Unschooling ambrosia

Today James didn't want any lunch but as John and I were eating ours, he came up to the table with one of the little pots of rice pudding that he likes. So - there we were chatting away when I noticed James looking at the pot and saying the names of all the family - Mum, Dad, Kristine etc. I asked him if he was reading the pot and he said he was. Then he began to point to each letter and ask me what it said. It took me a few seconds to realise that he really was asking me to tell him the letters! So, I did - that's a Bee - that's a mmm and that's esss. Then he made the cute sound that he always makes when chasing us with his toy snake!!
I so love this journey :)

Book Sharing Monday (xvii)

I posted the other day about our trip to Wigtown - Scotland's Book Town. Thirteen book shops in one street, and other booky things around the village. What a paradise!! Anyway - we returned from our holiday with a hefty stash each. This little lot belongs to James. He would have had much more - I found him sitting in front of a shelf in the Old Bank Bookshop with a large stack of Haynes car repair manuals beside him. "I'll just take these Mum" he said. Well, I managed to tempt him away to another shelf where he decided on the Great Little Railways instead. I wouldn't have minded, but his Father does have quite a few Haynes manuals already, going back several cars :) He does rather like the Picture Penguin - About a Motor Car. So do I - I think I may actually understand what some of those bits in a car engine are!

This week I am sharing a short poem from When We Were Very Young by A.A Milne, called Politeness. I thought about it today when we were out for lunch and the cashier kept trying to talk to James and he didn't want to talk to her. "Oh - are you shy? - Oh he's shy - Isn't he shy?" Well - he's not actually shy - he just doesn't happen to think he should perform to random strangers - grrrr.

If people ask me
I always tell them
"Quite well, thank you, I'm very glad to say"
If people ask me
I always answer
"Quite well, how are you today?"
I always answer,
I always tell them,
If they ask me
Politely....
BUT SOMETIMES

I wish

That they wouldn't.

Well - ok, James didn't exactly see this book and say "Can I have that one Mum?" We just happen to have the 3 other books in the same binding. It was a bit ironic that I found it in the Reading Lassies bookshop (currently for sale) ,which specialises in feminist and radical writing. Well - it gives us plenty of discussion material, about class discrimination, chauvinism and authoritative and remote parenting ;)

Share more books at Alex's blog -Canadian Home Learning

Freedom - a view from the North

For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
From The Declaration of Arbroath 1320.

Quite a controversial quote here, especially as the majority of wonderful people who read my blog are in fact English. I mean no offence here friends. It is just that I have been reading so much about the appalling plans by the UK government to take away the freedom of English parents to home educate their children, that I find this quite apt in the circumstances. It is a frightening prospect. Everyday I find more and more to worry about. Information can be found here and here, and here.
Fortunately for me, I live in Scotland, where these measures will not apply - our SNP government have said they have no plans to implement a similar review. Hopefully Mr BrownBalls will take some notice of the huge response to their 'proposals' If, as is supsected, they do not, I look forward to welcoming any home educators and their children to this land - there is plenty room to grow here. Its a sad day for democracy though when people are forced to become refugees in their own country over doing the best for their children.
I was in the National Museum of Scotland the other day. The entrance to the ground floor exhibition contains one of my favourite items - The Monymusk Reliquary. On the walls are inscribed the names of all the Kings of Scotland, and also the above quote from the Declaration of Arbroath is highlighted in beautiful calligraphy. As I read these familiar words, my eye travelled down to the long bench below. Sitting there looking very tired and subdued was a group of children from a daycare nursery wearing their high visiility vest uniforms and all strapped together with one of these. Ironic? Poignant? Or a warning?
Well - there are still 5320 of us at least!

I did it!

No photos of this one, but yesterday morning, while I was sorting out his clothes and not quite paying attention, James put his pants on himself!!!!! Ok they were outside in and he had the holes slightly mixed up, but still.... I can't tell you how thrilled I am by this. He has quite poor function in his left hand - so things like this are really difficult for him. I managed to stifle a scream and said - "Oh,I see you've put your pants on yourself"
"Yes - I did it" he said and went back to playing car parks.
But we both knew...

When does learning happen?

