The trials of home educating

I knew when we started on our journey into home education there would be bad days, but the optimist in me thought they would be few and far between and I never imagined we would experience 5 in a row! Last week Chipman was on his 2nd week of a trial of no ADHD medication and I was in a really grumpy mood that I just couldn't shift. It was not a match made in heaven! Without his medication Chipman needed constant reminders to focus on his work and I have felt like a real nag, if I said once 'sit down' 'pick up your pen and write' or 'stop being an aeroplane' I said it a thousand times.

Being an aeroplane, train or gremlin have been ways for Chipman to express his frustrations but have unfortunately added to mine. On Tuesday we were working on simplifying ratios, not being in a particularly patient mood myself and numbers looking like a foreign language to me we stumbled on a problem solving the 6th question. I suggested to Chipman that we move onto the next question and talk to mathematically minded Dad when he got home about this particular question. He was having none of this as he said they had to be done in order. So whist I trawled the Internet, phoned various people and stressed out trying to find the answer Chipman spun around me being an aeroplane, noises and all. And just in case I was in any doubt as to what he was doing, the aeroplane engine noises and arms out to the side circling after all may not have been a big enough clue, he was periodically shouting he was in fact an aeroplane. Despite my pleas, which started out calm and turned into shouty quite quickly, Chipman's aeroplane was not going to land any time soon. In tears I decided that we had had enough maths for one day and called it quits, Chipman landed and got on with some geography.

The maths frustrations continued, the aeroplane made appearances, although Chipman's method of transport sometimes changed to a train as the week went on. And with the train as you may have guessed came noises, arms circling at his sides and the announcement that he was a train until Thursday. We had been stuck in the house for 4 solid days and think we were both starting to go a little stir crazy. So when the suggestion from a friend to go out for lunch came up we jumped at it. Having some time away from the house certainly helped, Friday was much calmer, although Chipman still needed to get around the house somehow so the aeroplane and train returned, I felt more able to deal with it just from a couple of hours away from the house.

I have learnt my lessons from last week, and there are quite a few. We need new strategies to help Chipman deal with his ADHD now that it is not being controlled by drugs and to get a fair assessment of how he is coping without them, we need time away from the house at least once a week and finally I am not blessed at being good with numbers so Dad is now the maths teacher. It was a trying week but reflecting back I can see my mistakes and I am hopefully going to learn from them.

Pen phobia and dice to help

Hands up if you have your child is a reluctant writer (I'm putting my hand up at this point). Hands up if you have difficulty inspring them just to start writing because inspiration is not there (again my hand is up). Hands up if the thought of creative writing with your child makes you want to hide under the covers and cancel school for the day just to avoid it (I think you can probably guess my hand is up again). In our house we have found a great solution for our 12 year old son Chipman.

It's called Storycubes. The box of Storycubes consists of 9 dice with a different picture on each side. You can get them online although we bought ours from our local bookshop. It's like writing is fun all of a sudden, throwing dice and taking it in turns to make up tales is more interesting than just being given a subject to write about or being told to write a story. Once the dice are thrown it's up to the thrower to decide what order they go and how the story will end.

 

When we first started using Storycubes we didn't write anything down. We would throw the dice and tell our stories, once Chipman was comfortable with this we started taking photo's of the cubes and I would scribe the story and then stick the photo onto the page as a reminder.

The next stage was for him to copy out what I had scribed. We took a while to get to the pen stage, letting Chipman get used to the story telling and imagination processe first. This week I will be adding challenges by looking at story structure. This week we will be looking at endings, Chipman will be challenged to try out a different ending for each story he makes up. We are using TES resources (free to sign up, everyone loves free!) for the structure ideas but you could make up your own. 

Once we have worked on structure, we will be working on length. Chipman's stories are typically a paragraph long with the bare minimum detail require to get his point across. The plan is to start increasing slowly so that they are more descriptive and encourage him to use longer conversations and build more atmosphere.

