In which I attempt to declutter some outgrown learning resources

Sorry, this is a sales post. Feel free to ignore. Hannah has outgrown some things and I need to raise a bit of cash for Christmas. Please comment below if you want anything...or email me:afzaulandsarah@virginmedia.com

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 £5.00 inc postage. The burp mechanism in the gorilla does not work, but we've always had great fun making our own sound effects!

PLEASE  NOTE: the book I have for sale is the same series but AGE 7-8. £1.50 inc postage

 Letts Active Readers: £4.00 inc postage. Books 1,3 and 9 are missing. Book 2 has one page written on

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In which we have a very varied day

Hannah slept over at her friend's house after trick or treating with her and I collected her in the morning, after which we went to Mass with my mum. In my head I had some idea about reinforcing the stuff we did on Halloween, but bit daft really, considering she'd had almost no sleep. So I just cuddled her.

Afterwards DH came to meet us outside and the four of us took my aunt and uncle's ashes to Epping Forest Woodland Burial Park where we had a very simple burial. It wasn't even a service. I tried to read a poem and sobbed all the way through (which is most unlike me; I gave the eulogy at both their funerals and managed not to cry in the middle). We then went out to have some lunch together, before Hannah, Mum and I dashed off to meet Louise and Lucia at the skating rink.

Hannah was invited to a skating party there in the summer and won a free skating session in a competition. It expired yesterday so it had to be done, even if that made the day manic and tiring. Also a shame that her illness last week meant we had to go in half term. It was heaving. L and L often go in the week during school time and have the ice to themselves. Still, the girls had fun and they saw one of the senior students from their drama school which always pleases them. The grown ups sat and gossiped over tea and hot chocolate. I *can* skate but my feet are so wide and hire skates so narrow that I always feel as though I have the blades on the inside of the boot! So I don't skate!

We dropped Mum home and went back to L and L's house for dinner as we were all going out to the theatre in the evening. Yummy meal of lamb stew, which I love but don't cook at home because veggie daughter misses lamb terribly; it's been her biggest sacrifice!

In the evening we went to Rich Mix, to see The CrickCrack Club for Day of the Dead. Louise spent many years in Mexico, where Lucia was born and the tradition of celebrating Day of the Dead has remained with them. Hannah no

Can I have a sneaky  proud mummy moment?? In the interval, Louise took the girls out to get popcorn and they came back with crisps instead, *because* Hannah had taken one look at the miniscule bag of popcorn they were selling for £3 and said, "that's really rather expensive, isn't it? I don;t think we should buy it because it's not worth that much," or words to that effect and refused to be pressured into it. Louise came back and told me that she really admired Hannah for being so principled. The show was amazing, three very talented storytellers talling tales from all over the world about death and the pleasures of life. Some of them were a little near the knuckle but the girls are still just about young enough for it to pass them by!

Got home late and had to carry a very weary Hannah so we are having a quiet day today!

In which we do Halloweeny things

There should be pictures to go with this post. There should be a lot more photos on this blog in general, but my camera broke and I have a rubbish deal on my phone contract so uploading photos from my phone is costly. My usual route to putting photos online relies on DH taking pictures on his phone and emailing them to me. Which is long-winded to say the least.

Oh well, I'll edit them in later!

We started with some reinforcement of the whole time-telling thing from yesterday, which really confirmed that she doesn't really get it. Yet. I know it will come and she *wants* to get it, so we'll keep working on it till  she does. She also did a couple of the literacy tests. Of course she is not actually being *tested* but she loves these books and races through a couple of pages a day. One of today's was about adding a prefix to make an opposite, eg,legal/illegal. The question gave you the word and then a choice of two possible prefixes. One of them was "noble". Now it is possible that my intelligent, very articulate nine year old actually has a very limited vocabulary, but she'd never heard the word "ignoble!" It tends not to crop up often in our daily life, nor even in our reading! I do wonder how many children her age would know it! She did know "abnormal" though, which reminded me of a long-running private joke I had with a friend at secondary school when we would make up opposites of "normal" based on almost every other prefix, so we were "disnormal", "unnormal", etc. We never considered "ignormal". I quite like that!

