Review - A Gift From Woolworths - Elaine Everest

I was given this book to review and although it is out of my comfort zone when it comes to books I really enjoyed it and found myself hoping there will be a sequel and I am embarking on reading the 4 previous books.

Elaine Everest is not an author I am familiar with so I googled her facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ElaineEverestAuthor/ and found she has a small following and has written widely for women's magazines, she is also a creative writing tutor .

This book A Gift From Woolworths is her fifth book in her Woolworths series and is a follow on in her series about a friendship in second World War times between Sarah, Maisie and Freda while working at Woolworths.

Although this is book 5 in the series you are given short back stories to each character so you know who is who. In this book the war is drawing to a close and you can feel the relief and optimism through the characters and the thrill of new beginnings despite rations still being in place and life still quite less than rosy. The book is heart warming set between births deaths and marriages, friendships and betrayals and as an added extra I learned there was a Woolworths museum.

The book gets a thumbs up from me and I am looking forwards to catching up with the rets of the books in the series.

NB* This review is written as part of the Blog Tour and all opinions are my own and I have received no remuneration for this review apart from a paperback copy of the book.

Home Education Is Not A Dumping Ground!..

I sit here really angry when I write this post. Recently I have noticed an increase in LA's negating their duties and dumping kids and their families unwittingly into the word of home education when they are ill equip or even wanting too. The LA has a duty to provide an education to kids that are too ill or are being bullied to the point of suffering with mental health problems because of it.

I have heard many stories over the past few months of parents being told to either send your child to school or home educate and no other options being given to these families who end up in despair because they know their child cannot cope at school and they are not equip to provide education at home financially or mentally. I can see the desperation in their posts and stories of their child already having attempted suicide on a number of occasions or they can see their child's mental heath deteriorating at a rapid rate of knots and all they are faced with are LA's and schools negating their duty to care for these vulnerable children and their families by attempting to force them to home educate, hoping the families will just sign on the dotted line to take financial responsibility and give the LA a get out clause. relieving them of their duties.

The LA have a duty to provide an education and that does include home tutoring. I actually found out about elective home education because a family member had been excluded from school and was receiving home tutoring to get her through her exams. It was then that I found out about this other option of Elective Home Education, I confused the two at first until I understood the implications which as I now realise are huge for some of these vulnerable struggling families.

However Home Tutoring should not be confused with Elective Home Education, although it does seem that these LA's and Schools are confusing the two and only seem to be offering parents with children that cannot attend school the two options of Home Education or send your child to school, I have noticed that more and more families are opting to home educate because they have no other options for them or they believe that they have no other options when they do, home tutoring provided and paid for by the LA.

Families need to know that it is not just a simple get your child to school or you will be fined and imprisoned or alternatively home educate, you do have options and to start you can read the Government Guidelines for children that have an illness and cannot attend school here which I have extracted some of that information below.

If your child can’t go to school

If your child can’t attend because of illness or injury, your school and local council will provide support to make sure their education doesn’t suffer.

The school’s role

The school should:

• let the local council know if your child is likely to be away from school for more than 15 school days
• give the local council information about your child’s needs, capabilities and the programme of work
• help them reintegrate at school when they return
• make sure they’re kept informed about school events and clubs
• encourage them to stay in contact with other pupils, eg through visits or videos

The local council’s role

If your child’s going to be away for a long time, the local council will make sure they get as normal an education as possible. This could include arranging:

• home teaching
• a hospital school or teaching service
• a combination of home and hospital teaching

The local council must make sure your child continues to get a full time education - unless part time is better for their health needs.
The local council should also:

• have a senior officer in charge of the arrangements and a written policy explaining how they’ll meet their responsibilities
• make sure your child isn’t without access to education for more than 15 school days
• arrange education from the start of your child’s absence if it’s clear they’re going to be away from school for long and recurring periods

If you are having problems engaging with your school or Local Authority who are blatantly ignoring your needs and trying to off-roll you into home education then please contact one of the below services who will help and give you advice on how to deal with the minefield in front of you to get the education your child deserves.

Contact For Families With Disabled Children are a charity that can help find you local support and also provide a handy guide for when your child cannot attend school which you will find here 

Red Balloon Learner Centre  supports young people who self-exclude or are isolated at school because of bullying or other trauma you can find their website here

Fresh Start In Education welcome any student regardless of their abilities, attitude or behaviour. We work to engage with them, enable them, and re-engage them in their education. You can find their website here

Child Law Advice Offer advice on children out of school and LA legal duties and the processes that should be followed you can find that webpage here

Not Fine In School Is a guide for families who are experiencing a difficult situation and your child is not fine in school, you can find their website here

Government Guidance on Education for Children with Health Needs Who Cannot attend School here

As a closing statement for this post I just wanted to add I see a lot of people entering home education because they feel they have no other choice, but there are choices.