Once we have that mastered all of the above the idea will be for him to plan his story out using this planning grid, placing the cubes and making notes in each relevant section before he writes the story out on his own. He wants to make a book of his Storycubes stories, complete with his own drawings, for his cousin as a  Christmas gift, so I am hoping we are at this stage by then! I am so excited to see that Chipman not only picks up a pen because I have told him he needs to, but is actually enjoying it and setting his own goals. As we are only half way through my master plan I cannot tell you how well it will all work but I am hoping it will all go smoothly and I won't be hiding under the covers!

We have gone from having a pen phobic writer that came out in a cold sweat or grumpy mood at the mere mention of writing a story, to one who wants to write his own book of short stories! Storycubes really have been an invaluable resource for us and I hope that my ramblings and Storycubes can be useful to your family too!

(This post is a personal opinion of Storycubes that I purchased for our family. I am not sponsored or endorsed by the Storycubes brand.)

Saying goodbye to the summer holidays and hello to school days

Sadly all good things must come to an end and for our family that was the summer holidays. (If you want to know what Chipman and I were up to then check this out) We decided that we would mark the occasion with a family day out to Legoland in Windsor. A great day was had by all, and I really do mean all, us adults had as much fun as the children! It is often hard to find things that both the children (with a 5 year age gap) want to do, but we were certainly onto a winner with Legoland. Beebie the youngest thought the miniature village was 'cool' and the eldest Chipman and his friend looked more closely at the detail that had gone into making each replica. The rides were great for height phobic Chipman and fearless Beebie with something that they all could enjoy. Our personal favourite was Atlantis Submarine voyage. We were there from when the park opened to when it shut and even the rain didn't dampen our spirits as we spun, whizzed, screamed and splashed our way around.

Beebie after our underwater adventure

Despite some dodgy driving Chipman got his drivers license!

The following Monday bought about the dreaded 'back to school'. I had been looking at lots of back to school celebrations that home educators use and struggled to find any that would suit our family with one going off to school and one staying at home to be educated. This year we started our own back to school tradition. The day started with homemade pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast.

'Can we have this every morning Mum?'

It takes a lot of concentration to eat pancakes

Whist they had finishing tucking into their yummy (their words not mine) pancakes it was time to open their 'Great Things About Me' envelopes. As I mentioned before in Art time with perfectionists both the children struggle with low self esteem so we started the new year off by bolstering them up. Inside each envelope was something that Mum, Dad, Grandma, Nana and Aunty thought they were good at. This ranged from good conversations to reading and maths. They loved reading them all and it is something we will be repeating next year. Before Beebie went off to school we took the usual back to school picture so we could remember the day they started school in 2013.

Back to school 2013

All in all we had a great time celebrating the end of the holidays with squeals of excitement and starting back at school with renewed enthusiasm and a great sense of worth. Did you celebrate the end of summer or start of the school year? I would love to hear what you go up to!

A miniature literary adventure

Today we went on a miniature literary adventure and it was great fun. We packed our lunch and the kids in the car and headed to Buckinghamshire. Our first stop was the  Roald dahl museum and story centre in Great Missenden.

It was full of hands on things for the children and not so young ones to enjoy from hands on computer activities, photo's dress up, creative writing and crafts. The Wonka doors even smelt of chocolate!

 Finding out how sparky Beebie was by answering some tricky questions. It turns out that she is as sparky as Fantastic Mr Fox!

 Chipman and Dad enjoying looking at Dahl family photos

 Dad couldn't resist trying out the dressing up box, although I think they were meant for smaller people!

  Chipman loved using the automatic grammatizator to make his sentences. Do boys ever grow out of finding toilet's funny? P enjoyed following the James and the giant peach trail and answering the questions along the way.

After we'd finished our literary part of adventure and our tummy's were full of picnic we headed of to Bekonscot model village and railway in Beaconsfield. It is a place that both my husband enjoyed visiting as children and enjoyed again today! We watched the trains go round as we looked at miniature shops, schools, churches, fairgrounds and saw a killer giant duck.