We did a little bit of research on the origins of Halloween in the Celtic festive of Samhain, after which Hannah drew a picture of a Celtic man preparing the Feast of the Dead. We went to Celtic Harmony Camp earlier in the year and after that, she dressed in the costume of a Celt at one of our regular history fairs so the man was reasonable accurately portrayed, down to his red hair. However, her interpretation of the meal left a little to be desired. It included a pie (possible I suppose), grapes (trade with the Romans?)...but also coffee and spaghetti bolognese. I am not an expert in food history but I am fairly sure the Celts did not have these things. Maybe modern pagans would include them.???

We then had a break for lunch which necessitated attacking the pumpkin, which I eviscerated and went off to turn its innards into rather tasty soup, while Hannah made its exterior into a gore-bespattered pirate. It was her first attempt at carving and it was better than any of my efforts in previous years! Here is obviously one of the places the photos I did not take should go!

Later, we touched briefly on how the early church imposed Christian festivals on top of existing pagan ones and talked a bit about how we would feel if someone told us we couldn't believe what we did believe, but had to believe what they told us to! We were going to look at the origins of trick or treat and other Halloween customs, but she was too busy getting her costume together for actually going trick or treating. So she got ready and then we painted spooky castle pictures. I will put photos in tomorrow, honestly!

In which we catch up on last week

Last week, Hannah was probably as ill as she has ever been in her life! We've been lucky (or  she has a very robust immune system due to full-term breastfeeding and decent exposure to dirt) and, other than colds she has had a real illness only three times in her life (one stomach bug, one throat infection and very mild chickenpox if you're interested). She had a coldy virus last week that developed into sinusitis. DH is sucsceptible to sinus trouble and it is so unpleasant. Poor child spent a week just lying on the sofa with a vile headache, sometimes in so much pain she could barely move her head.

She was finally well enough by Friday to go to her grandmother's to celebrate Eid-ul-Adha with the rest of the family, but wasn't well enough till today to do the work we had planned about it. Actually, it was last year's work that we just didn't get round to then. I'd printed off a lapbook from someone's blog  but it was just a few things to stick into a folder, nothing required any actual work, so Hannah chose to stick it into her exercise book for Religion and Philosophy and write her own explanations underneath each picture as I read to her from a book about Hajj. She was quite fired up about going to Mecca when she is older.

We also did some work on time as this seems to be something she forgets on a regular basis. I think she can tell the time and mostly she can, but she seems to get very muddled all over again on a regular basis. So we went over it again and for the moment, it seems to have sunk in! We might spend a bit more time on it tomorrow though just to reinforce it.

She whizzed through a couple of pages of literacy tests (oops, almost typed "testes" there...I know testing is bollocks but still!) and ran into a couple of words she didn't know so practiced looking them up in a dictionary, which is another, useful for life in general, skill, like time-telling, that seems not to stick in her brain and needs frequent re-visiting.

After all that, we watched Saturday's Merlin and talked about story structure, went to the post office and supermarket. Time to relax...well time for Hannah to relax, time for me to make fajitas for dinner!

In which we were too busy to blog...

Wednesday was just a manic day! Hannah went to a Victorian Pharmacy workshop in Richmond Park, which is about as far from us as it is possible to be and still be in the same city so we needed to leave early. She went in to do her thing and I walked for an hour in Richmond Park in glorous autumn sunshine! She really enjoyed the workshop. The children dressed up in Victorian caps and aprons and were shown how to make extracts of various substances, tooth powder from salt, spearmint and something Hannah claims was icing sugar but seems an unlikely ingredient in tooth powder to me! They also used pill rolling gadgets like this to make pills from playdoh! The printed label on the box says "Not to be taken".

I had to rush her away from new friends she'd made and we made a valiant effort to get back across London in just over an hour to get to her first LAMDA class. Poor thing; she was so excited about starting and then we missed half of it because of traffic! She has to make a selection from about half a dozen short monologuesand I'm trying not to influence her unduly in favour of the Anne of  Green Gables piece, just because I love the books so much! She's wary of needing to do a Canadian accent, but it's the easiest to act, in my opinion.After LAMDA, we raced off again to Irish dancing.

