I’m having one of those periods.

I question if I’m really going to be able to do this right, or am I just going to mess up Lamb’s chances. Will I ever manage to help him learn to read? Or count past 15?

At scouts a few nights ago this feeling was heightened while I watched him finish up there. The children stood in a circle, singing songs. It was so clear watching Lamb that he is different, that he is a very long way behind. I always knew that but it’s not often that I really notice it. It made me feel even more wobbly. Have I really got the skills to move him forward?

Lately I’ve been focusing too much on where I’m failing, and what is going wrong. Reviewing how each day has gone and recording it have become part of my routine, and I feel that it’s essential for me to keep looking at what I’m doing and assessing my own behavior. But my homeschooling diary has become a bit of a bashing stick instead, which I hit myself over the head with each night. I stack it full of words that tell myself that I haven’t done well enough, been patient enough, haven’t explained things properly. All I’m achieving with it at the moment is to trap myself in a vicious cycle.

 

I’m not getting it right. I do lose my temper some times. I do get impatient. But doesn’t every mum from time to time? I’m no different to anybody else, and I’m gonna fall hard if I keep aiming for perfection and beating up on myself when I don’t achieve it.

 

So here is the plan. First the things that aren’t going so well.

1. This last week I have been trying to get too much done, and ending up missing important things like numeracy practise.

2. I’ve been staying up late trying to get some planning time in, and some down time afterwards! Lack of sleep has made me tired and cranky, and it’s made me late out of bed which always puts me in a bad mood.

3. I’ve gotten carried away having seen a little bit of progress with Lamb’s word recognition and made the major mistake of then pushing him on too quickly. Result: he gets stressed by too much new information.

4. Possibly the biggest problem of all is Moodle. Moo has stopped having naps now and so is with us for the entirety of the day. Much of the time it is easy to include him in what we are doing. Those times that it isn’t I’ve found that Moo sets out on a mission to be as naughty as possible to win back my attention. On the one hand it makes the learning difficult for Lamb, but more worryingly for me is the concern that the behaviour shows that Moodle is finding this move to homeschooling difficult. How to reassure him, and give him enough so that he’s happy to let me spend time quietly with Lamb from time to time?

 

It’s blindingly obvious how to correct the first 3 problems, but the last is going to need some strategies.

Story cards

Lamb is at a stage where he is just getting familiar with words. Writing stories is as yet a distant horizon. But to help him begin to understand how a story is put together I’ve made him these little story cards to use. They’re working better than I had hoped. Lamb’s stories don’t always strictly make sense (!) but he has grasped that to ‘make-up’ a story he needs a main character (in most of Lamb’s stories the main character usually has a fairly unusual name: Baff was the last name he came up with!), a setting and the story  needs a beginning, a middle and an end.

They’ve needed laminating to stop little hands tearing them while arguing over who has which card! Although Moodle is too young to be making-up stories he enjoys playing with the story cards too and naming the things he finds.

Australia theme

some aboriginal potato printing

For the last week, and continuing into next week we have been learning about Australia. So far we have coloured in maps of Australia and found how far away it is, we’ve learnt about travel brochures and produced one of our own, and we have done a lot of work from the homeschoolshare site in relation to the picture book ‘Wombat Stew’. In addition to that Lamb has been learning to use factual books to find things out – so far we have learnt lots about kangaroos, koalas and wombats… My favourite part of the week though has to have been watching Lamb and Moodle dancing along to my made up song about marsupials! Funny as it was it did achieve its objective and Lamb can now confidently recall what a marsupial is.

These are the books we have been using:

‘Malu Kangaroo’ by Judith Morecroft and Bronwyn Bancroft. This is a really lovely picture book very much in the style of aboriginal art, which is about a kangaroo who teaches man to surf.

‘Living in the Australian outback’ by Jane Bingham – a nice simple and factual book.

‘Rainbow Bird – an aboriginal folk tale from Northern Australia’ by Eric Maddern and Adrienne Kennaway. Much enjoyed by Lamb this story flows nicely and has nice soft pictures.

‘Stories from the Billabong’ by James Vance Marshall. This collection of aboriginal dream-time stories is much more word intensive than the other books, but each story averages at 2-3 pages long with each story ending with some factual information. With younger children like Lamb this book is best read one section at a time. The stories are written with a beautiful mythic feel and the illustrations are gorgeous aboriginal inspired paintings. It’s a great book to link literature with both art and cultural studies.