The children named this normal sized duck the 'killer giant duck' as in comparison to the model people it looked HUGE!

Chipman was amazed that the roof was made of asphalt tiles like a full size roof would be and being sensory driven had to know what it felt like!

The amount of attention to detail and work that goes into each of these models was astounding.

After looking into a small world and the world of an awesome author we loaded 2 tired children into the car and headed home.

Art time with perfectionists

So when I started our art session this morning I planned to teach the children about aboriginal dot art and then blog about it, but as ever with home educating it hasn't quite worked out that way. The reason, both my children are huge perfectionists! My plan  to tell them about the history of aboriginal art and play aboriginal music whilst painting didn't quite work, teaching my perfectionists a new skill means lots of encouragment so they don't give up, so instead of teaching them about art history I taught them how to persevere and try their best. It might not have been the lesson I intended but it was one worth learning!

The children's perfectionism is teamed with low self esteem which means nothing is ever perfect enough. Beebie's stems from her speech and language difficulties, she tried hard with her speech but it didn't always work so she just gave up talking, she has to try harder than others with certain subjects for less results so her coping strategy is if some doesn't go according to plan she will rip it up before you have a chance to talk about it. Beebie is in school and a lot of her homework gets handed in on a sellotaped piece of paper! Chipman's stems from being told at school for years he's naughty and a bad person, if he's such a bad person how can he do anything good. If he can't do it as perfectly as he wants or it's challenging then he just gives up! They both want to prove themselves worthy by being perfect, well perfect is unobtainable so it causes lots of frustrations.

This morning as we sat down with drawing books and bamboo skewers and paints, I set them each an individual challenge whilst they were painting. Chipman's challenge was to see his picture to the end and complete it. He completed his challenge, he nearly didn't at several points when his picture didn't look like the one in his 'how to draw book' but he listened to my advice and produced this beautiful, colourful flower.

Beebie's challenge was to not get stressed out if it didn't go right or was hard, but to talk about it. She found it frustrating but she told me that she was getting frustrated rather than screaming or sitting in a mood. I talked it through with her and on she went. At the end she had drawn and painted a dolphin, cat and dog and said 'Mummy that was so much fun'

The children may not have learned a whole lot about aboriginal art or even produced anything that looks like it but they rose to the challenge. They tried something new, they accepted that their pictures were not exactly 'perfect' like the book and they have made some fantastic art work which once dry will be proudly displayed on the wall.

Leaping into deschooling

Deschooling, a term I had never heard of until I started home educating. What is it exactly? Well it's getting school out of our systems, 12 year old Chipman has 8 Years of learning in a school environment and myself 14, we only know how to learn in a classroom. Home educating has so many advantages over classroom learning but both mine and Chipman's heads are in a school mindset, that each subject must be taught separately for a set time each day, that we must follow a very rigid timetable that is the same each week and that it won't be fun! We need time to find out how Chipman learns, what he loves and get to know each other, for the past 8 years the only time we have spent together has been after school and the holidays. So now the official school type learning stops and we have fun! 

So far this week we have started making a a 3d cardboard sphinx (he's really into the Egyptians at the moment), made clay models, watched films, been to the charity shops to buy books and games. We have learnt a lot about each other, I have learnt that Chipman loves crafting as do I but I have also learnt that I am not a very patient teacher and want to jump in and do it for him! I need to learn how to take a step back and to facilitate him rather than doing it for him. I also need to find creative ways for him to show his learning.

Chipman has also taught me how to play chess! We have learnt that both of us learn by doing and not by reading the instructions. I have also found that Chipman is a much more patient teacher than me and explains things very well verbally.

I don't know how long we will deschool for, I imagine for as long as it takes, there are many different theories that range from 1 week to 1 month per year of schooling the child has done. We will carry on learning about each other's passions, learning styles and who the other person is until we feel ready to learn and when Chipman and I can see that learning can be fun and not just workbooks.

Are you deschooling? Have you already deschooled? Share your experiences or ask your questions in the comments below!