After all the running about I was too tired to write it up!

Then actually there was probably plenty of time to blog, but Hannah is coldy and floppinng about not doing much and all we've done is go to the cinema as part of National Schools Film Week. DH took her to see The Lorax yesterday and I finally got to see Brave with her today! Brilliant! Also we saw a family we used to see at Mad Science and it's always nice to catch up with the people we see only sporadically!

In which nothing special happens

I'm determined this time to write even when it's just a day and nothing much happens...although whether I will hold myself to that on the days she does nothing but watch cartoons remains to be seen.

Today was a work day for me. I'm doing two half-days a week at the moment. Hannah asked me if I would set her work to do while I'm out so what happens is that I write a list of things on a white board and leave anything she needs for it out on the table. She's not under any pressure to finish it and if she needs help that DH is unable to provide, she can just wait. And as always, life is welcome to intervene!

Today she did two pages in a literacy workbook and about half a sheet of division sums before she and DH went over to his sister's.  While she was there, she read some of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which she has just started. I've made myself stay hands-off where reading is concerned. Reading is my passion; it's as necessary to me as eating or breathing, but she is not me and I don't want her to feel under any pressure to read. I do wish she could discover the pleasure of getting lost in a story and not  wanting to  put it down and I hope that will happen now she is reading better stories. I have no problem with her reading the formulaic series of books about puppies or dinosaurs, but  they are pretty predictable and the characters are not particularly well-developed so there's no incentive to read on, either to find out what happens or because you care about the characters.

However, now she is onto the later Harry Potter books, I am going to have to encourage more daytime reading or she will never get through them at all. I think I'll probably get them on kindle for her as well..she will never manage to  read Order of the Phoenix in physical form!

She's also learnt how to pay a cheque into the bank today. How useful that will be in future I don't know..probably by the time she is managing her own  bank account cheques won't exist, but she gets a kick out of doing grown up things.

In which some of us are dragons from Northern Ireland

I don't even know where to start with this one, except that I truly believe that imaginative play is one of the most profound learning experiences and besides that, it's fun...for them playing and for me, overhearing randomness and trying not to laugh!

Hannah's friend is here today and they started by L towing Hannah up and down the laminate floor in a fleece blanket, the dog in pursuit and both of them shrieking with laughter. Somehow the game evolved into something that involved Hannah being a baby dragon. I made her some wings out of a small fleece blanket (bit of a theme there today!) tied on with string. There was a break from the dragon game for lunch and watching Transformers then back to being dragons, this time randomly with Northern Irish accents...no idea why!

In other news, the Cooking Round Britain project continues. Last week, when I didn't bother to blog, we made Aberffrau biscuits which were featured on Great British Bake Off. These are very simple, shortbready type biscuits, baked in the shape of a scallop shell. Originally the biscuit dough would have been pressed into an actual shell, but as we don't live in Anglesey,whence the biscuits come, we didn't have a scallop shell handy and pressed the dough out into circles and then made lines in a scallop shell pattern with our fingers. There are two explanations for the choice of the shape: one links them to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, whose pilgrims wear a scallop shell to denote their quest. The other is far more romantic, a legend that once a Welsh Prince was holding his court in Aberffraw (not too unlikely, the place also hosted the Eisteddfod in the distant past), and his wife was walking on the beach there, and spotting a pretty scallop shell asked for a cake to be baked in the same form. Take your pick!

There was supposed to be a pattern of alternating sweet and savoury dishes, but cooking on a Monday naturally lends itself more to sweet stuff that can be taken as a snack to drama and not so much to cooking something for dinner as we don't get home till gone 8! Maybe next week we can cook on another day and do savoury. This week we made welsh cakes. These were very easy and most delicious. I would almost always have the ingredients on hand so it's a good one to add to the repetoire of quick snacky things to make. These could be from any part of Wales and am not quite sure what to do in terms of the Welsh counties, which traditionally were quite few but there now seem to be 22 of them, some tiny and because they are modern creations, they don't have traditional recipes. I think we'll have to just make all the recipes we can find for Wales and colour in all the counties when we're done!

