So, I’m 37+ weeks pregnant now.  I can’t have the baby until after next Tuesday as I’m co-facilitating an antenatal course with an antenatal teacher friend over the weekend and on Tuesday evening so can’t really enjoy what I experienced this evening…my first run of contractions

All my births have had no warning signs at all - no nesting, no show, no nothing - except for a week or two of pre-labour contraction runs.  Not painful, and also not in a labour-type pattern.  They come close together and are very different to braxton hicks.  Normally they make me smile and think how exciting it is that it’s the beginning of the end - unfortunately, until I’ve got this weekend out of the way, I can’t stop thinking ‘please don’t be real labour!!!’.  With Flopsy, of course, and also with Mopsy actually, I spent every single little ‘run’ hoping it was ‘it’.  With Cotton-tail I was wise to it and just let them happen and enjoyed knowing that it meant my time would come within the next couple of weeks and that my body was preparing itself.  This time…well, I just can’t wait until next Tuesday when I can start doing the same. 

I’m up at stupid-o’clock (2.15am!!!) because I had a lovely meal out with friends in the evening and, thanks to eating a big meal far too late in the day, I am now unable to sleep for reflux and indigestion.  I need to be upright for an hour or so, but can’t sleep upright at all, so have given in and come downstairs to play on the computer.  Hope there are lots of newly-updated blogs to keep me amused…or maybe something to watch on iplayer…hmm - the possibilities are endless!  Internet surfing time without being disturbed - should be heaven if my eyes didn’t keep wanting to close

It appears that some publishing houses are planning on putting age-bands on children’s books.  Read this post at Making It Up and sign up to a campaign against it if you feel the same way I (and many, many others do!).

As most readers of Seeing With New Eyes will know, we don’t have any educational structure at all in our house, and only a very loose daily pattern that we tend to follow to keep me sane, and even this is subject to huge amounts of flexibility and change.  So how do the children learn anything???  Occassionally I’ve written posts discussing things like this.  I don’t really like the idea of identifying learning taking place as I prefer feeling that the children really are just living and enjoying life and that they learn what is important to them, whether I can see it happening or not. 

I also disagree with some writers on autonomy in childhood (most notably Jan Fortune-Wood) who don’t feel that John Holt was right in his trust that true learning was somehow mystical and worked by some unseen process of absorption in a way we can’t possibly understand.  I see my children doing it all the time!  Who knows what they learn from a conversation?  I think it’s possible they even learn things other than the answer to the question they’ve just asked.  They wouldn’t be able to identify it, so how would I be able to?  Their minds are just constantly working, thinking, adapting, placing new ideas in context with old ones, consolidating things they already know etc.  I just think children and learning is like an ice-berg - we only ever see the very tip of it and have no right to see any more than the tip they choose to show us. 

And this is what is wrong with school - they just focus on that tip of learning - the bit they can see and test and check up on.  But the tip can be fragile and breaks easily so what is far more important is nurturing what is going on under the water - the bits that will be there for the child’s lifetime.  How on earth can that happen in school when so much importance is placed on ‘the tip’?  How can children really get to the depths of their learning under the water when they are forced to pay all their attention to the fragile and unimportant ‘tip’ throughout their schooling period - the bits they’ll forget as soon as they’ve passed the relevant ‘tests’ unless they happen to have a special interest in whatever it is?

Back to my own children, who are given the freedom and autonomy to focus on the depths of their learning that are important to *them* and relevant to *their* lives - not imposed on them by the powers that be.  On Friday the girls asked to do some cutting out so we got out some of our Guardian wall posters that we’ve been cutting out gradually in order to use the pictures for anything they fancy - posters/sorting/whatever.  Or maybe it’s just the enjoyment of improving on their cutting skills.  Who cares?  Not me .  As long as they are enjoying it then they *must* be getting something from it whether or not it fits in with a curriculum.  Anyway, we managed to get two posters cut up before we had to go out to a friend’s house and, my goodness, the conversations (and other things) that took place while we worked together!  We talked about the things we were cutting out.

“What’s this I’m cutting out now, Mummy?”

“What is a newt?”

“What do those words say at the top, Mummy?”

“Mummy, Cotton-tail has got her bit all wet under the tap!  She’ll get our bits wet too if she’s not careful and then they’ll be ruined!”

