A good friend of mine has recently decided not to send her children back to school next week and to start on the HE journey instead.  Naturally we’ve been corresponding a fair amount by email - I’ve only met her a handful of times IRL, but she’s stayed with us once and we are in contact quite a lot.  I’ve never met her children but she’s, obviously met ours.  She’s been considering HE on and off for some time but she says that meeting with other HE families has been one of the things to make her confident enough to take the plunge.  She says that our family seemed so relaxed and happy when she met us and wanted that for her family again.

Lovely of her to say so, but I thought we were a pretty stressy family!  Either we’re all very good actors, or we do have an underlying peace within our lives.  I tend to think that maybe we are a very happy, relaxed family but is it just because we HE?  No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think it’s because we are brilliant parents either (because we are so not brilliant parents!  We are constantly getting it wrong, are grumpy and impatient, and all the things that all parents are!).  I think it’s because a lot of the stress within families comes from trying to conform - whether families are doing this consciously or sub-consciously.  And I think that this starts from the minute the first baby is born - or even before that.  I’ve written before about the effect of disempowering on the whole of parenting (or what I believe about it anyway), but I also think that the pressure to conform is also heavily to blame for a lot of the unpleasant side of parenting nowadays.  The pressure to have your baby in hospital.  The pressure to have your baby sleeping through very young.  The pressure to have your baby take a bottle, even if they’re breastfeeding.  The pressure to stop breastfeeding after some ridiculously young age.  One of the best things I ever read about parenting was in a book called The No Cry Sleep Solution - we were keen to get Flopsy self-settling once she was about 5m old (because, of course, the world will come to an end if she keeps on feeding to sleep - or she’ll still be doing it when she’s 18 years old) but didn’t want to leave her to cry.  But what this book said was ‘does it bother you?  or does it bother everyone else?  If it doesn’t bother you, and you’re only doing ’sleep training’ because you feel you ought to, then don’t do it’.  It changed my whole outlook about parenting forever.  I didn’t mind feeding her to sleep.  In fact, I quite enjoyed it - the lovely way she’d be all wired and hyped up and then her body would gradually relax in my arms until she was fast asleep and all warm and cuddly and lovely.  She fed to sleep for the next two years when she weaned and then *gasp* somehow managed to get herself to sleep just being cuddled.  Except we’re not allowed to cuddle our toddlers to sleep - they need to learn to go to sleep alone (even though adults aren’t expected to).  But luckily for Flopsy, by this time we couldn’t care less what the rest of the world thought - we could do what was right for Flopsy and we stayed cuddling her to sleep.  At the age of 5, she can get to sleep on her own if she wants to, but she usually likes one of us in the room with her.  That’s fine by us - she doesn’t take long to get to sleep.  She doesn’t like being cuddled to sleep now, mores the pity I think, but we’re quite happy spending 10 or 20 minutes listening to our children’s breathing slow and settle before we get our hour or two together downstairs without demands for this, that and the other!

What I’m trying to get to, in a very long-winded way, is that once you stop bothering what other people think, you are free.  You are very, very free.  And your children are too.  You have the freedom to do what is right for your child regardless of anything outside of your family.  You have the freedom to continue breastfeeding for as long as you and your child are happy to.  You have the freedom to let them sleep in your bed for as long as you and your child are happy to.  Oh hang on, but aren’t adult beds too small to have three (or more) children squeezed in there - how does anyone get any sleep?  Oh yes, it doesn’t matter.  We have the freedom to say ‘who says we need to stick to a king-size bed?  why don’t we just put a single alongside and have a room that is just full of bed that we can all snuggle in together?’. 