Just come back from dropping the girls to drama and am very excited because Hannah is starting her LAMDA classes this week. 

In which we start a new project and make Bosworth Jumbles

On Wednesday Hannah and I were catching up on Great British Bake Off and one of the history of food sections was about Cornish saffron buns. We reflected that we hadn't tried those on our recent holiday in Cornwall. I was about to suggest we made some when an idea for a whole project embracing geography, history and cookery burst fully formed into my brain. We would print off a map of the counties of the UK, one which could be coloured (Hannah has only a very shaky idea of how the country fits together so this will help her understand it better). One by one we  would make a local speciality from each county and look at its history, make it...eat it obviously..and colour in its county of origin on the map.

Today we decided on Bosworth Jumbles, from Leicestershire as suggested by someone on Learning Under the Trees. I googled it and found a recipe on the ITV website from Ade Edmondson's programme on cooking local dishes. He used to come into the bookshop where I worked as a new graduate and was lovely so I felt warmly inclined towards his method, which you will find here. This S shaped biscuit is from a recipe supposedly left behind at the Battle of Bosworth (1485) by Richard III's cook! Although a different website suggests a far simpler recipe which seems much more likely than the lemony version we made. All I can say is Richard III may have lost his horse, his kingdom and his life at Bosworth, but at least he had damn fine biscuits!

I should add the not-very-S-shaped one is not badly made but half-eaten!

In which we experience an air raid...

...in a manner of speaking! After playing with a friend who goes to school and is currently doing WW2, Hannah came home expressing a desire to build an Anderson shelter. Not, as her friend  had done, from a cardboard box, but properly, in the garden, from scrap metal. I took a deep breath. I thought about the possibility of getting scrap metal. I discounted that and offered large cardboard boxes instead, but in an unused bed in the garden with a wooden frame. Hannah accepted but then we considered the fact that we have a metal shed in the garden. That would work,we thought. We spent a bit of time researching shelters and air raids and decided on what she would need to have in the shelter.

Yesterday she made herself a gas mask out of a pair of goggles from a chemistry set, some dark fabric, a toilet roll inner tube with metal mesh from the craft box on the end. She planned her wardrobe, a dress (those of you who know Hannah will know how unusual *this* is), a hand-knitted cardigan, knee-socks and boots. She decided which toys and books would be appropriate..and ended up reading The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, which was published in 1940 (we checked!).

Today, while she got dressed into her wartime clothes, I went down and made up a make-shift bed in the shelter. She had some home made leek and potato soup (wanted it to have been feasible for a 1940 lunch) for lunch and packed a canteen of water, a thermos of soup and a roll in her case. Then I played an audio clip of the air raid siren and she picked up her bag and coat and went calmly down to the shelter with the dog.

They stayed in there for two hours, which is probably long enough to get a sense of what the waiting for the all clear might be like. The dog fell asleep, Hannah read a bit of her book and played with her toys. She wrote a diary entry. Then she emerged into the daylight after the all-clear!

In which we celebrate "best friendship"

There have been a slew of articles doing the rounds on Facebook this week on the subject of discouraging children from having best friends, like this one in the New York Times or this one in the Sun. There are always comments from the teachers advocating these policies that they are not saying children can't have best friends, just that they are encouraging inclusiveness and general friendliness. And I agree that is a good thing, but I don't understand several things about this move.

I don't understand why having a best friend prevents you from having other friends and making friendly approaches to others. Certainly children can be encouraged to do so *without* losing that special bond of best friendship.

And I really don't understand why children have to be protected from the pain of falling out with their friends. We have spats with our friends, our family, our life partner.....that is part of life. It's painful, but there's no way to get through life without experiencing it at all unless we do not have a close relationship at all. Which would be a poor and miserable way to live a life!