Cotton-tail had her own pieces of the wall chart to ‘cut out’ with her plastic scissors (normally I’d give her a normal pair, if she were any other toddler, but Cotton-tail does like to wave them around alarmingly opening and shutting them in a very scary way!  She started by having a go with the scissors, then decided she’d prefer to just spend some time putting the pieces of wall chart in and out of the folder we were storing our cut-outs in.  First of all she had to learn how to undo and do up the popper holding it closed.  After she’d done that a few times, and put her pieces of paper in and out of it a few times, she decided she’d see what happened if she screwed up her pieces of paper and then took them to the downstairs loo to see what would happen to them if she wet them under the tap.  Then she brought them back in and stuffed them in the folder again - hence the last comment above!  This game went on for some time.  Unfortunately she hasn’t yet learnt to turn the tap off so we quite frequently suddenly realise we can hear running water and have to rush to turn it off ourselves, hoping that it hasn’t been running and wasting water for too long!

Mopsy recognised a pike which features in one of her favourite books and was very pleased with herself. 

And so on and so forth.

What else have we been up to?  Well Flopsy has spent the last few months pretending to talk in French and asking me to tell her some French words.  We considered going to a local HE French class but Flopsy doesn’t really ‘do’ classes so didn’t bother in the end.  Yesterday my Grandad gave me a set of 6 ‘learn to speak French’ cds that he’d saved the tokens for from the Times and Flopsy was thrilled.  We listened to the first one on the way home in the car (a 45 minute journey) in the evening - four 15min lessons each very similar to the last to give plenty of practice - by the third lesson I could hear both Flopsy and Mopsy trying to repeat some of the French words and this morning Flopsy asked straight away if we could put the cd on again.  If this is anything like her recent dinosaur craze (which consisted of buying toy dinosaurs, getting dinosaur books for her birthday, buying Walking With Dinosaurs with her birthday money, getting yet more dinosaur books out of the library, visiting the Natural History Museum and more; and which was very, very involved and indepth and was joined by Mopsy with nearly all of it - alongside this, Mopsy’s also had a very deep interest in “Great White Sharks that eat people”!), then I can see us having the cds on in the car for quite some time, and ending up with a 5yo who knows a fair amount of French. 

Now, my pre-knowing-about-and-understanding-and-valuing-autonomous-learning head says to me ‘Great!  Something I can ‘tick off” but my new-improved-absolute-respect-for-my-children-and-for-them-owning-their-learning head says ‘Great!  Something to make car journeys more enjoyable for them!’ and the learning that may or may not take place becomes irrelevant.

Sandra Dodd recently got people to take part in a ‘Learn Nothing Day’ and the response was fairly unanimous - how can you learn nothing?  John Holt says that you’d have to shut away a child in a dark room for his entire childhood if you wanted to get him to not learn anything and even that wouldn’t work completely.  Just because we can’t quantify or test what someone has learnt, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and in fact, the bits we can quantify and test are probably far less important than the bits we can’t because the ‘testable’ bits are the bits that won’t stick.  I’ve often thought that revision for exams is a bit of a daft thing to do - if you have to revise the stuff, then you don’t know it, you’re just memorising it.  If you really and truly *know* the stuff that will be in the exam, you’ll only need to revise a few specific things like dates, maybe, in a history exam for example - the bits you’d normally look in a book for.  But we’re told in school to spend weeks and weeks revising for exams - doesn’t that suggest that we don’t really *know* the stuff they’ve been feeding us for the last year?

Anyway, because of the inspiration and trust in the process I’ve gained from reading other blogs of autonomous home educators (or unschoolers as they’re known in the US), I will continue to jot down here little snippets of how it works for us because I know, from experience, that it is difficult to trust in a process that you can’t see happening until you’ve spent a lot of time with other people who do trust in it (both IRL and online).

At the moment, the LA seem to know nothing about us.  I know this because most of my friends, both HEing & schooling, got letters from the LA when it was the Autumn before their children would start reception year at school asking them which school their children would be registered at.  We never got one for Flopsy.  She will be of compulsory education age on 31st August, so just a couple of weeks away, and we’ve heard nothing at all.  These letters used not to be send out because the health authority used not to share information with the education authority - clearly not the case now.  Even children who’ve never attended a nursery or pre-school have had letters.  We think we’ve slipped through the net thanks to changing doctors and moving house (didn’t do it on purpose!), and, of course, our children have never been registered with anything other than doctors and HVs because they’ve never been to nursery or pre-school.