How does this lead on to HE?  I so often hear of parents actually trying desperately to change their children just so they will manage in school.  Of course, that’s very kind of their parents - you don’t want your children to find school difficult when you could make life easier for them by ‘making’ them more confident, or learn their letters very young (or not, maybe - maybe holding them back so they’re not top of the class even).  Or you could even use your ‘freedom to do what’s right for your child’ to decide not to send them to school.  You could say ‘I don’t want to mould my child to fit some institution.  I want to see my children blossom and grow in the way they’re meant to and in the time-frame they’re meant to’.  This will be different for every child, which makes school the worst place to send them because school doesn’t allow for children to all be different - to all be ready to read at different ages, or to be ready to be confident at different ages, or even to just be different!  School tells parents that they’re concerned because their child has only one friend.  Or that they don’t have any special friends.  Or that they like spending a lot of time on their own reading.  Or that they can’t be dragged away from the painting table.  Why are any of these things a concern?  They’re just a sign that all children are different and like different things, and make friends in different ways.  But so many parents trust the teachers, because they’ve got the training, and start working out ways to change their children to fit the mould a bit better.  Not us!  We have the freedom to decide not to change our children.  They don’t go to school or nursery and we are not interested in other people’s concerns about our children.  We are only interested in *our* concerns about them and how *we* can help ensure their happiness and security in the way that is best for *our* children.  And we have the freedom to do that because we are used to not conforming - it was long, long ago we threw off the shackles of doing what the rest of our society does.  I think that’s what makes our family seem relaxed and happy - the fact we *all* know there is no pressure to do things just because everyone else does them.  Flopsy knows she doesn’t have to read to us if she doesn’t want to - she hardly reads to us at all now, but she reads to herself all the time and enjoys it and that’s what’s important.  Mopsy knows she doesn’t have to stop her painting if she doesn’t want to - she only needs to stop when she’s finished. 

And the other thing is this.  We have the freedom to see a worrying change in our children and wonder why it is and do whatever it takes to sort it out.  We have the freedom to know that a child exhibiting signs of insecurity, however self-confident and happy they seem the rest of the time, probably is insecure and the reason needs to be discovered and sorted out.  I’ve heard parents say how much their children change when they go to school, usually in negative ways ‘but I know they’re happy there because they say they are’ or ‘because the teacher says they are’.  I’ve heard parents desperately asking for help for their newly bed-wetting 4yo ‘but I know it’s not school [even though it started when they went to school] because they love school’.  I find it very hard not to shout OPEN YOUR EYES!!! at these parents.  Just because a child seems fine on the outside, does not mean they are fine on the inside.  Children often don’t realise they’re not fine, but their subconscious mind cleverly finds ways of telling us that they’re not fine and, as parents, we should be picking up on those signs and doing something about it.  But how do you do something about it if you don’t trust the signs, or if doing something about it means not conforming and that’s something you haven’t freed yourself up to do yet?  How lucky those children are whose parents are not only aware of doing things differently in order to make things right for their children, but also have the freedom to do the things that are right for their children.

And I’m not suggesting for one minute that it’s easy to break away from ‘the done thing’.  I’ve been doing it for three children now and am fairly non-mainstream in nearly everything, but I still struggle with some things.  I struggle with letting them have messy hair.  I struggle with letting them wear very odd clothes (I have relaxed enough to let them wear fairly odd clothes, but some things I just can’t stop myself persuading them not to wear!).  I struggle with letting them eat what and when they want when we’re out with other families sometimes (not always).  There are other things, I’m sure, that I have to keep reminding myself aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, and certainly not as important as my children’s happiness and security but I keep on trying.  And I’m loving it!  I’m loving being a mum.  I’m loving having my children around me the whole time.  They drive me crazy; I get bored; I get impatient and lose my temper; I say things I regret immediately; I do things I regret immediately; I badger them about things I shouldn’t; I get it wrong; they irritate me BUT I wouldn’t change a thing because, despite all those things they also delight me; they charm me; they make my heart melt; I enjoy them; I enjoy learning with them; I enjoy watching them play; I love them snuggling up to me in the night; I love all the kisses and cuddles; I love sharing books with them; I love helping them play on the computer; I love taking them places and sharing their wonder at new discoveries; I love watching them making friends; I love seeing them making up wonderful games with eachother and with their friends.  What a lot I’d miss if they were in school or pre-school.  I hope my friend loves it as much as I 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!

Since I was last blogging, Flopsy has become a pretty fluent reader.  We used the highly recommended 5 step reading scheme that many other HEors recommended to us.  It goes like this:

1. Read to them

2. Read to them

3. Read to them

4. Read to them

5. Read to them

I’m aware she’s done it quite young for a child whose parents follow an autonomous learning route, but the very fact that it’s happened is what’s amazed and delighted us.  I’ve read lots about how children learn to read autonomously, and it’s so wonderful to see it unfolding before our eyes.  We’d heard that a child who decides to learn to read (at whatever age) will do so easily within the space of a few weeks and that’s exactly what’s happened.  I thought it might be interesting (or even helpful to other HEors) to blog the process as it unfolded for Flopsy. 

