Workbooks

Recently we were given some workbooks, but they were different to workbooks we had used before. These ones come complete with a CD and a licence to edit and print off as many of the worksheets as you need. I can see the potential in this for use in a home education group or co-op and even for us as a family it means we can tweak the activities to suit us and print off a selection of worksheets and activities for Small to choose from.

Today Small chose two of the pages I had printed out and (in a huge leap forward for a little boy who has had little interest and some difficulty with using a pen) he wrote the answers himself.

In case you were wondering, yes unschoolers can use workbooks! The essence of unschooling is the flexibility to provide a range of resources and follow your child's lead, so if they find worksheets interesting then get printing.

If you want to look at the workbooks, you can find them at.            Books From Sharon.  We used three of the maths workbooks but they are available in a range of subjects and ages. Go and take a look :-)

Worksheets by moonlight

I love how flexible our life is and how we can do 'work' when Small feels enthusiastic, rather than to a timetable.

Tonight Small is doing his 'sleep is for the weak' routine and shortly before midnight he asked if we could get the project folder out.

The project folder is a ring binder that, every few months, I fill with print outs, crafts ideas and worksheets that I think Small might enjoy. The Nature Detectives website is great for seasonal print outs and I add ideas I have seen in books or online. I also use it to store pictures and work he has done when we change our seasonal display. It's a great way to show far away family members the things we get up to.

Tonight, at around midnight, Small asked to do a food chains worksheet we printed out from Nature Detectives. He had never done food chains before and was really proud of himself when he worked them all out. He even suggested an extra food chain and noticed that the chains seemed to start with plants and of course (most!) plants don't have mouths to eat other creatures, so I explained that plants get their energy from the sun. We finished off by drawing a food web, starting with a tree and looking at how lots of different animals can live on one tree and that one buzzard, for example, might eat several of the smaller animals. It helped him see that not everything is as linear as our initial food chains and that cutting down the tree could take food away from lots of animals, not just the ones who eat the seeds and leaves of that tree.

The perfect lesson...

It seems to me that baking is an ideal education tool.

• Maths is covered by weighing out ingredients or measuring them using fractions of a cup (often used in American recipes).

• Initiative is used when altering recipes - today our vegan chocolate cake recipe came to a standstill when we realised we had run out of cocoa powder! A quick think and we used coffee instead and added extra flour to compensate for the lack of cocoa powder.

• Science is found in all aspects of baking - combining ingredients and watching the effects they have on each other, seeing how heat changes their appearance and taste. Every step of a recipe is determined by the chemistry of the ingredients.

• Mixing cake batter, pouring, kneading and rolling out dough are good for coordination and give different sensory feedback.

• You can read recipes together with a young child and let an older child read them to you instead.

Most importantly, you get to eat cake at the end of it all!

Unschooling Definition

When your child hasn't read the same parenting books (forums, blogs, news articles, scribbled notes) as you...

I believe in our unschooling lifestyle. I believe that, given the opportunity, almost all children will learn to regulate their biological needs and their behaviours.

Of course, children rarely (if ever!) travel smoothly from point A to point B and often a leap forward may be followed by a step back. If there are additional needs, such as autism in Small's case, it can seem to take longer than the dreaded 'normal'.

Small appears to require less sleep than most five year olds and has always struggled to calm his body enough to fall asleep, despite me trying every trick in the book. He may never sleep 7pm-7am but recently we had a breakthrough. Rather than running laps of the house until he collapsed with exhaustion, he began to ask to go and snuggle in bed. He requested that the lights be turned off and simply cuddles up and falls asleep. I admit that I did wonder whether being on the spectrum meant that we needed to abandon our ideals of gentle parenting. I can't really imagine shutting him in his room or leaving him to scream, but at 2am the thoughts did creep in. I am glad that we trusted ourselves and most importantly trusted Small. He took more time than some children, but he can now notice when he is tired and ask to go to bed.

