Olympian Nicola White and Hockey .

Olivia was very excited to meet Nicloa White at her hockey practice.

Olivia has always been a fan of hockey and started to play with our local team last year.

This week the team had a visit from Nicola White the Olympian Hockey player.

Olivia managed to get her picture in the paper and they managed to get a fantastic shot of Olivia standing nearby Nicola White as she watched on giving the girls some Hockey advice.

The team had a fantastic write up in the local paper too which you can find by clicking on the picture below.

History meets Recycling

I am loving our new focus on history. The kids love history and it is constantly on our agenda, I have started to get them to look at history in a different way or more how it is connected to how we live today and how people will live in the future.

We had a great discussion whilst in the bath, about how we know about history and how many things we have looked at are the same in history but have changed, for example our theme for the past few years has been focusing on how people live, so we looked at how fashions have changed, ho toys have changed and how people's houses have changed and in addition what, in those houses have changed like lighting for instance from candles to bulbs.

We went back to some of the things we have seen and learnt about such as the nomads caves we went to look at and the Castles we have been too along with the museums we have attended. 

We talked about the theme of things changing and  I asked what was the common theme throughout the changes, and asked them to think about why those changes occurred.

We came up with the answer that things changed so that people's lives were made better, better housing, better ways to cook and our favourite example was how shampoo is bottled, instead of people walking from the shops with shampoo dripping through their fingers someone came up with a way to bottle shampoo to carry it away easily making it easy to transport shampoo.

We then discussed how these good changes can cause problems or discourse, for example although people have come up with ways to package things and make it easy for us with canned and packaged foods instead of having to go to a field for our food to harvest it ourselves, this in itself causes issues such as disposal of all that packaging.

I got them to think about it by using the example of the shampoo bottle and telling them that there are 45 million people in our country so imagine 45 million people each having one shampoo bottle, were does that go?. how big that mound of empty shampoo bottles would be, so people have had to come up with ways to recycle things. Then I asked them to think about each person in the world having one shampoo bottle each and how big that mound of shampoo bottles would be.

We looked at the bottom of the shampoo bottle and talked about the recycling sign on the bottom of the bottle.

We talked about mummies business and how it is based on recycling, by mummy selling items that people no longer need, they avoid going to landfill and lengthening their life by selling them to people that wanted to use them therefore helping to keep the environment slightly better off.

So we now have two trips planned from this conversation, one to a recycling centre, although they are aware of recycling centres anyway as we go to the local tip, a visit to a working demonstrable recycling centre will be excellent and  I do know of a couple of places that do educational visits which centre on non-recyclable waste that I can arrange a visit for.

When we were talking about fashion changing we realised that we have never attended a fashion museum, showing changes in fashion throughout the centuries, so that will be our second visit to plan, a fashion museum.

I set them a project to do in their own time over the coming months, I challenged them to come up with something made entirely out of recycled materials, this can be anything that is usable or decorative.

But the rules are they have to plan it first with diagrams and lists of materials needed. Using their own imagination or searching You Tube for websites for ideas.

What does a 'full time' education actually mean?

The words 'must receive a full time education' is often banded about so easily with no thought into what it actually means.

The common meaning of a full time education in UK means 190 days in a state school institute commonly referred to as 12 hours per week per school term time. (much less for independent schools)

That equates to 5 days a week approximately 6 hours a day (9-3) spread over 190 prescribed days broken down into 6 week chunks.

How much education takes place in this time is debatable and has been at the core of many a discussion over the web with people pointing out that in those 6 hours, it is not actually all spent learning which the guidance of 12 hours per week term time takes into account.

There are movements between classrooms, registers, assemblies, class meetings, settling down classes before work begins, lunch and break times and of course teacher training days, strikes and days out.

So adjusting fairly and not debating the 12 hours a week term time 'full time' education guidance, which equates to 38 weeks and 456 hours per year, learning.

This works out for a home educator being on par with schools, at 1 hour per day, learning over 365 days of the year.

Upping the hours using the debate by removing 1 hour for lunch, and half hour for breaks and half hour for other eventualities mentioned above and reducing learning time to 4 hours per school day, broken down over a full school year of 190 days, this works out at approximately 760 hours of learning per year.