Hannah is currently curled up on the sofa with her best friend. As I started writing this, her friend had her head on Hannah's lap and Hannah had her arm round her friend. They spent all day yesterday and all day today together. They've had the odd argument as they always do, but after so many years of best friendship, they are used to that and are very good at resolving it and getting on with being friends again. They first met in 2005, when Hannah was 22 months old and her friend was 20 months. Her mother and I got into conversation in a soft play area and have also been good friends ever since. They've been to pre-school together, we've shared home ed days (I have L here one day a week at the moment although it used to be two days), we go on holiday together, we have sleepovers, they come to our family birthday dinners. It's special.

It's not exclusive. They have other mutual friends they enjoy spending time with, some of whom were initially L's friends and some of whom were Hannah's. They do drama and trampolining together so they have a fairly large circle of shared friends and acquaintainces..but they also do a lot of separate things and have other friends that the other only meets at birthday parties. They have, in fact, a normal friendship. Just like adults. Surely it is not that weird to have a friend you feel closer to, feel you can trust with your deepest feelings and concerns, have more in common with, share values with??? Should we all be aiming for a colourless existence where we get on with everyone but love none? I don't think so.

I like that Hannah has these close friendships. She has 4 special friends. L is one..more like a sister than just a friend (especially considering the squabbling and rivalry!)..they go back before memory and I hope that they can weather the storms of adolescence and stay friends for ever (it's a challenge, but not impossible...I have a good friend I;ve known since we were about 2 and our friendship has survived all our different life choices and deepened over the years).

A is the next; they met about 2 years ago and have a much more peaceful friendship. They have lots in common and can spend hours and hours in each other's company quite easily. O is another friend in this vein although we don't see her that often at the moment. And last but not least, B. We met her last year and despite a 4 year age gap, she and Hannah had one of those instant connections that feels a little like love at first sight. Although they maintain their friendship by email as we live in London and B in Leicestershire, I have a feeling that they will always be able to pick up where they left off as the best friendships do.

So here's to friendships, the ups and downs and all the brilliant potential of best friends!

In which I make a plan

Mondays are apt to run away from me unless I do some forward planning. When I just have Hannah at home, the question, "what shall we do today?" is enough to start her off, sometimes according to the theoretical timetable and sometimes not, but when we also have her friend L which we do every Monday, it works better if I organise something on which they can work in a cooperative way. They are as intensely competitive as if they had been siblings and have such different strengths that a project in which they can take on different roles works well.

Usually I try to tie that in with something topical as they have such very different interests. This week it revolves round pancake day. So far I have this planned: make a very simple lapbook about pancake day (or at least start it) with info on why we celebrate it, how it is celebrated in different countries, etc. Make buns filled with whipped cream as they do in Denmark and Sweden. Have a pancake race. Make a mask or headdress for carnival.

We shall see!

First though, we have to have a hamster funeral. L's hamster died and they don't have a garden so we said they could bring Barney to join the rodent graveyard here.

In which we go to an uninspiring event

Living in London, we are spoilt for choice of fabulous and exciting things to do...which is why it is really annoying to have hauled ourselves into central London (in half term!) to check out the Imagine festival at the Southbank Centre and found it a bit....meh!

On paper, it sounds great. So many performances of music, plays and poetry that I was interested in. In part the meh-ness (I know that's not a word, bear with me!) was down to a delay in communication with the friend I was going with. We left it far too late to decide which events we wanted to see and by the time we did they were fully booked.  Of course nothing on the website said "this event is in a tiny room and there are only actually 30 tickets available," or we might have been a bit more urgent about our meandering plans to get together and plan what to do.

So that was one gripe, but I might not have minded so much the long wait for the one event we could attend if there had been anything to  do in the interim. I don't count eating our packed lunch and running around pretending to be a dog as things to do. There was an art and craft session advertised as "drop in" but when we attempted to drop in, we were told it was full and the rest of the day's sessions were fully booked. My friend said she could see tables with sheets of drawing paper and pens on. Really??? This is the best you can do? Funnily enough, I can provide her with paper and pens at home. If I go to a craft session at an event I expect it to tie into the event in some way.