Exams are expensive and so it tutoring, having to give up your employment is not a choice that should be made lightly, your child deserves the best education they can have and off-rolling is not always in the best interest of the child, if there are alternatives then I implore you to explore those options first before you decide to home educate. Attempts at Off rolling is a disgusting practice that every family should challenge.

For a more in-depth look and some figures on off rolling see here the government education inspection Blog.

Into Film Festival - Beautiful Planet

We had a fabulous visit to the Into Film Festival for the visually stunning A Beautiful Planet Screening. We were very fortunate to listen to a talk from Paul Fisher, Communications Manager From European Space Agency after the film and had the opportunity to have a one to one to ask questions about Climate Change and future jobs in the Space Industry... (thank you Paul for taking your time out to speak with us when everyone had gone.., that pen is fab thank you)....

We will now eagerly go through some of the educational materials that go along with the film and do some fun scientific experiments.

Forensic Field Trip

The twins and I went on a Home Educators Forensic Field Trip and experienced the basics of a Forensic Investigators job.

The workshop was run by Think Forensic in Huddersfield which incidently to our delight is the home of Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker is from Skelmanthorpe where think forensic is based,  you can find them over on facebook. We took a picture outside the restaurant where Jodie likes to eat when she is back home.

We covered the basics of how to take footprints and fingerprints while learning some great facts and figures.

We then got to go onto a crime scene, collect up all the evidence and figure out who done it!.

It was great fun and gave Oliver a taste of some of the things he wants to so as a career working as a detective.

Learning to play the Guitar

Olivia is very creative and one of her passions is music. I have a little bit of experience of music, I played in Mossley Hollins School Brass Band, I originally started off by playing the Cello and had lessons that I loved but I was then moved over to playing the Baritone in the school band. I was never a very confident player amongst some extremely talented people in the band. We played at the Royal Albert Hall and went over to play at the Rastede Festival in Germany. Mossley Hollins even produced a record which I was not on and they were a competition band and played amongst the likes of Black Dyke. Our band Master Mr Farrah is a man I still to this day greatly admire.

I felt I did not have the talent it takes to play or the dedication that it takes to become a good player although I did later join a non competition band in Ross-On-Wye when we lived in Hereford in my late 20's.

Olivia is very musical, she loves to sing and I can see her passion brewing with playing the guitar. We have limited spare cash and not enough to stretch to regular weekly lessons so I have to improvise and find online resources at little or no cost to help her develop her talent.

We tinkered around with a few but never really got anywhere until I found one in particular that gave us a few cords that have really given her the confidence to believe in herself that she can play and one day be a good guitarist the guy is called Marty Swartz, check him out his lessons are great

He also plays Olivias favourite Stand By Me that she has been trying to learn.

 The second bit of inspiration has come from her experience of singing with a busker, he played certain cords alongside Olivia singing and she picked up the sounds of that cord and has been playing it on loop from memory. The sounds of those cords are very much like the video below that Olivia likes to practice with.

The third inspiration for learning to play the guitar has come from a program I found on line that is completely free to use. He has a website and a youtube presence.

For now we are going to try to stick to Justin Guitars and follow his website and see how she gets on, hopefully we will be able to afford some proper guitar lessons in the future but for now I will do what I can to help her follow her passion.

Excitedly Fulflling Desires With Professor Brian Cox

Both Oliver and Olivia are mad fans of Brian Cox, for one he is from our home town and went to one of our local schools but the way he presents is engaging for both adults and children alike.

Oliver always says he wished he can see him live in the flesh so I am very excited to announce I have managed to scrape together enough cash to make his desire come true. I have only gone and purchased 3 tickets to see Brian Cox Universal: Adventures in Space and Time Tour in February at MEN arena. (click below to find out more)

I am so excited, we recently went to Science and Industry Distortions in Space Time Event and they loved the effects and that has set the scene nicely.

Alongside Albert Einstein, Brian Cox is someone who greatly influences Oliver, he has an interest in relativity and Spacetime and all things 4th dimensional, he loves Doctor Who of course which we all do and we have spent quite some time working slowly on layering our understanding of spacetime so I have purchased Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of the Solar System (click on the links to see more) books written by Brian Cox so that I can put their event tickets in each book to open on Xmas day.

