There's the Click

Active learning is a beautiful thing.

It happens whenever someone is engaged, interested and challenged. The holy grail of active learning is when it's self-driven - where no-one else dictated or controlled the activity. There's plenty of talk of spontaneous learning, where the stars align and suddenly - bang - there's a magical moment where a child just starts learning. How can I get this magic?

Being spontaneous takes planning. We spontaneously made a rope swing to entertain ourselves at a youth hostel last month - because I keep a rope in the car for emergency rope swing adventures (or towing).

You can spontaneously stop at a National Trust place to paddle in the river if you have already remembered to put your membership card, spare clothes and a towel in the car.

You can spontaneously do science experiments if you have food colouring, candles, bicarb, tums, sand, etc... in the cupboard.

You can spontaneously do art if you picked up air drying clay and acrylic paints last time you went past HobbyCraft.

You get the idea. Spontaneity is an illusion but I do embrace self-driven learning. As my confidence continues to grow so does my comfort level with flexibility. For two mornings this week I've stood back and let the boys get on with it, to see what they'd do. It was enlightening.

Day 1
The boys found a box of balloons and started blowing them up and letting them go. W googled balloon hacks on YouTube and they tried experiment after experiment : the fire-proof balloon was a favourite, as was the static water-bending trick. They added coins to the balloons and span them.

They filled them with water - but had to solve the issue of how to get the water in. Attaching to the tap resulted in split balloons and a large puddle in the kitchen. A revised system with a plastic bottle worked quite well but so did taking a mouthful of water and just blowing. When they had enough of being soaked they filled the balloons with rice to make stress balls.

I found a bag of balloon modelling balloons and dogs, hats, giraffes and a snake followed as they read the instructions for a dog and then went freestyle. They decorated some with sharpies.

Time spent : 4 hours. Intervention : virtually zero (I had to get towels for the floor and I dug out the modelling balloons)

Day 2 
The boys decide to start W's stamp collection. The boys read and followed the instructions for how to add stamps to an album, categorised some of the stamps, asked their Nana for more stamps, soaked them off the envelopes and dried them. One stamp was for 500 Zimbabwean dollars so thinking they'd hit the big time, checked how much it was worth in GBP. A disappointing £1.10 - however K added to the value of the other UK stamps and was delighted to find it totalled over £13.

After stamps they decided to do some Reading Eggspress challenges and did comprehensions to earn animal cards and then traded them, with a discussion about which category of animal they were each collecting. The peacock was listed in flying birds and W wasn't sure peacocks could fly so he looked up a video to check they could.

They moved on to HomeByMe and worked on their houses, W made a pod house with all amenities based on a tiny footprint. K worked on the interior design of his office.

Time spent : 5 hours. Intervention : Zero, except for being a willing audience as they showed me what they had created and how to do the stamps.

So what's the formula for engaged, interested children? Luck is a big part of it. They had slept well, eaten a good breakfast and were in a chipper mood. We've had a good week. This keeps brotherly bickering to a minimum and created an atmosphere conducive to getting on with stuff. Rules are vital. If there wasn't a rule that we don't play computer games til the end of our school day then I'd have been reporting 5 hours of Minecraft or CrossyRoad. Environment helps. The kitchen was (relatively) tidy for a change and I'd shuffled some activities they might have forgotten about into sight - like how the supermarket guys rotate the fruit so the oldest is at the front.

There's a knack too, to intervening and directing just a few moments before everything descends into chaos. The active learning utopia has a limited shelf life; being self-driven is tiring and after a while you need someone else to take the reins, or provide snacks, or both. Balance is the key; both days we did formal literacy and maths after lunch.

Most of the discussions I read about this type of spontaneous/ free/ self-driven learning are play based and sadly that tends to mean the discussion is restricted to the under 5s. What a shame. Play, at any age, presents some of the best opportunities for analysis, planning, resilience, creativity and team work.

When learning is deep, relevant and active you can't tell where play stops and learning begins.

Acids and Bases

I fancied a science lesson and we had an opener : a boy at PGL said that water was more acidic than Coca Cola.