There was also apparently a Reading Den, but we didn't go there.

There was so much empty space, largely taken up with bored children running about, that could so easily have been utilised by storytellers, musicians and small quick craft activities.

I did, however, really enjoy the idiosycratic performance of The Comedy of Errors by a group of girls from Mulberry school. Very cleverly put together. I don't think it quite came across to everyone. Hannah was completely baffled by it and I wished I had taken the time to explain the plot beforehand so she could have enjoyed it too.

If we go next year (and I'm not ruling out the possibility), I will be suire to book well in advance for any interesting events and take more cash for the funfair in case of boredom!

In which we throw a party

It's become a bit of a tradition to have a halloween party. Hannah and I both enjoy party planning and entertaining people and Halloween, coming a little over 6 months after Hannah's birthday, fits nicely into a pattern of regular party throwing. We didn't have one last year as it happens because we went on holiday in the October half term (with rest of family for BIL's birthday...sadly we usually holiday with them so are still tied to the school holidays for it), so this year we were ready to make up for it with a BIG party.

Hitherto we have had at most 6 children and had it at home but by the time the guest list had grown to 25, it was obvious home was not going to cut it this year. But having paid for 18 children to do 10 pin bowling in April, my bank account doesn't quite match my enthusiasm for parties. The unseasonably warm October weather gave me an idea though. We would do it in the forest and put up our humungous tent in case it rained.

(humungous tent, although this was at HESFES, not at the party)

I was nervous about the tent because it was a pain to put up at HESFES, but in the event, it took 15 minutes, after which DH pootled off to collect girls from trampolining while I unpacked the bags and hid chocolate eyeballs in the surrounding bit of forest. Afzaul got back with Hannah, 2 of her friends and my friend L about 1.45 and not long after the guests began to arrive. Within about 30 mins we had 14 children so we started the games.

As Hannah's friends are an eclectic mix from a variety of activities, we always start a party with a getting to know you game. In line with the Halloween theme, we played "spider's web" which involved holding a bit of wool while throwing the rest of the ball to someone else. The person holding the ball had to say their name and how they know Hannah. We ended up with a lovely looking web, the ice was well and truly broken as the minute the last person had said their name the whole crowd of them took off into the woods, shrieking and giggling and the resultant tangle provided Tim and Richard, two of the dads who stayed, with hours of entertainment as they determinedly untangled it (they cheated in the end and scissors came into it!).

Once we'd got to know each other, the hunt for eyeballs was on. The children sorted themselves into teams and I set them loose to hunt for the chocolate eyeballs. Great fun was had by all as the children disappeared in giggling huddles into the woods while the parents got to know each other and most importantly I got time to draw breath! After about 20 minutes they came straggling back with 40-odd eyeballs between them and the winning team got a prize (more chocolate...sorry!). After a brief break to eat some eyeballs, we set off in search of a flat open space to do mummy races. Two children in each team volunteered to be mummies and the other 3 were wrappers. Armed with a roll of toilet paper they set about preparing their first mummy who had to run to a log about 25m away, back again, have their bandages removed before wrapping mummy number 2 and the seond person running there and back. Team Irish Dancing won..although I did help them with the wrapping as on the whole they were younger than the other teams.

After that came Zombie Mats...which in all Hannah's explanations made NO sense to me whatever, but in the event involved one person being the zombie who had to walk slowly, zombie-style, round a circle while the other children moved from one mat to another. When the zombie managed to get onto a mat, the child who happened to be standing on the centre mat became the zombie. They played quite a few rounds of this, then followed that up with blindfolded doughnut eating.

I had other games in mind, but the apple bobbing became impossible because we didnt have enough water and, hyped up on chocolate and the excitement of being out in the wood as darkness crept up on us, no one wanted to sit down to play "witches cauldron"...which in any case was a bit of a backup in the event of having to take shelter in the tent. The rest of the party seemed to consist of running around shrieking (children) and laughing at Tim and Richard determinedly untangling the spider's web wool (adults).