I think the reason she did it so young, btw, is because she has always, from very early on, been very ‘left-brained’ - analytical, perfectionist etc.  No matter what ‘they’ say about encouraging creativity to even the sides of the brain out, Flopsy is simply a left-brained person.  She’s always loved numbers and letters.  I hate labelling, but this has been such an obvious part of her personality that one can’t ignore its part in her learning to read.  She learnt the names of all the letters of the alphabet at a very young age.  We had a first words book that had the alphabet in capitals on the first page and we had to read it to her over and over again.  I thought this book was fab as I was reading One-to-One, which is inspired by Steiner education.  It says that if children want to learn letters, it’s best to teach capitals first.  However, Flopsy worked out pretty quickly from other books and games/jigsaws which lower-case letters corresponded to which upper-case ones and kind of took that side of it out of our hands!  I think she was only two by the time she knew the alphabet by heart.  I have an instinctive aversion to phonics being the first stage of reading, so we only ever told her the names of the letters, not the sounds they make - that came a lot later when she was asking for help with working out words.

Alongside the learning of the alphabet, she was also building on her love of books.  There’s a fab book called Read With Me: An Apprenticeship Approach to Reading, which my mum recommended to me and which I would thoroughly recommend to any other HEor if you can get hold of a copy - it’s sadly out of print now.  It really spoke to my heart as she says that reading should primarily be about enjoying books, not about decoding words and that the decoding will just come naturally if children spend their early years just being allowed to enjoy books.  I know many children whose enjoyment of books has been sadly hampered by being forced to learn how to decode words too young so I was determined that this wouldn’t happen to my children.  Flopsy, from a very young age, as well as being read to by us from birth, began to look at books on her own and then started to tell us the story in them.  She didn’t do this very much, though, as she likes to know she’s doing things just right, so preferred to only read us books that she knew by heart - we have some brilliant books for this, e.g. Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Red Hat, Blue Hat.  Mopsy will read us any book she can get her hands on, but she doesn’t mind if her words don’t match what she remembers us saying.  Flopsy’s love of books meant she would spend a huge amount of time with a pile beside her just looking through them one by one.  To me, that is reading.  I don’t know how many times I’ve traipsed upstairs wondering why she and Mopsy have been so quiet and concerned about what they’re up to, simply to find them both cuddled up in bed with piles of books around them.

The next stage was recognising words that are important to her, like her name.  I think she was coming up to three when she could consistently recognise her name.  It was at this time that I started to understand what people meant when they talked about children learning to read the ‘whole words’ way.  Mopsy’s real name is Alys, and one day, when we’d been writing on the chalk board together and some of the bits had been rubbed off, Flopsy saw the word ’says’ and told me that it said ‘Alys’.  She’d looked at the shape of the word, and made up her mind what it said based on that.  She’s continued her learning to read in this way.

As she slowly started to recognise more and more words, she began to gain a knowledge of what sounds the letters made.  She’s always enjoyed work books and those children’s magazines, and of course the tv and the cbeebies website, so she’s learnt a lot of letter sounds from those.  When she’s asked us what a word says, we’ve attempted to help her sound it out, but it’s never really helped her much - she just wasn’t seeing words in that way.  Gradually she learnt to recognise more and more words and we were fairly impressed at the number she knew.  But she wasn’t, and this turned out to be the key. 

By the time she was nearly five she knew so many words, but kept telling us that she couldn’t read.  I don’t know what the definition of ‘being able to read’ is, but we kept saying that she could read loads of words and was doing really well.  However, she didn’t really believe us and I think the problem was that she was comparing her reading to ours.  Her confidence was low because the only people whose reading ability she could compare hers to were adults.  I offered for her to do a reading age test with me, confident that she’d know enough words to come up with a high reading age and hopeful that it would prove to her that she was reading well for her age.  She said she wanted to and it came up as 6.75 - about 2 years ahead of her actual age.  When I told her, the affect was incredible.  She suddenly really got into reading to us.  Before this, she wouldn’t attempt to read things in front of us, and we suspected she knew far more than we realised. 