Didn't sound likely to me but the boys were insistent. The boy imparting this factoid was at least 12 years old and therefore probably a genius with very bad teeth; certainly cleverer than me as I am a mum and therefore know nothing. Apparently.

Insults aside I decided they could prove it to themselves. Theory was the place to start - we talked through characteristics of acids, bases and what the pH scale is. We briefly looked at hydrogen ions but I lost W so it was time to get practical and we followed the Stanford Uni experiment (link below).

I pre-made the cabbage water and the kitchen smelt horrendous; then we assembled a bunch of household objects :

• Bicarbonate of soda (dissolved in water)
• Distilled water
• Cola
• Lemon juice
• Apple juice
• Vinegar
• Bleach
• Shampoo
• Anti-bac hand gel

The boys predicted whether each liquid was going to be acidic or alkaline based on their characteristics (sliminess / bitterness / sourness). The boys tasted the lemon juice and bicarb just for my own entertainment. "Can we pleeease drink the Coke?" Only if it turns out to be less acidic than water.

With our cabbage water ready we started adding our various liquids, comparing the colour of the cabbage water to our chart to see what the approximate pH was and writing up our results as we went.

We got a really fantastic range of colours and the bleach finally overrode the kitchen cabbage smell which was a relief for everyone.

Most importantly we did indeed prove the hypothesis, that mum is always right Coke is worse for your teeth than water.


If you've got your own science lab the BBC has the experiment nicely explained here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/bang/bang_tp_red_cabbage_indicator.pdf

If you're a kitchen table scientist then take a look at this brilliant PDF from Stanford Uni:
http://web.stanford.edu/~ajspakow/downloads/outreach/ph-student-9-30-09.pdf

Building Blocks

Simple things used to explore more complicated concepts.

Jenga blocks and wooden dominos are endlessly useful. In their usual form, you can explore structure, strength and stability. Making domino rallies helps with angles, design and the knock-on-effect of actions and energy transfer.

If you're feeling creative, there are loads of write-on-the-block ideas:

• sums (colour code by difficulty)
• emotions
• questions/conversation starters
• music notes (build a tune)
• word types (noun, adjective, verb etc)
• story ideas (build a story) 
• spellings (write a word on all 4 faces, 3 incorrect and 1 correct)

Turning Negatives into Positives

K wanted proof that subtracting a negative number is the same as adding. The rule is clear cut but I was failing to convince K. There were raised voices and it was not fun.

Luckily MathsIsFun delivered on its promise and rescued us from a mother-son rift.

I went with their hot air balloon example which has the added bonus of reinforcing the number line concept.

My hot air balloon looks like a flower pot (art is not my thing) but the idea is sound and it works like this:

The orange circles are balloons, worth +1. The grey are weights, worth -1.

• Start with the balloon pointing to zero then remove balloons (subtract a positive) or add weights (add a negative) to make the balloon drop. 
• Add balloons to make it rise (add a positive).
• Remove weights to show how subtracting a negative results in the balloon rising (a positive).

It's an effective way of proving to a 9 year old that taking away a negative can make a positive and there was a bonus bit of craft work preparing the number line and stamping out the circles.

Fabulous ideas from : http://www.mathsisfun.com/positive-negative-integers.html

Money Matters

It's never too early to start teaching children about money. Last week we had a gentle introduction to the evils and joys of money.

As with most things, it was driven by my sanity being at stake.

As we stood in a shop for the thousandth time with one boy or another insisting he had enough in his money box at home to buy the Pokemon / Lego / book / cuddly toy in front of us, I'd consider gambling with my own money.

Should I lend these mini people the cash - do they really have enough at home? Do they have honest faces? Do they know that I'll probably forget I lent it to them? Am I being hustled? Will I be clawing back repayment of the 60p debt in weekly instalments? Should I charge interest? Will I need a spreadsheet for this? Why am I making this so complicated?

