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

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

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.

Fretting and Other Norms

There has been fretting.

Are we doing the right thing? Are they learning enough? Is it okay that we take the dog for a walk in the middle of a school day? Will we make them weird(er)?

I think (hope) that this kind of worrying is completely normal when you do something that's not normal.

When it all gets a bit too much and we have a genuine wobble on the whole EHE philosophy I instinctively head to the figures. Maths may not be my strongest suit but I'm improving along with the boys.

School is 9-3.15pm. So 6.5 hours or so. Let's knock off the easy bits - coats off and registration, assembly, lunchtime, 2 x 30 min breaks, coats on and pack bags ... perhaps 3 hours lost to logistics.

Feeling better already.

Now we're looking at 3.5 hours of teaching. Roughly 30 children in the class so in that time we still need to take into account papers being handed out, repeating instructions, supporting struggling children, stretching the most able, handling any disruption.

I'm a qualified teacher but I'm secondary and these little people are out of my comfort zone. Even knowing the rhythm and challenges of school life I am astounded at how much progress children make in state primary school - and how hard and creatively teachers work to make that happen.

Maths doesn't lie though. 3.5 hours of group teach per day is equivalent to how much one to one tuition? I'm sure it's different for every child and attention span, interest and brain ache are natural limitations. One unexpected aspect of EHE for us was that we have to work in small bursts or the boys burn out fast. In a normal classroom they get integral breaks: while a child is told off, while the teacher writes on the whiteboard, while 30 handouts are passed round. At home you can't hide. It's full on, constant and you can't rely on your partner to answer for you.

Add to this the fact that the teaching is completely tailored to the child's level and needs.

So a typical day is not the relaxed, bubbling-along-like-a-stream dream I was expecting. It's intense. And we need those brain-breaks. So between lessons we bounce on the trampoline, dangle from the trapeze, head to the woods ...

But HELP I still don't know if the boys are doing ok?! Good news - external assessment is my friend. W has gone up a sublevel in maths in a very short time. 

Because I'm a brilliant teacher? Because his school teacher wasn't great? Definitely not. 

It's because the cheeky monkey was coasting and at Home School you can't coast. Instead you can just go to the coast. Because it's a beautiful day and we can learn about tides, fish & fossils.....

ELAA (Everyone Loves An Acronym)

LOs, Learning Objectives, are a fancy word for what they're going to learn. In a normal classroom setting, you'll often see 3 levels - an LO that everyone will hit, an LO most will hit and an LO some of the class will hit.

So for this blog post,
ALL will be able to describe what an LO is
MOST will be able to explain why LOs are important
SOME will be so inspired by the LO discussion that they write a book on LOs, make a million pounds, set up a home school for gifted cherry trees and live in bliss for the rest of their days. Or something like that.

That's your differentiation: leaving room for the more able pupils to go further but ensuring the less able still learn what they need to and get that all important sense of achievement.

A few tips to write successful LOs.
1. Be specific - your LO might be related to a piece of knowledge, a skill or an attitude (or all 3)
2. Make them measurable - use measurable verbs (like describe or explain rather than 'understand')
3. Check - are they realistic given your resources, lesson plan, children?
4. And finally : You might not need 3 levels if your class size is 1 or 2. Do not spend long writing them. They are just a tool. Use of LOs does not guarantee teaching returns. The attitude of your children may go up as well as down. Typical APR 10%.

So what does this mean to Home Ed? Surely this is one of those 'system constraints' or 'made up mumbo jumbo' or 'political correctness gone mad' that we must reject as the system tries to force learning on children's fragile little minds. Well maybe.

However teaching without LOs would be sailing without a map. Or flying without a unicorn. It's not about success in the box-ticking world, it's more about having a barometer for progress at a really micro level. In this 30 minutes, in this room, with these 2 kids.... what do I want them to take away from it.

And what about holistic learning I hear my EHE colleagues shout. Being so rigid you'll miss learning opportunities! You are right my lovely friends and therein lies the key to LOs - they're not the be all and end all. You will throw them out and ignore them when a better learning opportunity (LOp?) rears its creative head. You will fail to meet them and be annoyed that the kids and/or the lesson didn't work like it was supposed to. But my goodness, don't start a journey without some idea of where you're going.