One of my favourite books in Learning all the time, by John Holt. Here he relates accounts of how children learn from everyday life, and how that delight in learning is conditioned out of them at school. I have been privileged to observe this learning process in my son, James, who will be 3 in November.
James is now of the age where we are being asked" When does he start preschool?" every time we are out. It gets wearisome, butI don't really want to get into the intricacies of our family life with the woman from the corner shop, or the bus driver, so, for now I just answer - "He's only 2!".
But he will not be going to pre-school or nursery. He will be continuing this marvellous expansion of his learning at home, directed by his own needs, interests and desires.
Today, learning happened at 5.30 am, when he just had to get up and play some game with his diggers and trucks. Fortunately, my husband volunteered to get up with him, and when he brought me a cup of tea, he commented on how he could almost see the neurons firing in James's brain - he was full of it. Talking his game out loud in long, complex, sentences, he was obviously working something out that had been on his mind.

I took over at 7.30, and the learning continued. We read a couple of comics - Roary the Racing Car. We made a cut-out tool box from the magazine, and then played a complicated game of fixing cars and buses - the sofa cushions being the cars. All this was entirely instigated and directed by James - I was there purely as a facilitator and gofer - it was such fun too!

The whole day has been like this. One learning event after another. Going to the DIY store with Dad, coming home and making a seesaw with bits of wood, making his own sandwich for lunch, playing the piano and singing along to his own tune, helping make dinner, picking plums, dividing pastry for the pie, using the leftover paste to make yet another birthday cake, singing all the words of Happy Birthday - all these activities were a small part of his own agenda for the day.
He is still going now, I hear him pretending to be a snake "I'm gonna eat oo Dad"

Now, thankfully, a 5 am - 10 pm full on day is relatively unusual here, but sometimes it happens. If we were shackled to other timetables, this day would have been so different, so I am truly fortunate that we have that freedom. I imagine how stressed I would be by such an early start. I might have lost my temper and shouted; harassed and nagged everyone into getting ready for work and school, cutting short any play or fun. "No time, no time!", in the rush to be out the door, far too soon. James would not have had the opportunity to do all the things he did today, unless he was at home. No-one would have played with him for hours on the living room floor, in just the way he wanted to, or let him help cut mushrooms for the risotto that he asked me to make for dinner. He might have come home, tired, clutching a piece of paper with blue paint slapped on it as evidence of his creativity, but would he have been told to be quiet when he began to play the piano and sing joyously as he did after tea today? Would he have been laughed at or ridiculed for playing with his Barbie campervan - organising a trip to the beach for some of his toys?Would he have been able to do these things anyway, or might he have been told to do some other box ticking activity instead? I do not want to endanger his gentle unfolding in any way by subjecting him to the shoulds and should nots of this society and certainly not by it's clock.

Instead, we were able to forget time and just go with the flow. It was only place to be. Seventeen hours of present moments - learning all the time.

Please visit Debs at Muddy Bare Feet, who is hosting Home Education Blog Carnival today for International Freedom in Education Day. There are so many inspirational posts there, much more coherent than this sleep deprived one. Night Night!

Freedom at last!

The new term began last week for the Scottish schools. For the first time in 25 years, I have nothing whatsoever to do with schools, or schooling - I am free from living according to a dictated timetable! It feels good.

I was asked at the weekend when James would be starting nursery. It was the first time I have really been asked that question by someone outside the family. It seems to be a given that all children need to go to some kind of 'preschool' education to ensure they should have the 'right start' and and early 'advantage'. It all seems so negative, this jostling for advantage - making sure they are ready etc.
Yesterday, James and I were at a local country park. There was a group of older teenagers from one of the nearby secondary schools there on a field trip with a couple of teachers. They were all on bikes and were involved in some sort of map reading challenge, in the style of something out of the TV programme The Apprentice. Now, I have never seen this programme, but I understand it to be very competitive and aggressive. They had to navigate round the park, carrying out various challenges on the way. Point s were given for these achievements and deducted for transgressing the rules. They wheeled up to me and asked me if my name started with J (one of their challenges). I was happy to oblige them, and allowed them to take my picture for their evidence. They were excited to have completed this, but minutes later, their faces fell when their teacher, in a very loud and patronising voice, deducted the 5 points because one of the bikes was left in the wrong place. This scene troubled me all day. While I recognise that there were some team building skills involved in this challenge, I do not think that this type of conditional training is what our children deserve. In the future, they will face many real challenges - most of them the result of the mistakes and greed of previous generations. They will need to live and work in a different way - radical free thinkers will be needed, and I fear there will not be too many of those who survive such negative experiences.James and I went on to complete our own challenge - we got lost! Well, that can happen when you let a 2.5 year old lead the way. We weren't that lost, but we did end up taking a much longer walk than we meant to. It was a lot of fun though - pretending to be dogs in the long (wet) grass, sitting by the river, close encounters with butterflies, and finding our first conkers. James also walked up a fairly steep hill on his own. Given that 6 months ago he was lying with his leg in traction, that was certainly an achievement. We looked at the different leaves on the trees growing around and talked about where the river was going - he sat for ages waving goodbye to the water :) Yes - I guess he knew what direction he wanted to go in today!