Thankfully GoHenry have come up with a simple solution for forgetful mothers like me and the kids now have their own pre-paid debit cards. GoHenry is for children aged 8 and up so we're bang on for using their joyful services. If you fancy it, you can link their weekly pocket money to chores and if the tasks aren't ticked the pocket money won't get paid. Now that's motivating..

There's a monthly charge but for us it's worth it as the lesson in responsibility and practice in handing their own funds is worth its weight. Even better, the children feel about 6 feet tall.

When we went for our first 'use our new debit card adventure' (who says HE isn't exciting) .. the nice lady at the supermarket couldn't quite believe they were allowed to check out and pay for items themselves with their very own debit card and very own (very secret) pin.

The cards came with a price - the boys had to endure a one hour lesson on money skills with me before the cards would be issued and so we covered interest, savings, loans, pin numbers and debit vs credit cards.

I left pension planning for next time.

For brilliant teaching resources for all levels :
https://www.barclaysmoneyskills.com/Information/Resource-centre/School-Children.aspx

The 7-11 pack has a brilliant board game at the end of the pack.

Let's Eat Grandma

It's an old one, but a good one. The importance of punctuation.

Coding Magic

Coding skills are becoming increasingly important from KS1. The focus of ICT skills in the NC is firmly based in the process - the logical reasoning, sequencing and problem solving inherent in writing programs to accomplish a purpose.

Without Scratch, I was floundering a bit. We did some background work off-computer looking at flow charts, what 'IF' really means, and repeating actions but we needed something to demonstrate how it works for real.

Imagine my insane level of excitement to stumble across the Learn an Hour of Code initiative at code.org https://code.org/learn

This is one incredible resource. With a number of themes to choose from, it takes you through a simple set of challenges before letting you have free reign to create your own program. Seeking maximum engagement, we started off with a Minecraft challenge.

Starting with simple sequencing using command blocks, there are instructional videos interspersed to introduce repeat blocks and then if statements. Our hour came and went. The boys spent a further 3 hours coding various scenarios. The rest of the timetable went out of the window : they concentrated, planned, designed, built and tested. I only stopped them when it was tea time.

A particularly nice feature is that they can view the javascript behind the blocks. So what skills are key here? The logical reasoning is vital, the sequencing helps in all manner of cause and effect scenarios but for me it's the debugging where the gold lies. When something doesn't work like it should, the boys couldn't blame the computer or anything else. It's their code, whatever it's doing, it does it because they told it to do it.

It's a detail but I love the responsibility aspect. On a practical level, having to go back through to work out why something isn't doing what you expect, fix it and re-test (repeat, repeat, repeat) until it does what you want - it is a profound and powerful lesson in problem solving and tenacity.

And wow - what a peaceful afternoon for me.

Keeping Up

Does a comma ever go before an 'and'?

How do you do long division?

These issues both came up this week and I had to look up the answers. I can hazard a decent guess but am I sure? Is my long division method perfect? Are there exceptions to a grammatical rule?

If I'm not sure then it's not good enough : K&W want to know for certain. My boys love rules so I have to be definite as they'll hang on to anything I tell them and quote me months or years from now. "But Mummy, while we were driving to the shops at Christmas time when I was 7 and wearing a blue jumper you said that all the drivers in <insert a town name> were idiots......"

Big responsibility.

It's a useful learning angle : you don't have to know everything, you just have to know how to find the answer. Which sources to trust, how to filter information to focus in on the thing you want to know, how to decide what's important, how to assess exceptions and differences in method or opinion.

Our days would be disjointed if I had to look up every tiny point and with an 8 and 9 year old I'm relieved to say I can handle most questions confidently. But the cracks are appearing : the questions are getting tougher.

What's an 8 year old doing learning long division? I don't think I learnt that until secondary school but here he is, doing it in line with his National Curriculum level and getting upset when I show the doorstep method that I know and love.

"It's not like that Mummy - there are boxes underneath! You have to take away!"

I battle on trying to show my (perfectly valid) method and we descend into tears because it isn't exactly what he's been taught. We take a break and decide to try again later when Mummy has had a cup of tea and found out exactly how the long division extended method is taught.