After doing the reading age test, DH bought her six of the level 1 books from the Ladybird Read It Yourself series.  They’re lovely books because they’re not based on phonics.  She’s looked at a few friends reading scheme books and not been very taken with them, but these ladybird books she loved.  They’re real stories - fairy tales - that are written very, very simply at level 1, and also very repetetively.  She took a while to get the confidence to try reading them to us and we read them to her a lot at first, but then she started to have a go herself and really took to them.  Because of reading the ‘whole words’ way, her reading voice really flowed and the story was more important than the words.  In other words, she didn’t have to spend time working out how to decode each sentence word by word.  She was very meticulous and didn’t move onto the next sentence until she’d decided that she’d got every word right.  We were careful never to correct her, and if she asked us what a word said, we told her outright after a short pause to give her a bit more chance to work it out herself.  We had to really resist teaching her how to sound these words out as it just annoyed her and made her stop reading!

After a few weeks, she decided she was good enough at the level 1 books for us to get her some level 2 books.  These took  her less time to get confident with and I think that within the space of  week she had moved onto level 3 and fairly immediately, level 4.  Alongside all this, we’ve frequently found her reading to her sisters and she often comes up to us with something and asked us if it says what she thinks it says.  It really has only taken a few weeks for her to become fluent and she’s clearly working out a lot of words for herself, simply based on her knowledge of the words she knows well already, and based on the context they’re in.  Her reading obsession has waned a little now she’s got there, but I’m not at all surprised after such an intense period of learning that she’s having a break for a while.  I’m intrigued to find out when she feels confident enough to be reading longer books to herself, but at the moment she’s very happy just reading any picture books that come to hand, and any signs or adult book titles or anything that she happens to see around.  It’s been such a delight to be a part of and I feel grateful every single day that she has learnt at home, rather than at school, so that I can share her joy with her and not worry about her being put off books by too much pushing.

Some of you will already know we tend to all sleep in an 8ft bed (although Flopsy and Mopsy do have their own bed in their own room that Flopsy occassionally sleeps in).  When we woke this morning, after a few books and a bit of hiding under covers and tickling Flopsy suddenly exclaimed “hey!  There are a lot of legs in this bed!”.  I burst out laughing, and she decided to count them (using her fingers).  “Two legs on Mummy, two legs on Mopsy, two legs on Cotton-tail, two legs on Daddy, two legs on me - that’s eight” she said, looking at her hands.  Although her working out was perfect, she’d missed out adding on two more fingers when she got to Cotton-tail.  I suggested she do it again and that I’d do the fingers for her with my hands.  Together we counted on in twos:  “Mummy two; Mopsy four; Cotton-tail six; Daddy eight; Flopsy ten”.  “Ten!  Mummy - there are ten legs in this bed.  Five people have ten legs.”  Maths in bed - far more fun than maths in the classroom

Friday morning, eating breakfast

Flopsy:  *gasp*  Look, Mummy - the grass is all silver!

Mummy:  Yes, it’s called frost

Flopsy:  Can I go and have a look at it?

Mummy:  Yes - do you want to put your shoes on first - it’s very cold outside.

Flopsy puts her shoes on and goes outside.  After a minute or two the back door opens…

Flopsy:  Mummy, mummy!  It’s not frost, it’s ice - come and look!

I go out and she shows me how she’s run her fingers up a blade of grass to pull the frost off and that it does indeed look very like the ice from the freezer.  I explain how frost and ice are the same thing, but that we use the word frost to describe the ice that comes when the water on outside things freezes overnight.  I go back inside.  Then Flopsy comes in and asks for her coat and jumper as it’s really very cold.  After a minute or two Mopsy goes out to join her.  Flopsy is no longer interested in showing me her discoveries and wants to show Mopsy instead.  What I hear is…

Flopsy:  Mopsy look - if you hold it in your hands it melts

Mopsy:  Oh yeah! 

Flopsy:  Shall we dig for worms?

Mopsy:  Yes

Flopsy:  Actually, it’s too cold - shall we go in?

Mopsy:  Yes

I’d say not.  I think that most HEors who follow an autonomous route do so because, like us, they feel very strongly that it’s the best thing for their children and because, when they pay attention to their children, they realise that it really *is* the best thing for their children.  I think it would be pretty easy (and fun, for someone like me who loved playing ’schools’ as a child ) to have sit-down lessons in the morning; to know what was going on from one day to the next; to know exactly what you are trying to teach your child at each lesson. 