I believe that gentle parenting is even more important when a child has ASD or a sensory disorder. If the world is such an overwhelming place, then family should be a safe harbour in which to rest. I don't always stay calm when Small is on his third meltdown in as many hours, because his food/clothes/game isn't quite right, but I try. I hope that by modelling kindness and communication he will absorb this approach. I jumped for joy yesterday (well, I would have if I could!) when I heard a conversation between Big and Small. Small had done something to upset Big, so Big said he was going in another room to have some time on his own. Small piped up, "Let's talk about it, Dad." It is a phrase Big and I use daily to remind Small that communicating is important and it was great to hear him using it to sort out a situation.

So if you are expecting changes and they haven't yet occurred, don't lose faith! Maybe you or they need more time. Remember that how you parent now can be a factor in their whole lifetime, so a few more months of trust could pay off with a future of security and trust.

Our Autumn display

Our Autumn display is being added to regularly, some things suggested by me and some that Small came up with.

We made an Autumn banner which prompted a discussion on the peculiarities of the English language.

The clay and twig hedgehog is there too, along with a felt gnome I made for Small several years ago.

We did some leaf rubbings and were sent a lovely little apple lady from the owner of the My Little Atelier boxes.

Small made a felt campfire and a toadstool house using felt and a cardboard tube - surely the most widely used craft material in most homes!

When we were painting recently Small decided to create an Autumn tree picture and has since recreated it by sewing leaves and red felt 'apples' onto a felt tree.

What have you done this Autumn?

Not Back to School Picnic

Our Not Back to School picnic illustrated why we love home educating so much and showed the diversity of the home educating community.

Families arrived, parents set out picnic blankets and food, while the children played at climbing trees, building dens, parachute games, football, hide and seek and taking photographs of each other.

The youngest there were babies, the eldest approaching the end of their primary school years.

Some families were at the start of their home educating journey, some have been doing it for years.

Some children had never set foot in a school setting, others started school then were withdrawn after several years.

Some families unschool, some follow a curriculum.

We all sat under the trees in the park and watched our children play together.

Unschooling housework?!

We don't insist on Small helping with housework, but we do explain that it is helpful when we all work together to keep our house nice to live in.

Sometimes I will ask if Small can help me with something and he will refuse, in which case I try not to force the issue.

Sometimes he is very helpful - in the last few days he helped me cook dinner, laid the table, took his dishes into the kitchen, helped me clean the bathroom, helped me put away clean laundry and put dirty laundry into baskets.

He may not do any housework for a week now, but that's OK. When he does help, he does it because he wants to and not because I have forced him.

Work in progress

To those who read pages about home education but are just lacking the belief in themselves to step into a new lifestyle... Take it from me, you are able to educate your child!

You are not replacing your role of 'parent' with one of 'teacher'. Life just carries on as it always has - your helpless baby developed into the child they have become. They will continue to flourish with you as facilitator.

But before you go any further, realise that it will not all be rainbows and unicorns. I remember trudging across the city in the rain, spending two hours on several buses to reach a home ed group and thinking, 'If Small went to school, I could be at home with a cup of tea right now.' You will have moments of thinking you must be crazy. Moments of doubt, wondering whether you do 'enough'.

And I'm afraid that embarking on a life of home education and respectful parenting doesn't mean that harmony will always reign in your home. There will be times you look back on the day and kick yourself for how you handled it. For us, today was less than perfect. We did some housework and crafts but in the evening we were all tired and under the weather. Small shouted at Big, Big shouted at Small, I shouted at both... In my short experience, this is par for the course. Parenting brings doubts and guilt enough anyway, without the added pressure of stepping away from the norm.

Get yourself online and find other families who HE and/or who try to parent similarly to you. They will remind you, when your confidence is wobbling, that you are doing fine. Then when they wobble, you can return the favour.

I love the autonomous life we lead and would recommend it to anyone who is curious. Just don't expect to click your fingers and everything to fall into place. It's all a work in progress.