By the time I find it, print it, try it, understand it and am ready to teach it I'm also certainly ready to declare it utterly stupid because the doorstep method is better, even if I did see it described on the internet as 'old fashioned'. The cheek.

Keeping up is small tangent with a serious implication. I wouldn't want to teach secondary level outside of the subjects for which I'm trained. Sometimes it's the small things that set your path.


PS: About those commas .... http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/020204whencommabfand.htm

Hedgewig

Hedgewig (named loosely after Harry Potter's owl) was spotted by K snuffling about in the garden in broad daylight.

I had some gloves handy and was able to enact a nifty rescue just before Bailey the dog attempted to help. We put all our other topics on ice and learnt a lot about hedgehogs.

Our spiky chap was very small and as a nocturnal beast wouldn't normally be seen sniffing around the climbing frame at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We weighed him and he was well below the 500g needed to hibernate.

I remember late night hedgehog visits to our back door when we were small and we always put out cat food, bread and milk. It seems unwise to trust any advice from the 80s so I was pleasantly surprised to read that cat food is still the best thing to offer hedgehogs - but unsurprisingly milk and bread are now a no-no.

Hedgewig dined on the finest cat food - the cat is a fussy madam so it's the posh stuff. Why any cat needs something that describes itself as 'deli' is beyond me. This is the same cat that ate half a baby bird this week. Evil, yes. Fussy, faking it. The cat said hello to Hedgewig (although roughly translated I think it was: why are you eating my fancy food?) and got her nose spiked. "It's not funny kids, it's learning". Okay it was quite funny.

Hedgewig was a noisy eater and after a meal liked to tip over his water bowl, poo in as many places as possible and then try and scale the sides of his spacious box. We tried to work out how close we could get before he smelt or saw us. Turns out the answer is very close - hedgehogs have poor eyesight and although their sense of smell is excellent the boys and I were no match for the heady aroma of cat food (phew). He wasn't bothered about us at all as it happens and I'm never sure whether to be flattered or offended when deemed to be zero threat.

K&W enjoyed doing some research. I didn't realise spines are actually hollow hairs and there are about 5000 of them (googled not counted). After a good hour of concentration it degenerated into looking for the cutest picture of a hedgehog we could find. Winner: baby hedgehog (called a hoglet!!) in a tea cup. Highly commended: Hedgehog curled up with a cat.

Tiggiewinkles, the wonderful wildlife hospital, took him in. I had to sign an agreement that I wouldn't insist on having him back which seems fair enough (finders keepers doesn't apply to wild animals) but I hope we'll find time to pop back in to see how he's doing.

We weren't planning to serve him up for tea - this is our little guy on the scales:

200 Pages

I had a wobble yesterday. Emotional wobbles are par for the course. The physical ones are avoidable if only cake and wine weren't so darn tasty.

We're a half term through the autumn and I want to do a status check to make sure we're on track. With the National Curriculum in front of me I had a sudden overwhelming feeling of wanting to do anything else but drag myself kicking and screaming through the 200+ pages. I loaded the dishwasher, made toffee apples, put away the washing, emptied the bin.

The curriculum was still there.

It's overwhelming because the expectations laid out are high but entire topics are represented in a brief sentence : description of method is low. And thank goodness. Imagine if the government produced a document telling teachers how to teach; now that would be a long, pointless document. Uproar would ensue.

The NC is like a cook book which has a picture of a really yummy ... well let's say cake ... with a list of ingredients alongside but no quantities or instructions, just the occasional hint. You know what you want to aim for, you know what you need, but the magic is in how you actually put it together.

Like baking, some topics will flop. You'll overdo some until they're unpalatable. You'll get quantities wrong and they take too long. Some just won't be to the tastes of your very discerning diners and they simply won't like them. We don't all love coffee cake.

So as a lone ranger how do you begin to break down the NC to extract something useful? The most important thing is to ditch what you don't need.

Step 1 : Read then ditch sections 1-6 and the contents pages.

Step 2 : Hop to the subjects at the end (everything except English, Maths and Science). Focus on one key stage (KS2 for us). Read the KS1 sections and if you're happy KS1 attainment targets are met, ditch.

