OK then.

6) Burnout is inevitable

We are not superhuman. The smug lists of activities and facebook boasts are our way of making ourselves feel better for being shit human beings for half the week and feeding them ham sandwiches for 3 days running cos we've all got flu and cba.

Learning to Read, Home Ed Style

So, y'know, screw this system: Too Much Too Young

Seriously. 

You have no idea what an utterly shambolic waste of time it is trying to teach some 4 year old kids how to read and write. 

I'm not kidding. I just spent nearly 4 years attempting it. Do you know what worked in the end? 

Waiting until she was ready.

Sure, there were times like this when I thought I had it all worked out. I have the whole lot of Jolly Phonics; songs, workbooks, teacher guide, A4 exercise book to stick each lovingly coloured worksheet in...

My grand phonics plan worked for about a week or two at a time. But she eventually thought it was a pile of crap and threw a strop when I tried to do it, so it sat in the cupboard. 

Next came The Reading Lesson (not an affiliate link, what do you think I am? A proper blogger?)

Sometimes this worked. Most of the time it didn't. I think we did chapter 1 about 5 times.

But, gradually she learned letters and sounds. She learned some words even. She played xbox games and learned what was useful to her. She saw an episode of Pokemon (thanks Netflix) and got hooked. Someone bought her a Pokemon game. I think reading might have become useful and relevant to her around the start of 2014, age 6. Through osmotic repetition and much (*much*) pestering asking-of-adults she learned some words.

I put up a 100 common words poster. I took a chance and bought some *really* old Pokemon readers for 1p off Amazon for her 7th birthday. Taking it in turns, we worked through the pages. This was something she could do - the stories and many of the words were familiar and she was memorising more as she went along. We borrowed audio books from the library. So. Many. Audio. Books.  We played Reading Eggs.

She still wasn't confident. She still told people she couldn't read. She still panicked when pressured to learn by anyone. I learned to let it go, mostly. And to stand up for her.

This year I decided to clear out my cupboards. I found the wipe-clean alphabet books and stacked them away for future offspring. I chucked away the Jolly Phonics workbooks. I looked at The Reading Lesson and remarked to Mr Onions I was putting it into storage. He had other ideas. He set her a challenge. Do some reading lessons every day for a week and I'll buy you a toy.

I'm not a bribery sort of person. I was all about the intrinsic motivation, star charts were the devil. But I was (skeptically) willing to give it a chance. And she did it. By Jove, she did! And after the first challenge was over, she carried on. It became part of our evening routine, she was learning and trying and finding she could do it, no reward required. She was 7 years old and she learned to read in less than 6 months. Now she proudly tells people she can read. 

She's nearly 8 and we're still working on it. We're getting early readers from the library and working on them every week. She has a huge love of stories and we've got into a habit of hanging out at the library for an hour each week reading to each other, coming away with more and more books every time (last time we went in the assistant gave me a bit of a look and reminded me we had 22 books out already but they're at risk of closing so I say they should lap up the issue numbers.)

Those 4 years were a bloody hard slog. It was draining, it was frustrating, it was pointless. She didn't have a reading related disability, she wasn't naughty, she just wasn't ready. But it took 4 years of getting it wrong, learning for myself, trying a bit of autonomous education and then building up her confidence, (something that had been taken away from her by all sorts of pressures, not least the diabolical time she spent in nursery school, aged 3) in order to achieve this. 

People, look to your child. Listen to her. Know him. They'll get there. Some earlier, some later, some in a completely novel way. It'll happen. Some even do it completely on their own, like our friends who learned to read without being taught. And if school doesn't appreciate your child is an individual, who will learn at their own pace, know that it's not your fault. It's their shoddy, broken system.

Assessing home educators

Many questions home educators receive have hidden agendas. For example;

"Does anyone have to inspect you?" hides the questions: 

"How can you educate without someone telling you what to do?" 

and;

"How can you be good enough?"

To which my reply ought to be:

"I have a brain, I can figure out the stuff my kid should know. I can read at least as well as an average teacher, I can access the same resources. Most people can do these things. Even if I can't buy books I can request them through my library. I can beg and borrow. You may be surprised to hear that many home educators spend plenty of time considering educational philosophies and honing their approach.

"I continue to educate myself. I have family and friends to whom I am accountable and I trust myself to make choices for my family. I work damn hard to achieve the best for her and no-one has a right to judge my ability or define us by arbitrary numbers made for a system we reject."

...but instead I will continue to smile and shake my head, "no, it's not like school." Because some arguments are still too frighteningly radical to get into out loud.

Summer Reading Challenge

Children are often liable to take you by surprise, aren't they? 

At the moment, we aren't using any kind of structured learning but we are doing lots of reading and taking advantage of every opportunity. In this environment, over past month, my little one has discovered something awesome.

The glee on her little face when she takes a book off me and says, "Now I'll read it to you mommy," eek! It still makes me grin.