For a home educator being on par with schools using the debate, this would work out at approximately 2 hours per day of learning spread over a full year.

For many home educators this of course is absurd and many home educators spend an awful lot more time, each and every day, educating their kids. Some utilise this advantage and follow the curriculum for specific subjects and the rest of the time the kids learn what they want to learn in their own way and on their own terms, for some home educators, life 'is' learning and they learn all the time.

Realistically most of what the kids in the school system learn is learnt 'outside' the school walls (or security gates in most instances). For some within those school walls this 12 hours never transpires due to class disruption by not so engaged students.

For a more detailed breakdown and far more realistic than I have been, check out this 'time is precious' blog post, you will be even more enlightened...

Self Employment and the Home Educator

One question that comes up time and time again is how do home educators afford to home educate, in fact, many who do wish to become home educators, end up giving up the dream to home educate and end up leaving their very unhappy child in the mainstream system full of guilt and anger at the system damaging their child, all due to not being able to find a way to mix work and home educating.

In this time of tight control by the Government of trying to make sure people are lifted out of poverty with sanctions thrown out left, right and centre, with no thought for the family unit mental health or individual situation prescribed by their one size fits all approach.

If you are not working then you will be stung with their arbitrary regime of punishing you if you are not looking for, or in any work, the single parent is no exception to the rule and are subject to sanctions pushing you further into poverty if you do not comply.

Forget the worry of childcare and inadequate schooling and being forced to leave your child with a stranger in a world full of abusers and other daily struggles of doing a two person's job by yourself as a single parent, none of that matters, what does matter is that you are earning money for the economy to put into someone else's pocket with forced spending in the way of childcare, petrol or travel money and work uniforms, so that you end up skint anyway, but the Government can at least make sure your inadequate parenting skills are away from your child and the child is with a more competent government surrogate parent, aka school, that is until it all goes wrong and you get the blame anyway, particularly when the child fails their SATS and the child is stressed and depressed due to the amount of useless work the surrogate parent, has put on the child, to prove the surrogate is spending the money they are given by government wisely.....but that is a different story for another time.

Many home educating parents live in a two parent household, they juggle life between them, working to maintain the lifestyle and caring for the kids and overseeing the child's education, this is often together or on shifts, some are lucky to have helpful families and friends who support and facilitate in the children's education, some are doing the job alone.

I am one of those doing the job alone, and many home educating parents employment comes in the form of self employment.

There are lots of enterprising people out there who manage to get by using their imagination and a lot of hard work, mostly unsupported by this government.. There are a lot of people who survive on the little they earn through self employment, all be it supported by working Tax Credits, but no support to help them maintain and grow their small business, this is mainly due to the fact they are classed as lifestyle business and not a start-up or growth business, they are not taken seriously and do not garner the same support.

Which I find ironic and if you talk to many of those lifestyle business they will tell you their ambitions of growing their business and many actually do, and in adition they are learning, they do their accounts, advertising, sales, product research and development and they are paying the bills they need to pay to maintain their preferred lifestyle, they are building on their expertise to become rounded business people and more employable in the future, they are doing something for their hard earned working tax credits and small earning.

They lead simple life's, spending on necessities and keeping their meagre business afloat to enable them to keep home educating. so why then do the Government punish these people by removing their working tax credits or more increasingly denying universal credits due to them not earning enough. 

Home educating single parents are certainly working hard enough, so why force them to go onto Jobseekers to sit for 40 hours a week and look for a job they have no interest in and probably something that is brain dead work that will sap the life out of them.

Self-employment for a home educator is not an easy feat but is kept up with gusto to do what is right for their child and families to give them all a better future.

Sure there are easy ways, shove the kid in school and only have a limited input into their child's education and welfare, but some of us think that the yearly foreign holiday and posh car is not worth the sacrifice, so a simple financial life and lots of juggling financial choices is an alternative viable choice to make for many of us.

One thing this Government and a lot of people in the public sphere do is underestimate the dynamic spirit of the single parent.