I think it’s not so easy to not know from one day to the next what your child is going to ask you to do.  It’s not so easy to be ready for anything.  It’s not so easy to be constantly resourceful so you can work out ways of doing things and finding out things at the time it’s important for your child to do or to find out something.  It’s not so easy to stay up late because your child has decided that’s when she wants to read with you.  It’s not so easy to make random food at random times of the day.  It’s not so easy to answer one child’s questions while you’re trying to read to another and change another one’s nappy.  There is no way a truly lazy parent could allow their children to do autonomous learning.  It’s fun and wonderful and exciting but it is not, not, not the easy option IMHO. 

I am also in  no way criticising HEors who choose a more structured approach - I feel very strongly that all families should do what works for them without fear of criticism from anyone (so long as no one is harmed of course!).  I’m just stating the point that I am actually pretty naffed off that either I or one or all of my friends have been labelled as lazy for doing something that has been written about by so many experienced people.  I hope the person in question can learn enough from his family and others that will help him change his mind and his perception. 

I’m low on motivation to blog and low on motivation to do lots of good things with my children at home.  We’re very busy most days, but our at home on our own days are getting more and more boring and frustrating (and also more frequent and longer due to Dh’s changing working hours coming up to Christmas).  Maybe I’m suffering from SAD.  Some friends and I have set up our own HE group and we have our third session on Wednesday, which I’m looking forward to.  We were out this morning, but a friend who had planned to come this afternoon can’t anymore as her son is still unwell so we are trying to amuse ourselves.  We sometimes go to collect Dh from work as that shortens our day a bit.  Yesterday (yes, my Dh works all weekend sometimes ), we watched loads of tv but also did quite a lot of other small things - some experiments of the week; pouring water; pouring rice; tracing letters in a tray of rice; playing with the train track (quickly while Cotton-tail was asleep!); pushing eachother around in boxes - but none of them really took up very much time at all and before long they were clamouring for the tv to go on again.  I don’t mind them watching tv, except that I find it soooooooo boring myself!  And Mopsy gets frustrated when she watches a lot of it - she starts fidgeting and hitting Flopsy. 

After we came home from our toddler group, we had lunch while the tv was on.  Then they watched Doodle Do which reminded them of the tissue-paper watercolours they do sometimes (which they learnt about from a different episode of Doodle Do than the one they watched today).  So we did the tissue paper water colours but unfortunately I gave them tissue paper which, for some reason, doesn’t bleed its ink, so that didn’t work as well as it has done in the past.  It didn’t seem to bother them - they just enjoyed the process.  While they did that, I painted some papier-mache heads they made ages ago with Dh while I was laid up in bed with a bad back.  They’ve been sitting on the table annoying me for nearly two weeks now, so I felt I had to do something with them!  When the pink paint’s dry (they’re going to look rather sunburnt), I’ll see if they want to draw faces on them and stick on some wool hair. 

Then they decided they wanted to go outside.  Flopsy put her shoes on but Mopsy had previously removed her tights so decided to go oustide barefoot despite the freezing cold!  They wanted to hunt for worms with spades but were too scared (?) to go inside their play house to get spades.  I was too grumpy to help them but reluctantly agreed to go and pick out some from the rain-filled sand-pit for them and then came back inside.  Apparently these weren’t good enough and Flopsy stomped back in again, followed by Mopsy a bit later on. 

Flopsy watched me play a Kakuro puzzle online while Mopsy washed her hands, and now they’re playing some imaginative game.  I can hear them in the room next door and they’re playing really nicely (I wonder how long that will last?).  Someone’s called Flip-flop and the game involves pretend beds - a common theme in their games.  I can occassionally hear a shriek of frustration from Cotton-tail who is at an age already where she wants to be able to do everything and is very annoyed she can’t.  She spent an age trying to hold two pens in one hand earlier on - I remember Flopsy and Mopsy wanting to learn that too at some point.

I’m feeling desperately tired for some reason.  I slept well last night so I really don’t know why I’m so exhausted.  Must be suffering from SAD!  I know I’m not pregnant for many reasons but the most chief of those is that I don’t feel sick - there’s no way I’d manage to be pregnant and not at least feel sick, if not actually be puking! 