The reasons we haven’t bothered to do the LA’s work for them so far are:

a) We don’t have to - it’s not law that we have to tell them we’re HEing

b) Although they have no right in law to visit our home or meet with our children unless there is a child protection concern, we don’t want the hassle of trying to tell them to bog off and finding other ways of telling them that we are genuinely educating our children (our children don’t, and won’t be asked to (by us) produce ‘work’ that I understand is sometimes asked for as evidence of learning)

c) We don’t want visits because we don’t want them spoiling the ongoing lives of our children where they are learning quite happily without being tested (which a visit would amount to)

The reason it might be worth telling them we’re here is:  Do we really want them to find out about us at some time in the future and then be very suspicious of us on the grounds that we didn’t tell them in the first place (even though we don’t have to)?  Would it be easier in the long run just to ‘fess up and be open about it?  Would we be helping other local HEors to educate the LA in the nature of autonomous learning?

It is true that we ‘have nothing to hide’ and it is also true that the ptb use that as their argument for knowing everything about us all the time ie. ‘those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear’.  But what about our privacy?

Children’s Centres all ask parents to register their children with them when they use groups based at them.  Some registration forms are simpler than others - the best ones simply ask for the parents’ names and addresses and phone numbers; the children’s GP and HV and the school they will be going to and any medical things the centre ought to know about.  However, they do say they will be sharing this information with the child’s school and that, if there are any child protection concers, with other authorities.  Fair enough, but even that would make me want to stay away from Children’s Centres (clearly, to my mind, a Government ploy to know as much as possible about as many as possible of us - ignoring the fact that the most vulnerable children are unlikely to have parents who will be taking them to activities anywhere, let alone run by busybodies in Children’s Centres!).  However, one of our local CCs has recently produced a gem of a registration form which asks you to tell them (and no where does it say that you are at liberty to not answer some of the questions) (items I cannot fathom the need for at all are in bold!):

• main carer’s name, address, telephone numbers, date of birth, relationship to child(ren), gender, ethnicity, the main language spoken, read and written, how fluent their English is (I can see that it may be helpful for parents if the CC knows if they can’t speak English, but not quite sure why they need so much detail!)
• Whether the carer has a disability or special needs with details
• If the carer is a lone parent, if s/he recieves any benefits, what those benefits are
• The carer’s employment status, and how many hours they work if they work PT
• The carer’s housing status (ie. home owner, renting, temp housing)
• If the carer smokes, or has ever smoked, how much they smoke and when they gave up if they have done so; if anyone else in the household smokes
• Health visitor name, GP surgery, if you’re pregnant and when the baby is due
• Nearly as much information about any other carer (it ‘allows’ you to leave this blank if you’d like, but if you do to provide an emergency telephone number)
• Child’s name, dob, gender, ethnicity, birth weight (????????), school or nursery, disability or special need

Then it says at the bottom that they will only share the information with Children’s Centre Partners but doesn’t tell you who those Partners are so you’re not even in a position to make an informed choice about filling in this form.

What on earth is going on in this country?  Why is our privacy being invaded here there and everywhere?  And, most importantly to us, do I really want to have anything to do with the LA, which is a government agency and will also be under pressure to be garnering all this information about us just because we have children and because our children are potentially at risk because the incompetent state aren’t educating them and of course, they know far better than us how to do it?  I could go into a massive rant about quite how incompetent the state is at educating children, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. 

On a completely different note…is anyone out there reading this?  Not that it matters (and I know Emma is reading it ), but I’m aware I’ve not been blogging for so long I may have been ‘given up on’ but if anyone is reading, will you drop me a comment to let me know?  I kind of miss my regular commenters!

Thursday is the day my mum comes over and I go to work at the bf support group for two hours in the middle of the day.  Dad came too this week because it’s school holidays (he works in a school) so he took me and picked me up.  Mum had brought the stuff to make the strawberry cheesecake from Big Cook Little Cook, as requested by the girls, so they made that as soon as I got home.  I also had a shift on the bf helpline after work so I didn’t see much of what was going on during the day with the children - probably lots of playing and fun, I should imagine!  Dad told me that the girls refused to stop picking up the chickens, which is very annoying as they were doing the same on Wednesday.  I’ve now had to tell the children that the chickens need some free-ranging time and they can each pick up each chicken once, and then only if I ask them to, e.g. to help me put them away, and that if they keep doing it, it’s not fair on the chickens and the children will have to stay inside while the chickens free-range.  Worked with Flopsy yesterday (Friday) but not Mopsy so she had to come in .  Hopefully she’ll understand soon and give a bit more respect to the chickens’ rights to forage un-molested!

Friday we went to a friend’s house and hung around there until mid-afternoon.  She’s in the early stages of pregnancy, and I’m in the late stages, so we’re both exhausted and spent the time lying on the sofas hoping the children entertaining themselves isn’t causing too much mayhem wherever they are!  We’d collected one egg in the morning, and came home to two more, so all three chickens are officially laying now