Single parents have had a bad wrap for a long time, instead of being lauded for getting through a difficult time juggling childcare, family and everyday life, alone, they are subject to harsh criticism which has in the past attracted comments like lazy, bad for kids, irresponsible, not fit for the job, a scourge on society, that again is subject to another story, but these inspirational single parents work hard, they work very hard, far from being lazy and a scourge, they are educating the next generation encouraging a life long learner and in comparison to schools are doing a very good job.

The number of kids suffering depression and stress caused by the school system is increasing in rapid numbers, more test pressures put on teachers, and more and more of the human element seems to be missing from the educational institution, causing a generation of kids to be lost, more pressure but still more failure is screaming into your face that something is not working. But no, they continue on their course to pile on the pressure and even worse results.

Our local school demonstrated their failure by a whole year failing to gain even a grade c read (here), Oldham itself has been nominated the acclaimed title of being the third worst place in the country for failing schools (read here).

For those taking a stand and want better and different for their kids, these people should be supported and encouraged instead of demonised and punished.

Self employed home educators are dynamic and they are doing something about the dire education situation and taking matters into their own hands, because this Government is clearly incapable of sorting out the dire educational situation, other than further monetising it to earn as much profit out of it as possible, while ignoring the collateral damage being done to the children they are supposed to be educating.

The law states 'children must be educated in school or otherwise' and as long as parents are prepared to take the education into their own hands, this should be supported, and those self employed people working hard to ensure their kids get the education they deserve, should not be punished and penalised for picking up the slack on a failing education system.

The irony is that each school place costs the government on average for all authorities across England is £4,550.54 per-pupil, so those that are self employed and home educating are already saving the government this amount of money, in my case x2 as home educating is not funded by the government in any way, educational supplies and exams are funded solely by the home educating family.

Looking at a way to re-distribute that money that is saved by Governments though parents home educating rather than punishing self employed home educators,  may be a better way to go than punishments of sanctions and forced brain dead employment..

Centre for Personalised Education - Alternative Educational Futures LEX Conference

Centre for Personalised Education are holding an - Alternative Educational Futures LEX Conference in March.

There are some great speakers booked and although I do not usually attend events like this, I may actually go to this one.

I love home education, I love the workings of home education, so it is always good to learn more about alternative education.

I  have often found it hard to understand why home education gets attacked so negatively,  so often, other than the fact that people do not like individualism in this country. Everything has to be controlled, anything that is not understood is dismissed as being odd or weird or not right and has to be guided by a higher power, those are the usual judgements of the ignorant who actually have no clue what it is all about but just like to judge anyway.

Personalised education does not make mass education look any worse than it is, personalised education is not an attack on main stream education, it is just a different alternative way of doing it.

I often laugh when I see negative comments coming from the masses regarding the inferiority of home education with socialisation and the quality of education being the most talked about subject when it come to home education, rarely is it the content of the education being discussed.

Most of these people who are negatively commenting on something they know nothing about have terrible writing skills (worse than mine) that  they learnt in school, the majority of them have jobs that they need no exams to be able to carry out, if in work at all, after all it is not the home educating community that are having campaigns to befriend people due to loneliness, they already befriend people throughout their varied interesting daily lives whilst home educating, instead of being confined to four walls being forced to mix with the segregated same age and ability groups, day in and day out, all whilst juggling innovative business ideas to keep them employed.

I often wonder why conferences like these are not more packed out by these outspoken vocal opponents of alternative education to find out more about it.

'The Centre for Personalised Education – Personalised Education Now seeks to promote educational ‘alternatives for everybody, all of the time’ through a diverse, funded Personalised Educational Landscape'.

This I am surprised is not already taken up more by our Government instead of them attacking it, being in a progressive society includes moving education forwards to a new level and coming up with great new ways to educate the masses. The level of unemployment and lack of a innovative workforce which industry leaders are screaming out about, with more and more people turning away from mass education in this country, should be a good indicator that the current 'mass eduction for all' is failing, it is failing to inspire and excite a huge group of the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

Even Mark Zuckerberg is a great advocate of personalised learning and Sal Khan the creator of Khan Academy is a great advocates and both have demonstrated perfectly what the power of personalised learning can do.