Tent in the woods party a fabulous idea....will definitely do that one again!

In which she tries an unexpected new activity

And I muse about my educational philosophy and the National Curriculum.

She had a friend sleep over last night and I had promised to take them swimming. We got to the pool, where I discovered that I'd forgotten my swimming costume. Fortunately the girls are old enough and competent enough swimmers to be allowed in the pool without adult supervision so off they went. I hung around the edge and read my book. About half the pool was set up for a fun session with huge floats and the other half was occupied by the local scuba diving club. after they'd been in for a few minutes, there was an announcement that the club was offering 15 minute taster sessions. Hannah immediately wanted to try, but I wasn;t sure they would let her because of her age. I suggested she went to ask, but she got distracted by the game she and A were playing and forgot about it. Until someone from the club came over and asked me if the girls would like a go. Turns out eight is not too young, so they went over. There was only one set of small enough gear so A had to wait while Hannah had her turn. I watched her for a bit and she seemed to be having a blast...which prompted the musing about educational philosophy.

"Do you have to follow the curriculum?" is quite a popular question when we tell people we home ed and mostly I just say no, especially if they have children in school whose learning is contrained by the state-determined, lowest common denominator that is the NC. What I really want to say is "no, thank God." I suppose we are by default following it in maths because Hannah likes workbooks and Education City, all of which are based on the NC, but then we can also discuss very large numbers, make our eyes go funny with the number of 0s in a googolplexian, use all sorts of maths in our everyday life and enjoy ourselves with abstract concepts...mainly on car journeys!

But for the rest of our learning (and I do mean "our"..I am re-teaching myself Latin and learning a lot of biology for the first time and fascinated by astronomy), the NC is so narrow and restrictive. The universe is so big and beautiful and amazing and a lifetime isn;t enough to learn all we want to know about. Thinking about all the potential to learn we have makes me so excited and I want Hannah to feel that buzz of wanting to know something and having the tools at her fingertips to find out and the pleasure of discussing and debating the things that have no answer or of finding the answer to questions that nobody knows YET!

All that from a 15 scuba diving taster session! But it seemed a perfect illustration of  how I see our journey, looking at the world as our classroom, our playground, our resource cupboard, our shelves full of interesting things to find out about and launch ourselves wholeheartedly at whatever opportunities come our way.

In which we catch up after some busy days

I started off yet another intention to write every day; it was good when I did that. I didn't the purely self-inflicted pressure to write something "interesting". Then it can be just a little ramble through our life, mainly for my own pleasure and if anyone else cares to read....good. You're all welcome.


Anyway, Thursday we went to the Science Museum with a small group of parents and children from my favourite Facebook home ed group, Learning Under the Trees. I'm not very good at recognising faces so apart from Tammie, I had no idea who I was waiting for, but am fairly blessed in being the sort of person who doesn;t find it hard to bounce up to random strangers and start chatting. While I was chatting with Janis, Hannah quickly made friends with her son, Nathan. An animatronic dog playing with an iPad, it transpires, is a really good ice breaker! Once Charlotte and Davinia and their families had arrived, we set off for a leisurely wander through the first gallery en route to the Launchpad. And that was that really.
By the time we got up there, Hannah had acquired another new friend in Abigail, no doubt attracted by a similarly funky sense of style and I was able to relax and chat while she went off and had fun. It was fairly quiet as we seemed to have hit the time when the morning school groups were at lunch and the afternoon groups yet to arrive! After lunch we went back there but by then it was massively crowded so we meandered round some other galleries (never been into that history of medical machines bit before and am so relieved I don;t need to be in an iron lung). Naturally there was shopping and goes on the simulator rides. I really wanted the genetics and DNA kit but at £25, no way! Wonder if Helen can get those in the shop????

There was an interesting incident on the way home. One of Hannah's new acquisitions was a tin of "science putty" and she was playing with it on the tube. As we stopped at a station, a piece of it fell out the door and I could see that Hannah's body instinctively went forward as if she was going to get out after it, but she stopped herself. It was quite fascinating, especially in light of all the work on the brain we've been doing, to see that her cognitive development has got to the point that she has impulse control!