Step 3 : Back into English, Maths and Science - put the appendices for English and Maths to one side, useful for your reference but no need to be overwhelmed here.
Note: the terminology and spelling lists from the appendices make good check lists.

Step 4 : Consider current academic level, not just school year. Remove the key stage/years you're not interested in for all subjects.

Step 5 : Read the introduction to each subject, absorb and discard.You should now be left with the relevant programmes of study.

If you're feeling really confident then you can get rid of the guidance sections so that you're left with the nuts and bolts (statutory requirements) for each subject, which will probably number around 20 pages in total.

Now you're ready to map the requirements into a teaching plan. Great work so far, you've earned a cup of tea. Maybe do the washing up while you're there... make a quick phone call.. check Facebook....

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-primary-curriculum

Rocket Power

Experimenting is great and it's easy to build and stick and smash and throw. The challenge is to start introducing scientific method, control and analysis while still keeping it fun.

Luckily there are numerous resources on the internet and this week we tried out the balloon rockets experiment courtesy of Rolls Royce.

Points for showing your working, here's what we did.

1. Decide on a question we're going to investigate. W went with : What shape balloon will be fastest? and K decided on : What thickness of string will be fastest?

2. Hypothesise. We think the long balloon and thinnest string.

3. Establish the variables and how we'll control them - W was particularly strong on this and quickly grasped the concept of only changing one at a time.

4. Get set up and time the rocket's descent with our stop watches. K did a great job (W chose this moment to have a paddy and returned 10 minutes later!). Bit of discussion about gravity, air resistance and aerodynamics.

5. Conclusions, speed=distance/time and some maths to work out mps followed by a handy google conversion to mph. The long balloon was quickest but in the string experiment is was the middle sized string that won. K worked out it was to do with texture and fiction.

Balloon rockets
http://www.rolls-royce.com/careers/students-and-graduates/education-and-work-experience/resources-for-schools/interactive-resources-for-7-11-year-olds.aspx#activity-worksheets

Feeling Lucky

It's only 10.30am and already it's been an emotional day.

I saw children on their way to our old school this morning and found it incredibly hard. Are we doing the right thing? Are the boys missing out? Is this really happening? It was easy to finish off last year HE. It's much harder to start a new year HE and I wasn't expecting that. I miss seeing other mums and catching up on summer holiday adventures over coffee.

I asked the boys how they felt. "Fine, Mummy" was the reply with a pair of shrugs - they tell me they are not bothered about going into a new class or meeting a new teacher. They're just excited to be in a new year and W desperately wants to know if he's now tall enough to go without a car seat ("Keep eating your vegetables darling..")

On the way to their art lesson K said he feels his luck has changed. "How so?" I ask. In his typical chatty fashion he gives me a long winded reply but the gist is this : He always felt unlucky - like he'd never be picked or never get the things he wanted. Lately though he feels lucky; he said he hopes for the best and quite often it happens.

I could cry for fear and indecision; holding the weight of the responsibility for the two most precious things in my life. I know why we're doing this. I know to trust my instinct. I know I can do it.

But there's no external measure for success. Whether it was the right thing or not will never be proven; you'll never know what might have happened if you'd done things differently.

That's the scary thing. We can only look at where we are now, what we have now, who we are now and base our decisions on that.

I'm trying not to put too much pressure on myself. Small wins are still wins.

And today, we feel lucky.

Time Out

We are struggling a bit with time.

Problem 1 : There's not enough of it.
Problem 2 : W is struggling to tell it.

I'm just focussed on the second issue today. W is good at maths but if you stick a clock in front of him he'll try every trick in the book to get out of telling you what it says. If he waits long enough K will shout out the answer anyway or I'll fall asleep.

Time then for a concentrated lesson on time. The internet provides some great stepped resources to introduce and then extend, so with a cup of tea, a bucket of patience and about an hour of one-to-one, we're ending today a bit further on than we started.