I am so excited, I cannot wait to see their faces when we get there!...

Round-up post

I thought I had better do another round-up post considering I have done few posts over the past few weeks.

It has been a very busy time - we have had a new edition to our family, my son had a little boy, I had the pleasure of witnessing his birth to my great joy, and had the pleasure of feeding him his first bottle. He is lovely, such a sweet little soul. I am the ever proud grandma and the twins are very proud aunty and uncle.

This gave rise to a few discussions about childbirth and gender issues which I wont go into here but may do a separate post about how we handle such topics.

The twins and I have been on our annual Halloween Muncaster Castle jaunt with our very good fellow home educating family companions. This was such a lovely time as we do not get to see these particular home educating friends very often but they are my very favourite to spend time with, so it is lovely to spend some quality catch up time just nattering and putting the world to right without having to rush, we can relax and just have some fun. This was extra special for us this year as it was our first getaway of the whole year. I decided to hire a car to be on the safe side so I did not have to worry about break downs which would have been an adventure but would have taken away from our limited time with our friends.

The twins have been working hard on their Maths and have been loving their new program Doodle Maths which we spend a good hour on or two hours for me as I go through questions with the twins individually, so I spend and hour with one and then spend an hour with the other most days.

Their English has been taking shape with Skoolbo and Olivia has the addition of Literacy planet, they both work through the daily challenges on Skoolbo independently and I work with Olivia through Literacy Planet, usually daily for as long as she wants to, fortunately she really enjoys the program so we tend to spend around an hour each day if we have time working through the different levels going over old stuff and discovering new things.

It was a good month for awards, Oliver won badger of the month award and they both were awarded their Discover Arts Award which made them extremely proud of themselves and they now cannot wait to start on the next award.

Olivia is getting more keen on learning the guitar, her singing and musical talents are starting to blossom, she had an opportunity to sing outside a supermarket with a busker to kindly let her take centre stage, this gave her such a buzz that she is now more determined than evert to learn to play the guitar. 

Oliver has been working on languages, he has always had a fascination with words and he asked me about Latin, so we talked about Latin and where it can be found and he is keen to learn more, he also has a fascination with Russian, he has been spending quite some on Duolingo, last time I looked over his shoulder he was looking at French and doing a quiz about different countries and various questions based around the languages.

Olivia has been doing quite a bit of cooking this month, she has wanted to do things herself without my interference unless asked for, from planning meals to cooking them from scratch, she has done well and nothing has been thrown in the bin, she is turning into a good little cook.

Coding has played a massive part in the twins learning the past month or two Oliver particularly likes coding and has been bamboozling my head with coding talking about Coffee, Java and blocks. Olivia was not so keen in the past but the new programs they have been using have obviously had some kind of effect as she is taking part with Oliver a lot lately, she has also been playing a lot more chess than she usually does. I think the interaction with other people on these programs has had an effect on them both. Being able to interact in various ways on these programs with other people has given them a competitive streak.

We went to the Trampoline park in Manchester with a couple of other home ed families and decided to set up a monthly meet for home ed families, the first one starts this month,  the price is fantastic that they have given home ed families we are looking forwards to this meet as we will get to meet families we have not yet met and some we have met but have not seen for a while.

We have gained a new home ed family for friends that live very near to us. She is lovely, just like me in personality and the kids get on great, we have met up with them a number of times and been to parks and bike rides, we all really enjoy their company.

We went to Lancashire mining Museum with another of our home ed family friends and this place is fantastic, we did some mushroom hunting and found some fantastic specimens, the mining museum is a fascinating place and the volunteers are extremely knowledgable and answered many questions that we had which lead on to us doing some research on South Africas mining where they have the largest Mine in the world, although Lancashire mining museum had a depth of an impressive 879 yards. we learnt a lot while we were there and we also had the pleasure of looking at a monument the colliery had rescued recently for WW1 Soldiers who once worked at the mine, research has been done on the names on the marble plaque and they had managed to put together information about their births, lives and deaths of each one of the miners. Very impressive to say the least.

 There is obviously more that I have missed off but I think this rounds up our month nicely...

 

Halloween 2018

We have just been met with another growing up event:- Oliver stated that even though we have done the usual this year for Halloween such as pumpkin Picking, Trick or treating and going away to a Halloween event, scary movies and all things Halloween, Oliver declared that it wasn't as good as previous years because the mystery has gone out of it all and he understands properly what it is all about. Neither of them wanted to dress up in full costume as they usually do. Olivia on the other hand has stated that you are never to old for Halloween.