She uses a number of techniques to help her read the story, but I don't think it involves the writing at all. It reminds me of the wordless books that I think form level one of The Oxford Reading Tree. It has also set off a chain reaction in my head of Awesome Things We Can Do Now.

So, how does she do it? 

Firstly, she chooses books that she knows well and recalls the exact words from memory, she uses inflection she's heard from us.

Then she looks at the pictures to jog her memory.

If she can't remember the exact words she sometimes gets frustrated, but she has recently tried substituting similar words (and received a lot of praise for thinking of that idea!)

She has also recalled and re-told the story of Peter Rabbit for me, without the book, in order to create our own little version of the story in a mini-book (thank you, zine-making obsession, I knew it would get me somewhere, even if I never made one of my own!)

This week, she used her new skills to finish her first book in the library Circus Stars challenge.

I'm so excited to see what happens next in our reading journey and I'll be updating the fun reading stuff we get up to on the way :)

"She's going to be in my family one day"

I was invited to the preschool Teddy Bears Picnic last week. It was pretty likely I'd be standing around for an hour, not speaking to any other parents and appearing to be a stuck up cow (my mom calls it 'aloof'), but for the sake of watching Miss J's face when introduced to Pink Bill Murray, I attended. 

Little NP was ecstatic to have me there and made a beautiful jam sandwich for us to share, with lettuce and teddy bear ham on the side (NP's philosophy: why make a choice when you can have both?)

I wasn't wrong: the hour was spent with everyone paired up with other parents they already knew, barely acknowledging anyone else. I played with the kids then had a nice sit in the sun. NP grabbed a bike and was soon joined by a little boy from the next-door (mostly evil) nursery. They sped around the playground track together for the best part of 10 minutes, talking, racing, waiting for each other to catch up. It was gorgeous. 

They came over to see me.

Little Boy: "This is my friend"

Me: "Oh right, this is my little girl, I'm her mommy"

LB: "She's going to be in my family one day"

Me: "Is she? Well that's nice, are you going to get married"

LB & NP: "Yes"

Me: "Are you having a nice ride on your bikes?"

LB: "Yes these are both Mini's and they have a V8 N"*

both speed off happily

Me: "Oh OK then"

must attempt to ingratiate more into acceptable parental society to get these two together more often. 

*This is what it sounded like to me, god knows what the last bit was meant to be, but I found it pretty damn funny

Gendered colours

I've been waiting for NP to develop some sort of gendered attitude towards colour, and recently I thought it had happened with Gary and Pink Bill Murray (whose name will surely be hilarious to a select few and ridiculous to all the rest)

Even though I said that Gary and Bill are boy names she insisted they were girls. 

"Why are they girls?" I asked, and I'm *almost certain* she mentioned 'pink' as a defining factor. 

So I tried a little gentle probing, "If they were blue would they still be girls?" 

She delivered a more withering look than I thought a 4 year old was capable of and said "Yes" in a tone that told me in no uncertain terms, "Mommy, you are the greatest dumbass in the world."

Growing vegetables with kids

A very happy green-fingered lady

We've been growing vegetables in our garden for 3 years now and I can't believe that this year is the first time we've tried something legume-ey (that's a scientific word, btw).

We've had plenty of success with potatoes for a couple of years but decided to give the soil a rest from those this year. A quick check in my self-sufficiency book has just proved that my ability to retain useless information is in fine form, as we've managed to plant the above sugar-snap peas in the spot that previously held potatoes.

I was hugely proud of myself for constructing a frame for the peas and NP has been delighted with her 'peapods'. We gave her a choice of seeds and she decided to grow sugar snaps because she loves them so much - she eats them raw. Every visitor to the house has been dragged outside to view them and as soon as she spotted me harvesting them she was right there yanking them off and whooping for joy.

I definitely think all kids should get a chance to grow veggies of some sort, even a tiny pot of salad would be great, watching things grow and taking care of them is a great conversation starter for learning about nature and sometimes even a good way to get them to eat vegetables. People always say that cooking with your kids makes them want to eat the food they've made; growing things is another step in that chain. 

Counterbalance

I believe our life is a process of juggling to preserve a fine balance; thus to reset the equilibrium that was thrown off by our super smug home educating post on Monday, the universe has thrown us a glorious cold that has left the rest of the week looking mostly like this:

This, I suppose, is actually another benefit of HE: little lady gets to spend her poorly time concentrating on getting better and doing the little things she enjoys (like Lego - which also doubles up as an educational tool for fine motor skills, following instructions, translating 2D pictures into 3D reality, shapes, number recognition etc. etc.) and neither of us have to worry about 'missing' anything.

(well, apart from being confined to the house with a child that can't even walk down the stairs)

Writing and Phonics

As an aside to our tale from yesterday, I thought I'd chat about the Phonics workbook we were doing, and the Playful Parenting technique that, I felt, gave us a massive breakthrough in working together.

I know, it sounds hideously boring, but I managed to demonstrate to myself that Playful Parenting really *does* work better than having a conversation, sometimes. I'm in no way connected to the author of the book, I simply had it recommended to me and found it at a good price on Kindle.