So - James will not be going to preschool or nursery - he is in charge of his own learning, and while that may mean he will choose to attend school at some point, he will make that decision. For now, every day is a new challenge, and one he meets with eagerness and joy - I will do my best to ensure he always feels like that.

When the muse strikes....

...well - you just have to grab at it - even if it is 5 am!

So there I was at that time on a Sunday morning being dragged out of bed -
"C'mon Mum, s'light - me paint!" said the 2 1/2 year old artist. A whole new big sentence; words I had never heard him use before. How could I resist? I am unschooling radically and I am here to facilitate. I am also one of these older mums and I need lots of sleep to make sure I have the energy to do this. Nevertheless, I am there sloshing out finger paints into jar lids, finding paper, slurping down a strong English Breakfast blend, trying to convince an insistent boy that finger paints don't require water or brushes and that I don't have any other paints and I promise I will get some proper paints as soon as I can. I lose the argument, but he soon sees my point when he tries it out, and goes back to the traditional hands-in style. Autonomous learning by the "me do it" process. Works every time! (Why do I doubt it?)

At around 7-ish, he decided he wanted to go back to bed. Great idea Son! Back we went and snuggled in beside still sleeping Dad and we dozed on until 9.30 - not bad - everyone's needs met, and some creativity to boot!

Later I felt a bit creative, so did some baking. Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it:) Banoffee cupcake anyone?

Play dough fun

On Sunday we made play dough. Nothing special in that as things go, but James asked to do it, and so we did. Wanting to try something different from the usual food colouring thing, I boiled up a couple of beetroot that were going a bit soft in the 'fridge, and we used the water from that in our usual recipe.


The result was a beautiful deep reddish pink colour - well no surprises there - beetroot is red after all. It also has that nice earthy smell. I was a bit worried that it would stain, but it doesn't seem to.
James has really enjoyed this batch and has played with it A LOT! He started of with the usual play dough things, rolling and patting and then getting me to make things - a choo-choo, a cup, a cat, a digger (challenging one) and then squashing them as soon as they were ready. Then he started to cut it up into slices, and later discovered it cut very nicely with scissors - woohoo! - he cut and cut for ages. After supper he doggedly started again and he didn't want to stop cutting until quite late in the evening, despite being so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open. Finally he melted into a pool of exhausted tears, but not wanting to stop having fun. He cuddled in and then remembered something else he like better than play dough, so off to bed for milk and sleep.
I loved watching him do this - his own ideas from beginning to end - and the learning process unfolding before my eyes. It was an ordinary thing to do, but full of wonder.

Shopping

This afternoon John wanted to go into town for a haircut, so James and I decided we would go along for the ride. James was hoping to buy another boat from one of the charity shops, so I suggested that he donate an old toy that he didn't play with anymore. He was quite amenable to this idea and selected a Postman Pat figure complete with mail trolley, that he had inherited from one of my step-grandsons. He was very excited about this and wanted to put it in his own bag to give to the lady himself. We took a couple of bags of books with us too.
Well, he didn't get his boat, but he did find a yellow digger and a wooden tractor instead. The lady in Barnardo's was very pleased to take his donation and made a wee fuss of him, which he always enjoys. Then we found a bag of large lego type pieces in the Capability shop for 50p and the lady there gave him a little Eskimo figure she had sitting on the counter.
We met up with Dad, who was sitting reading on a bench outside the barbers. James stayed with him while I investigated the British Heart Foundation shop. When I returned, (with a skirt, a top and a couple of good children's books) he had built a large tower, helped by Dad and an older man who had been sitting on the bench too. They were totally engrossed in their construction project and the man was genuinely sorry when we left for home.
On the way, we passed another 2 charity shops - Help the Aged and Sense (more books, a jumper, shirt and wellies for James). In each place and along the way, people smiled, chatted and generally took an interest in him. All the shop volunteers made a fuss of him; an elder from the Islamic community centre, who was browsing in the Sense shop came up and shook his hand; and, as a group of teenage boys passed by, one of them said to the others "Awww,did you see that cute wee boy?", and they all turned round a smiled at him
I was struck by the way these folk, strangers to us, all immediately resonated with James's natural innocence. There is something so touching about a child's wonder at the world; and the world responds back. I hope James will never lose that sense of wonder and innocence.