I’m a bit fed up that we don’t live in the country-side with a big garden with place to explore.

Ok, I can hear the play has turned  a little sour.  They’re over-involving little Cotton-tail - Mopsy seems to think she can play horses with her.  Must go and save her. 

If you follow the idea of autonomous learning right through to it’s logical end, then surely no toy is ‘educational’ to a child?  The reason I’m thinking about this is because I decided not to get Flopsy something I know she wanted for Christmas because I felt that it wasn’t really much fun getting an ‘educational’ toy for a present and that educational things should just be bought throughout the year.  This is totally irrational.  It’s not ‘educational’ to Flopsy because it’s something she enjoys doing!  I’m bonkers!  Don’t worry, we’ve still got her something she really wants, it’s my method of choosing that I’m bemoaning. 

I remember being on holiday with my parents a couple of years ago, and for my ‘holiday reading’ I’d brought books to do with my course.  My Dad said “don’t you ever give yourself a break from studying?”.  I remember feeling a bit miffed at the time, but realised that what he didn’t understand was that I wasn’t studying because I had to, I had chosen to train to be a Breastfeeding Counsellor because I am passionate about empowering mothers and supporting women who want to breastfeed.  Therefore, the material I needed to read was of great interest to me.  I *loved* every essay I wrote and miss them now that I don’t have any to write.  My essay’s were interesting to write and the reading was interesting.  I was studying not to gain a certificate, but to learn about a subject that means a lot to me.  So my holiday reading wasn’t in the same vein as GCSE revision - if I’d been reading the books but not training to be a BFC, my Dad probaby wouldn’t have made that comment. 

And this is the essence of autonomous learning - doing it for yourself, not for anyone else and not for a certificate (unless you want one, of course!).  It’s not distinguishing learning from life.  It’s allowing children to spend their time the way they want to and if that means spending hours doing workbooks and playing with cuisenaire rods then that’s fine!  I’m imposing my own cultural conditioning on my children to even make a distinction between toys meant to subconsiously teach children and toys that are ‘just for fun’.  What a wally!

Children’s learning

I’ve had various analogies in my head over the years, with regard to children’s learning and knowledge.  The one I’ve had for the longest is that of an ice-berg.  Any parent will relate to the experience of a child coming out with something that you respond to with ‘how on earth do you know that?’.  Whatever a child chooses to let us see of their knowledge, I am certain that there is way, way more there that we will never know about and, in my opinion, have no right to know about.  That knowledge belongs to the child and they can tell us about it if they wish.  On a bit of a tangent, I do feel that enforced testing is a real infringement on a child’s rights to their own knowledge - like invading their minds - unless, of course, a child has chosen to be tested in order to gain a qualification or certificate to prove their knowledge.

The analogy that has been forming in my head lately is that of rare wild animals.  We know they’re there, but, in an ideal world, we don’t know the details and we leave them well alone unless they come out of their own accord for us to observe them from a distance.  Or if we leave food out for them during the winter, they might venture out to eat it.  What happens when we actively interfere with the natural living of wild animals?  Well, they often get ill.  Sometimes they get too frightened to continue reproducing.  If we disturb nests some animals and birds will abandon their young.  Even if we’re interfering with the best of intentions, we can seriously upset the delicate balance of their lives which can have disasterous results.  Is this what children’s learning and knowledge is like?  It’s there, going on all the time, without our interference.  Just happening.  Every now and then a child needs help from someone more experienced and asks for it.  Or sometimes the knowledge just pops its head up for us to see - what a privelege!  But when we interfere without invitation, who knows what we’re doing to it.

We should just be here as providers of opportunities and as signposts to our children, and nothing else.  We should offer them experiences, allow them the chance to discover interests - easy to do with television and the internet being so accessible nowadays, and fun to do with trips to museums/castles/whatever, and cosy and loving to do by sharing books and magazines.  We should be open to them deciding not to do the things we suggest.  And we should be available to our children to answer their questions and signpost them to other ways of learning about things that interest them. 

Finding the happy medium that means we’re doing what our children need us to do but not interfering beyond that is easier said than done, but it’s a standard to aim for