W prefers online games to worksheets and as this is a tricky topic for him I'm happy to oblige until his confidence builds up. Here are some nice free resources (plenty on TES & Twinkl too) -

Start with the basics - hour/minute hands, am/pm and 24 hour clock:
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/maths/time/

Exercises with the colourful Bitesize characters:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/maths/telling_the_time/play/
(Pick up the worksheet for re-enforcement)

Match analogue to digital:
http://resources.oswego.org/games/stoptheclock/sthec3.html

Cheerful little plenary game:
http://www.ictgames.com/hickory4.html

Use the empty clocks from :
http://nrich.maths.org/7384/note
to write the times of your own day (wake up, breakfast, lunch, etc)

A good day, definitely time for a glass of wine.

Glorious Bits

A lovely, bitty day. Today felt like an all round win and I'm wondering if it was because yesterday was a real grind... the happy value of comparative analysis?

This is the kind of day I'd love to describe as 'typical'. Although if it was, I wouldn't be rushing to blog about it before things go awry and the magic fades.

A prompt 9am start (after a little bickering .. we'll brush over that), kicking off with maths as we always do. K is working on time (Y5 POS) and W on metal methods for subtraction (Y4 POS).

Break time at 10am. K&W head out to swing about like monkeys, I frantically load the dishwasher, wipe down the counters and bleach the sink.

10.30am and K&W come in on the 2nd time of calling (counted as a win) and we open out a huge map of the world. First we've got to work out if the world is actually flat and understand how a map can be flat if the world is round so we unpeel the world (tangerines), keeping the peel in one piece. Mixed success and a lot of peel on the floor but we used the pieces to show tectonic plates so a quick volcano/earthquake diversion (NC LKS2 Geog- volcanoes, earthquakes) and the boys spotted how South America looks like a jigsaw fit to Africa so we touched on how the continents were formed.

Officially today's LOs were identifying some continents, our location, where key world events are happening right now and how proximity to the equator changes climate. (NC LKS2 Geog). It was a fun hour. We've got Aunties in a couple of far flung locations so we started labelling and then K&W did some independent research to find the locations of things that interest them. K had heard about the Dead Sea so he looked it up, found out about why you float in it and then identified Israel on the map. W wanted to find out whether the animals in the film Madagascar were real so we found Madagascar and googled for wildlife.

Our labels are a bit random. W added the 'Cool Animals' tag to Madagascar and a 'We Are Here'. K labelled the Dead Sea and Manx Cats. One label says 'Drugs' and points to Columbia - an overspill from a discussion about drug smuggling at the airport ("Why do they search the bags?" cue a caught-on-the-spot-over-explanation from me about smuggling and street values.) Spot a Pyramids label, where bush babies live and also the postal address of Santa.

Side note teaching on internet searching, choosing reliable sources and using suitable keywords (NC UKS2 ICT - be discerning, evaluate digital content).

After geography we did an online maths session and then had another brain break.

Last lesson of the day was a quick fire grammar presentation - a retention check for adjectives, nouns, adverbs and appropriate connectives (reinforce Y2 POS) and K correctly spotted a preposition.

Now it's lunchtime and we're almost done for the day. We've got a coffee date with friends in a bit (socialisation - tick) and then we'll go to Explore Learning this afternoon for one more bit of Maths/Literacy.

A good day.

Theory and Practice

Contextual learning is a fancy way of saying that the kids own their learning, slotting it effortlessly into their individual world view. Clear as mud. Here's another nutshell attempt : learning happens in a meaningful way linked to real world experience.

Wave goodbye to 6 + 6 = 12. Say hello to "You ate 6 biscuits. Your brother ate 6 biscuits. How cross is Mummy on a scale of 1 to 12?"

It's a big hunky theory to explain something that is regular common sense once you shine a light on it. If you're told something or discover something that relates to your own experiences or hopes or interests then you're more likely to retain and assimilate the information.

Children however are far too lazy to have gone out there and done all the great stuff we adults have done like travel to Antigua, get a mortgage, cook a paella, celebrate their 30th birthday, shop at Argos and dance the tango. The more new experiences I expose the boys to the more reference points we have for their learning. Field trip freedom is one of my favourite aspects of EHE.