The premise of Playful Parenting is joining the child in her world, instead of forcing her into the parental world of 'Do As You're Told.'

For example:

NP has become very anxious about 'doing writing.' I blame the school nursery entirely for this because they regularly forced the kids to write their names, making NP do it against her will by holding the pencil with her, so that they could assess her. After this, she was unhappy about writing unless someone was helping her in this way. I also think she has performance anxiety about getting it perfect (which is probably inherited from us freaks ;)

Yesterday she dearly wanted to have a go at the workbook, she flicked through and found the pages she wanted to do (as I bit my control-freak tongue about working through the pages in order) and found the letter 'M', which we haven't officially 'done' yet (in terms of listening to the songs etc, we have, however, been writing 'Mommy' quite regularly).

We chatted about the page and NP had a go at a capital M. Then she told me I had to do the rest. I wasn't about to start filling in the book for her, how would she learn anything from that?

I decided that the situation here was about control. She was trying to gain a little power in a situation where she felt unsure and inadequate. I felt I needed to give her a way of having power without confirming her belief that she wasn't good enough to do it (which is what I thought would happen if I filled all the letters in perfectly for her).

So I decided to have a tantrum. I huffed and grumbled that I was rubbish and I couldn't do it. I said "I can't!" I pretended to cry about it. I said she had to help me do it.

With a tiny smirk, she filled in the first letter, free handed. I looked at her, wide-eyed, and said "You wrote a 'mm'" Not praising, just a statement.

This game continued until all the letters were filled: she would tell me to do it, I would have a little tantrum, and then she would cheekily fill it in herself. She finished the whole page independently.

Now, they weren't perfect, and she didn't mind, we'd had a fun game and she'd managed to do it all.

Playful Parenting and self-reflection are things I'm really keen to share with other parents because it's so easy to fall into the trap of only ever treating your kid 'one way.' We tend to speak to NP in quite a mature manner, having conversations and reasoning with her about behaviour or routine. This works OK if she can see the point of what we're saying. However, sometimes she gets into this state of mind where she wants to 'play up,' causing escalating irritation and eventual arguments that negate the whole point of what we were trying to achieve at the time.

'Playing up' normally happens when one of the Onions clan (myself or Mr O) is trying to 'teach.' Be it writing, drawing, cooking or how to use something, NP gets frustrated, we get frustrated, she giggles in our faces and we get annoyed. NOT the best way of inspiring self-directed learning, huh? On many occasions we didn't adapt our approach, we just kept forcing our way upon her, to little success (see where the self-reflection comes in?) So, in the future, instead of seeing it as 'playing up' I'm going to think more about 'playing,' period.

A day in our life

I decided the best way to kick off our Home Educating journey would be to join the Patch of Puddles "A Typical Home Ed Day in Photos" carnival!

Now, you might notice I don't do a lot of photo blogging, so forgive me if this goes slightly wrong, I have no idea what I'm doing :)

Today had NP and me pottering about the house, buying new shoes, having lunch out and going to Stay and Play (a group for 0 - 5's). Bit of an expensive day all in all, but good times were had (apart from usual grumbles about walking too much).

We started the day with some Jolly Phonics songs over breakfast, with 'clicking castanets' resulting in a quick percussion session:

From 16 May 2011

Mommy had to do 'a a ants on my arm' too:

From 16 May 2011

From 16 May 2011

Daddy gave us a book about Greek Mythology last night so we read about Cerberus and Hades:

From 16 May 2011

Getting the percussion instruments out of the cupboard reminded us about the Timmy Time Pop Up game we keep in there, so we had a few goes with that:

From 16 May 2011

After a quick drink we got our snack and worked some more on our new sound with a Jolly Phonics worksheet:

From 16 May 2011

Bit of our favourite background music (and a promise of watching some of the film later):

From 16 May 2011

Some workbooks seemed like a good idea:

From 16 May 2011

We didn't get any photos in the shoe shop but we had a lovely lunch then made our way to Stay and Play where we had some messy fun:

From 16 May 2011

From 16 May 2011

After a lovely (and exhausting!) walk home:

From 16 May 2011

we settled down to watch Bilbo:

From 16 May 2011

Then I cooked dinner, Daddy came home and we ate and had cuddles!

Today was definitely a 'busy' day. We don't always work on phonics every day, but I do try to introduce a new sound each week. NP started Jolly Phonics at the failed nursery and ate it up, so we decided to carry on at home. Normally we spend a lot of time just hanging out, playing games, watching TV or going to the park or library. I don't really believe NP needs much 'educating' at this age, but I take advantage of the opportunities. For about 6 weeks I've left the phonics things lying on the table for her to pick up at her will, some days she has a go, some days she doesn't. Today was a day when she felt comfortable and interested enough to have a go.

Phew, I hope that was enlightening or at least un-boring! I can't guarantee whether my future posts will or will not be like this one, like I said, this is new territory for me. Feedback always appreciated :)

Click on the house picture to see more Carnival entries!