Personalised learning to me, is something to be excited about, and I am all for those trying to get personalised learning initiatives funded by our Government and Industry, and let it be seen for what it is, not something to fear and regulate the death out of, but something to support and help innovate and become more accessible for our future generations..

To find out more about this years Centre for personalised education Conference and to book a place click on the eventbrite link below.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/centre-for-personalised-education-alternative-educational-futures-lex-registration-31417578824

Home Education In The news again..

Home education is in the news again and yet again more negativity...

This time the negativity is directed at the poor woman who dared to speak about how she chooses to educate her own children... Take note that I said 'chooses' to educate her own children...

It highlights everything I hate about this growing home education scene, 'the school gates syndrome' is arriving in force at the gates of home education.

This poor woman attacked by the vast majority of home educators who are more concerned about how 'she makes them look bad' because the media inaccurately portrayed how she 'chooses to do it  a different way than they do', than the fact that they are missing the point of the fundamental right of home education, it is her 'personal choice' in how she chooses to home educate, and as long as she is educating them, what is their problem, this is under attack and therefore their own choice is also under attack, as the collective fundamental freedom of choice to home educators is to educate in a way they see fit. Leading theses vocal home educators to fall right into the very trap they are being led into of more regulation, using 'divide and conquer'.

Unfortunately what seems to have occurred is some in the community have strangely interpreted the interview she gave, as if she was talking about everyone, like how she educates is how everyone else home educates, I find that quite disturbing and it feels like some kind of  gas lighting has gripped the home ed community and started to spread, it's strange, very strange.I am really not sure how the interview can be interpreted into 'this is how everyone home educates', I have never found the part where she said she is talking for everyone, I only find the parts where she is talking about herself and her own family.

What should be under attack is the disgusting way the media portrayed the family and more than likely misled the family on what the topic was and how it was going to be used. The family also have a maintained blog that indicates that the portrayed story of 'a terrible mother leaving her kids in front of a computer all day' by using the title of 'Mum educates the kids by allowing them to play video games 7 hours a day'... is clearly exaggerated and twisted by the media to fit their narrative, and whatever goal they are trying to achieve in shaping government policy.

The home ed community as a whole for the majority of time can be a great support in times of need of information and advice and support of one form or another, home education has been turned around from being a lonely and isolated experience to one of a massive community of like minded individuals up and down the country, so it is very sad to see a whole community turning on one person for her choices for her family, including going to the media.

The reason why I home educate is because I can do it  in a way that suits 'my children' and tailor it to suit us as a family unit, with no one prescribing to me how I home educate, that includes other home educators and the LEA, home educating is or once was a personal choice and a decision not taken lightly and not just a fashion statement and a way to avoid following school rules.

We choose and prescribe our days and timetables and social events tailored to our preference, nothing forced and nothing elaborate unless that is what we want.  Increasingly I have watched paranoid home educators trying to emulate school, cramming in as many school like home education events as possible to avoid the critical glare of anyone insinuating their children do not 'socialise' and the education they are receiving is inferior to 'school'. That is their choice and no-one has a right to criticise them for it, just do what you feel is right for you and your family.

Of course home ed events are far from few and far between these days in parts of the country, the socialisation question falls flat on it's face before it even begins, so numerous are social events for home educators in fact that a lot of home education families never spend any time at home, they have events to attend every day of the week and that includes choosing between the many options of which event they attend that day, with rushed and stressed schedules they must maintain to keep up appearances and reams and reams of photo evidence that they are doing something, therefore proving everyone wrong.

Some criticise the fact that she should have known that media would twist it and lie, 'so what' I say, the way the home ed community have turned on her and more disturbingly her children, is a disgrace and is more of an embarrassment to home educators as a collective than the interview and ensuing negativity the family have received.

I have kept at arms length from the home education community as I have seen how 'nasty' it can become and I have been a victim myself, I learnt very early on, to stay away and concentrate on what I am here to do, which is home educate my children without the gaze and opinionated views on what we should and should not be doing at any one prescribed time. Our education is a very private choice, some of which we share and some we keep to ourselves, we do it our way, in our time, and on our own terms.

