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!

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.

Beeswax and Scrabble

This afternoon has been one of discovery for both Small and me.

Having watched me play Scrabble online Small asked if we could play scrabble together, so I bought a Junior Scrabble set on eBay after nearly fainting at the price of board games. We helped each other by suggesting words and Small was thrilled to beat me!

A new activity for both of us was making candles from sheets of beeswax. While visiting family last week I stumbled across a shop selling waldorf-style materials and I took the opportunity to buy a few bits and pieces... I justified that I was saving money on postage fees so it was worth some spur of the moment shopping!

I had suggested making candles a few days ago but Small often resists trying new activities so I simply sat down and made a candle myself. Curiosity overcame him so he had a go himself and was proud of his creation. For a lad who finds new activities rather daunting it was wonderful to see him so pleased with his efforts.

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.

Why schools are failing our children

"Schools are still organised on factory lines - ringing bells, separate facilities, separate subjects. We still educate children by batches, as of the most important thing about them is date of manufacture."

If you have never seen or heard this talk by Sir Ken Robinson, take ten minutes out of your day and watch it. He explains clearly and bluntly why the school system sets so many children up to fail.

In or out of the box?

In schools, subjects are fitted into neat boxes, regardless of overlap. For example, social history and geography may cover some of the same material - when I was at school I found that traditional farming methods were studied in both, but different teachers, classrooms and times of the day all serve to separate the information in a child's mind. Lessons learned in one subject stay in the box labeled 'Geography' and are not easily applied to history, which has its own neatly labeled box.

In unschooling, there are no boxes. You live your life, absorbing information without restricting it to certain subjects.

Yesterday Small and I baked a vegan chocolate cake recipe. We are not vegan, but it is a tasty and reliable recipe that is very popular in our house. The ingredients are measured in cups and it is Small's job to add them to the mixing bowl. Working in cups gave me the chance to explain simple fractions to him - we need 1 1/4 cups of flour, so for the quarter we split the cup into four parts and fill one of those parts with the flour.

The fun in this recipe is that the replacement for eggs is a vinegar and bicarbonate of soda mix. When these ingredients are added they fizz, just like the classic volcano experiment using the same ingredients, but at slightly less spectacular levels - I don't want the cake mix fizzing out of the mixing bowl!

So in baking a cake you could say we had covered Home Economics, Mathematics and Chemistry. As far as Small is concerned we just baked a cake, anything he learned was just incidental. And I am more than happy for him to look at it that way. Who needs boxes anyway?