Timberkits

I confess to being very lax on my D&T teaching. I always figured it wasn't really my thing and I don't have the patience or attention to detail required to design and build things which Ikea sell for under £1.

I've started to change though.

It began with throwing a pot (onto a wheel rather than at a wall) which is without doubt one of the most therapeutic ways to get your hands dirty and - if you're my age and remember Ghost - think happily of Patrick Swayze for 15 minutes. As if I needed an excuse.

We found a friendly pottery place which welcomes home ed children and learnt about clay, glazing and firing as we happily made and then decorated some wonky pots. Enthused by the pot making success I went on a hunt for our next D&T project and happened across Timbertech through a face book group.

The Timberkits are a genius little box of self-build automata mechanisms made by Timbertech. We opted for the 4 kit box so that the boys could make one and then in a nod to iterative development, make a second having learnt lessons from the first.

You can download lessons plans from the website and watch handy YouTube videos so we made use of those to learn about the components and backed it up with some Twinkl resources on Automata Animals to look at how animals move and design our machines. We had also visited the Mad Museum in Stratford which ties in perfectly.

It was a fabulous project - I could rave on about the process, the cutting and sanding and sticking but actually the upshot was the boys have some really cool little toys that they are proud of and they learnt lots about design, measuring, axles, cams, followers...

A spider which goes up and down and spins.

A helicopter which goes up and down with rotating blades.

A sheep that eats grass.

I'm a D&T convert. I'm saving up tin cans to make pencil holders.

Mind the Gap

I spent the first year of EHE making a really dumb mistake: I'd figure out what the curriculum wanted me to do and then plan to cover it.

I fretted that there was never enough time or attention span to get through the quantity of material (especially covering 2 different year groups) and so I ended up compromising constantly while carrying a heavy weight of guilt that I wasn't teaching what I was meant to.

And then... an epiphany.

I love a good epiphany and schedule them weekly. It's a wonderful process that starts with me saying 'Hold on a minute...', followed by chewing my lip for a bit and googling for things, then a cup of tea, a bit more head scratching and ending with me running off to find S to declare 'I've had an epiphany!'. This is inevitably followed by feedback ('Another one?' and 'Er ... that's obvious isn't it?') and then the whole process completes with calling myself an idiot for not having realised <insert obvious thing here> and having another cup of tea.

In this case the epiphany is a real gem:

IF MY CHILDREN ALREADY KNOW SOMETHING... 
I DO NOT NEED TO TEACH IT TO THEM.

Wow. Bombshell, right?

When you've picked yourself off the floor and had a cup of tea I'll be happy to elaborate on this achingly obvious statement.

The curriculum at school is a scatter gun approach. With a class of 30 (or more) and hugely varying abilities and attitudes you have no choice but to stick to a plan - the lovely NC - and teach it all, differentiating where you can at a pupil level. The difference at home is that my differentiation can be close to zero, as can my attitude to compromise. I have just two students. Ditch the scatter gun and pick up the laser beam.

The never-ending-to-do-list just got 90% shorter. I don't need to teach long multiplication - they already know it. Equivalent fractions? It's been ticked off. All I have to do is reassure myself that they understand and can apply concept and I can move on. I can be nimble. I can personalise. I can intervene - I watched K working through an exercise of 30 questions and when it was abundantly clear he had the topic mastered I stopped him and we diverted our attention to a new topic.

Schools are a best-fit system to get a lot of children to learn stuff in the (more or less) most efficient/cost effective way the government can muster. When you zoom in and only have to concern yourself with just one, or two, children your efficiency increases 10 fold and you shed all of the baggage of worrying about the big picture.

I spent a year staring at the 'by the end of KS2 all children should...' list until I had the confidence to put it down. When I glance back I'm astounded at how much we've achieved while we were too busy having adventures to follow it.