Socialisation is a massive part of home education whether you are 'in' with a home ed community or not, my twins go to organised regular groups outside of home education and they have home educated friends we keep in touch with and have meet ups with. Their online life is yet to arrive, but it will, in time, when they get old enough for an online life, I believe an online life is as important as an offline one and much can be gained.

We do not feel compelled to be 'in' with other home educators, we are just living life and whatever comes around, comes around, being home educated does not define us or mean we can only attend home ed events, I have work and my clients have kids that the twins socialise with, we have family with kids of different ages, we have friends with kids of different ages, we have regular day to day things where they meet other kids. We go to home ed events if it is suitable for us in what we are learning at the time or it is affordable or there are people we would like to see or it does not conflict with other things we are doing.

My heart goes out to this woman and I am ashamed how the home ed community has turned so harshly on her, if there is any demonstration of public bullying, this is one of those demonstrations. One of the very things I turned my back on school for, although this demonstration also debunks the theory that kids that do not go to school, will not learn to deal with bullying, as in this case you can clearly see despite avoiding school, vile harsh bullying can still occur.

Appeasing Grammar Police....

Writing anything down has always been something that gives me great chills.

I am very aware of my very poor grammar skills in my written work, this has affected me in different ways, recently I have failed to carry through with a Police complaint due to not being able to put down on paper what I needed to say, I did shout for help with the letter but none was forthcoming, so it resulted in  such an important thing for me being forgotten and left in the doldrums.

This made me realise how poor grammar can affect life in ways unexpected, grammar is important.

The twins do grammar work and have done so from an early age, this is important for them to get to grips with. This is a good example of how I can learn alongside the kids while home educating and brush up on my own skills and fix some of the poor education I received through a school.

My writing never improves, bad habits die hard, despite trying to do a lot of work on my grammar skills, it seems to go in one ear and out of the other, when I look back on posts on this blog I generally always think 'what on earth did I write there'. I recently read a post about bad grammar on Blog Clarity, this is a great article and highlights the importance of proof reading blog posts.

Sentence planning is something I seem to struggle with, I noticed this whilst doing my degree, in fact that was one very big reason I never completed my degree, the contents were easy to understand, writing it down on paper, in my own words was another matter.

I had a facebook friend who used to help me with my Uni work, (thanks DH), she would go through my work and be critical, her English Lit and Language skills are excellent, she knows how to use her words, she has studied and has qualifications in the art of English and has exemplary skills in the art of English. I envy her... She would make a great writer.

It is so frustrating but the block is there and all I can do is keep plodding on and hope the twins are much better at it than I ever will be, and not give up writing for fear of others critical and often unkind rather than helpful remarks.

There are a few weblinks that I often turn to for a refresher and some tips, and to help the twins, I just have the job of getting the info to sink in, here are some of those weblinks:-

Beating Dyslexia - Correct Grammar

English Grammar - The British Council 

Talk English.com 

My English Pages 

Easy Pace Learning

I have been advised in the past to do a technical writing course, which should help, some of the courses I have found are here, not all are free.

Wikiversity - Technical writing

Study.com - Basics of Technical writing

Coursera - Technical writing

Learning Tree

There are literally hundreds of English Grammar sites, some free to use, all I have to do is learn it and get it to sink in... that is the hard part!...

Shameless Plug For Maplin

I have to give this plug for Maplins, what a fab company to deal with.

I have had my eye on one of their Metal Detectors for a while since we decided to take up metal detecting whilst we were staying by the beach, the particular detector I had my eye on was the standard metal detector with analogue display, this has great reviews I found on the web and looks like a great starter metal detector for the twins and I to get to grips with, easy to use, lightweight and has a good depth search coil.

I have done a lot of research on metal detectors and they come in at crazy prices mostly at the £100+ mark, so I thought this looked good for the price as a starter model, the price I have seen on this model was £49.99 in the Maplin Sale or £69.99 at the usual price.

To my dismay when I went to buy it after I managed to scrape the cash together, the sale had ended, and I had missed out on the sale price, feeling a bit upset as I knew that we would now have to wait even longer for a metal detector until I scraped some more money together, sad when we had our hearts set on getting started and I was banking on this to be a distraction to the horrors we are going through right now.