‘Wombat goes Walkabout’ by Michael Morpurgo. There are also resources for this book on the homeschoolshare site. The story itself is about a little lost Wombat who finds himself in the middle of a bush fire. Like all the best stories loved by little ones it has repetitive dialog that encourages children to join in and helps them to predict the story. Along with ‘Wombat Stew’ it’s a good picture book to introduce Australian animals.

‘Australia – Destination Detectives’ – Miriam Lumb. Lots of pictures here covering transport, wildlife, cities, landscape, people and food.

Alongside these books we’ve used various first facts books about the various animals.

It’s going much better than our last topic on Robin Hood. The finding of age-appropriate picture books can make or break one of our topics it would seem!

Reading and Waldorf

I have been reading ‘Holistic Special Education’ edited by Robin Jackson. Mostly the book will have no obvious impact on our home school life because it is about the CampHill residential schools for special needs children which provide a residential waldorf approach to education. But reading the underlying philosophy that dictates how special children are approached is inspiring. I’m about half way through the book now and it has given me a few things to think on.

The most important question that I’ve taken from this book is ‘am I talking to my child or am I talking with him?’ stemming from a philosophy that a relationship that is geared towards helping a special needs child should be one in which there is give and take from both sides.

I am not apart from my child, I am in a relationship with my child.

I’m keeping this in mind throughout the day. Am I really listening before I assume I know what Lamb is trying to tell me? Am I really listening to the things he does not say and responding in a loving way? This has become as much of a learning journey for me as much as it is for Lamb. Both of us are changing as a result.

But changing in good ways, definitely good ways.

Pondering Curriculum

As we have only just started home educating the various peoples in and around the local authority are taking particular interest in us. I do hope this dies down. Yesterday the man I know as the inclusion officer visited the house to give us some pointers on planning and dropped off some printouts on the national curriculum for the UK.

While it isn’t a legal requirement for us to follow the national curriculum I feel we’re very much being shepherded in that direction. I’m familiar with the foundation stage curriculum as I trained as a nursery-nurse many moons ago, but my knowledge of the national curriculum proper is only at a very basic level.

I sat down today to look at the printouts that the inclusion officer had left for us. I could be daunted by these printouts. Actually, maybe I am a little bit. But what strikes me is how incredibly fussy it is. My initial thoughts are why on earth would my 7 year old need to consider suffixes and prefixes and the like? Even if my 7 year old was an utterly average 7 year old, why? Does any child of 7 really need to know this?

Lamb is not an average 7 year old though, and most of the key stage 1 national curriculum is going to be irrelevant to us for now. But still trying to consider the notion of a curriculum has shaken me a little bit.

In my mind I have been more conscious of constructing a gentle rhythm to lead us through the day. I have been making plans plenty, but not once thus far has my brain thrown the word curriculum at me. In this last week or so, whenever I think of what I want to achieve as a home educator and how to go about it the word that has reverberated in my brain is: gently.

This idea of  a lesson plan written out and then reviewed for whether it was a sucess is making me feel itchy. If I were to do that for every activity I’m almost certain I’d spend half of my life doing it. I’m not doing this to brush up on paperwork skills.

So I continue to think about the concept of a curriculum and what I should be doing about it. Lamb is at a very basic level in his learning. He is still at a stage where he needs to be playing and exploring. If I were to come up with a list of objectives for lamb I suspect they would look more like those found on the foundation level and that they would focus more on social development than they would on numeracy. Numeracy is important but there’s so much of it that he’s just not able to understand right now. This is something that’s going to need a little thought!

On Being A Mother

Starting to home educate has felt to me like I have truly become a mother. It’s silly – I’ve been a mother for over 7 years, but only now do I feel like I’m really starting to understand what that means and to live up to what it asks.

 

Starting out afresh as a home educator I was thinking about what a mother is and about how my role in the kids lives changes now that I’m teacher as well as mummy. After a lot of thought it struck me that my role doesn’t change that much at all. What my kids need from me now is the same as what they always have needed from me. They need be to understand, and support. They need me to be gentle. Most of all they need me to be a good example.

 

Today it almost seems to be something to be ashamed of when I say I’m a stay-at-home mum. Women are expected to want to be career girls that get back to work, that have their cake and eat it. It’s not the norm any more to stay at home and look after your own kids. The thing is I always wanted to bring my kids up myself. I’ve worked in a nursery, and I know they’re not bad places. But I always wanted to look after my own children, simple as that.

Now I am going to stand proud as that stay-at-home mum. I won’t try to explain or justify that choice any more. Finally I really am taking motherhood seriously, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It feels liberating!