It works in a classroom setting too and I am starting small.

When we were doing time this week, W was struggling and getting increasingly frustrated. W is a tactile learner so if cutting, throwing a die or sticking can be integral to what we're doing then he'll pick it up faster. We ditched the worksheets and got out the card, scissors and split pins. 

When it all goes wrong and you're faced with a mutiny you can salvage the day by reverting to an activity they love and sneaking the learning in.

Like mashing up broccoli in their yoghurts.

Cake. And Eating It.

It's a ranty sort of a day. I am fed up with the perfect, high exposure, close up world of social media where everything looks all lush! and gorgeous! and awesome! Everything looks amazing from the right angle.

Yes - you can make a nice eggs benedict. No - you can't spend 5 minutes arranging your coffee, a copy of the Guardian and a pencil so you can get the perfect instagram snap. Have you lost your mind? It'll be cold. Just get on and eat your breakfast.

Raising children is a tough gig, always has been. A few generations back you only had to keep up with the Joneses. Now you have to keep up with YummyMummy4, DomGoddess1978 and SuperMumof4 who are on an unstoppable mission to make you feel like a failure by posting close up pictures of their craft and culinary successes.

Imagine if every picture had to be taken wide angle, showing the context. However amazing that meal or craft item, there was MESS on the way to the finished product. Big dirty piles of it. Creativity in all its forms is messy and glorious. But showing the horrific state of your kitchen after cooking cupcakes with little children is not a good look in the social media world - a place where we only ever show our best side.

Sites like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are undeniably brilliant; they are bursting with great ideas but the images are a tiny zoomed-in peek at the result. The process is so much more important (and a whole lot messier) than the outcome.

To that end, here's some of our process. The process started with a 6am start (why, children, why?) and we set to work on a lego drive-through museum. There was some sharing, designing, negotiating and writing 'The Gems of Insanity' on a Lego block in sharpie.

It's chaos, Jim, but we had fun.

And here's my nod to social media. From ImTotallyTheBestMumEver1980.....

Milk Bottle Sound Waves

The small group and hands-on control of home schooling means you can get very cross-curricular. Or if the kids are behaving, happy-curricular.

It makes it harder to track what you're teaching but it's like a secret shortcut to the holy grail that is learning-more-than-one-thing-at-once.

Taking an example of a simple sound wave experiment here's how to cross-curricular it to the max.

LO : Be able to describe and draw sound waves with various amplitudes and frequencies.

Experiment : Fill 3-5 bottles with different amounts of water and tap the tops, drawing the sound waves for each one.

Hold on to your hats, your bonus teaching points are on their way ...

1. Maths - decide on your quantities (patterns/number lines), use a measuring jug to pour the water into each bottle (measuring)
2. Science - write or discuss a hypothesis, label your bottles
3. Art - add drops of food colouring to each bottle to create different colours
4. Music - compose a simple tune on your bottles

Labels

It's lovely to think you're unique but equally lovely to know there are other people out there who share your perspective.

I've spent some happy time today exploring the EHE forums. I was a bit ruffled by a theme that run though indicating that there are two reasons families home ed - because regular education can't meet behavioural/SEN needs of the child or because the family have a philosophy which is at odds with formal education.

I began to feel like we were falling through the cracks as we don't sit comfortably in either group.... but happy days! It turns out there is a third group to which we can belong and it even has a label.

We're called Structured Home-Edders. Or on a day when it all goes wrong and we end up walking the dog and making cakes - Semi-Structured Home Edders.

It doesn't make a fun acronym so I'm probably going to reject the label anyway. I could rename it OH-FUC : Other HomeEds - Following Usual Curriculum. But that's not big or clever... (chuckle).

When I can't get a feeling of 'fit' I like to ponder if fit even matters and whether there's a common trait between all the different Home Ed groups. The broad spectrum of home educating families is a strength as everyone can learn from everyone else and there seems to be a common goal shared by all HE families:

Find different ways for our children to learn 

And that is very inspiring.