I was more annoyed as their sale end date that I saw was 14/02/2017 or so I thought, I may have seen it wrong but that is what was advertised on the facebook page, but the end date was actually the 31st January 2017.

Not being one to normally complain, unusually I did complain, this was mainly due to a bad week and hearing some quite bad news on an ongoing situation in our lives. I felt pretty upset and in a weak moment thought to myself, I didn't need the disappointment and feeling like I had promised the twins something that I could now not deliver on, after we had been looking forwards to a bit of simple fun all week.

I wrote them a short message on their facebook page and pointed out that I wished they had made it more clear when their sale ended as we had missed out on the metal detector.

To my surprise they quickly wrote back asking which item number it was and then proceeded to offer it at the sale price, I was so happy. Maplins were quick to phone me and sort out collecting the detector.

None of which I expected, I just wanted to moan and share my disappointment at me missing the sale.

I have to say they had first class customer service and they really do not know how much that gesture meant to us. The smile it put on my face and the kids was priceless, after the terrible time we have been having that small thing made a massive difference in our lives and will now go a long way to making the next few weeks bearable and put a few adventures and smiles on our faces.

Thank you Maplin

Home education and adaptation to any life event

Our new year started off with a lot of disruption to our lives. 

After experiencing a devastating life changing event we have had to use my coping strategy of finding the positives in a very bad situation.

We have not been at home for many reasons and are looking to move to Lincolnshire as soon as finances and circumstances allow, how this would have transpired if we were schooled and not home educating I dread to think.

The fortunate thing is that we do home educate and so the kids education has not been affected unlike it would have been if we had been in the school system.

The great thing about home education is that you can do it anywhere under any circumstances.

Despite all the upheaval we have been undergoing in our lives and the massive amounts of change, things have stayed the same, as far as the twins education goes.

In this short month of January we have been learning about Kind Henry 1V and visited the remains of Bolingbrook Castle, the twins also researched King William The Conqueror and the monarchy hierarchy with kings and queens and the marriages and inheritance, we manage to incorporate our theme of places and how they are named into this by looking at his wife Matilda of Flanders which led us onto the  poem of Flanders Fields and we read and decoded the poem, this lead to looking at world war 2 and the Dam busters, we visited the museum where they have started the restoration of the Lancaster bomber.

 
 
 Due to us being near to a beach we have also started to look at the geology and geography of the beach and have been collecting some fantastic precious stones and various rocks along with the obligatory shells discovering all about what we find.

 

We have even embarked on buying a metal detector to see if we can find some amazing archaeology finds on the beach, which will make Oliver's dream come true of finding some ancient relics, whilst Olivia has intentions on finding precious stones to make jewellery from.

Our project on changing places that we have been working on as a theme for the past few years has taken the form of a powerpoint presentation where they have been brushing up on some IT skills and are researching road names and where they come from, learning that the historical industry of a town or important person from a town can be seen in the road names, we even spent an afternoon getting to know the new town by looking like nutters and walking round photographing road name signs whilst they homed their photography skills with their camera, so they can add the signs to the powerpoint.

They have learnt the meaning behind the names, such as the theme around where we live is trees, so we have been looking at the particular trees and learning about them, they were delighted to find out that the red berries they keep seeing are actually hawthorns, as they have been asking what they are for some time, so we have been learning about native and non native species.

We are doing a compare and contrast on our home town and this new town and will also visit  nearby fishing village town and do some street research there.

I love the contrast between our home town being a textile and mining town and the new areas being fishing villages, it makes for a great compare and contrast exercise.

In between all that we have been doing our usual Khan Academy and IXL Maths sheets, reading lots mainly of the books they requested for Xmas amongst many other things.

We have also met another home educating family in our new town and look forwards  to meeting them again, we have discovered new groups that we intend to meet up with but with the coastal flood warning that was sadly delayed that plan, although we did learn about tidal flooding and the connection with the moon and coastal erosion, so all was not lost with that, even that was a learning curve.

So while it may seem to others we are gallivanting and doing not very much, it has been a very busy and productive January, all unplanned and all very exciting and new, in between my devastation emotionally....

I am pleased my plan of making good out of a bad situation, has been successful and without home education things would have been rather dire.....