Friday is art class. We managed to fit in some spelling and did some maths and literacy on Education City, then went off to Hertford for her lesson, where they finished off  the work they had been doing on cakes. Sadly not real ones, but a still life painting of small cakes and a large papier mache cupcake. I love this class; she has made some amazing things at it; my personal favourite so far is a terracotta warrior in clay, painted as the originals would have been. Will have to try to source some sort of work to provide her with background now. Afterwards I took her friends home and they had a short time to play, then we came home, ate some dinner.

In the evening we were out again, to see a production of Hairspray at the local senior school she will not be attending! A friend's brother was in it so her parents had got us tickets. Wow! I knew a lot of the cast, either because they go to Hannah's drama school or because they had come from the primary school I used to work at and it added to the excitment.  But it was really really well done and some incredible talents. The girl playing Miss Motormouth was mind-blowing. I absolutely believed that she had had a life full of suffering the indiginities and injustice of segregation and it brought tears to my eyes.

I didn;t know the story before we went which is a shame, it would have been good to do some work before hand on the civil rights movement etc, but Hannah always seems to be more motivated to follow up after the event than prepare before so will do something this week.

Today has been quiet, got up late and we have a friend sleeping over.

In which we go back to work

We've been a bit up in the air since my auntie died, but we are getting back on track now. We have done three trips to the RI this year so far: a schools event on the physics of rollercoasters and fairground rides, a family fun day on the brain and a schools event on maths and magic. Royal Institution, we are so grateful you re-thought your heinous plan to charge home educators four times the school price, because we love your events, we love science and we don't deserve to be penalised for choosing to home ed. (if a school child is sick and the teacher brings 29 kids instead of 30, so what, but if our child is sick, we can't come...which I suppose makes us less "reliable" but it's still not fair!)


Elsewhere, she has made a good start on the Maths Mindstretchers 9-11 book and has set herself the goal of finishing the whole book before she actually is 9. She is getting much more confident working with bigger numbers and she really enjoys it..


We have a few projects on the back burner, still working on one on the brain and now planning one about hiccups! But today we started looking at cave art for the history fair in March (experience has taught me that if we are not organised well in advance we will not be ready at all!). The plan is to do a short presentation on cave art with pictures and then provide a craft activity to go with it.

In which Hannah learns about life and death

Hannah has had some tough ones in recent months, in compassion and empathy and now grief. Since September I have been caring for my aunt who had dementia. Sometimes Hannah came with me and some days it was really hard. It was horrible for her on the days that the loved one she always called Nanna was cranky and snapped at her (those days were heartbreaking for me too), but it was also difficult on the days when her mind was completely absent and she rambled on about stuff that made no sense and somehow we had to find ways to reply to this nonsense without patronising or ridiculing her. Hannah struggled to forgive her for the snappiness, but we learnt a bit about how the brain works (thank you Royal Institution Christmas Lectures...very timely!) and talked about what we thought might be going on in Auntie's brain. We talked about how we would feel when she died and why it was important not to hang on to grudges. We wanted to be able to say afterwards that we had done our best and been at peace with her.

Hannah helped me feed her with gentleness and dignity. She managed not to laugh when Auntie told her the oranges and lemons needed to get back in contact with the gorilla...not in her presence anyway. Even when she was  invited to play with her friend who lived next door, she made a point of running in to say hello and give her Nanna a kiss.

On Saturday night Auntie managed to set some furniture on fire and I took her to hospital. No damage done, according to tests but they agreed to keep her in because of some concern about her kidneys. My mum and Hannah came up to see her, which I didn't want at the time but am glad she did have that last opportunity to see her. On Sunday, she died.

We have cried a lot, looked at photos and mementoes of her life and cried some more. Some people around us find tears and sadness uncomfortable, but I have always wanted Hannah to understand and accept her feelings as part of her, something to be expressed not locked away. The only real way to the other side of grief is through it.


I suspect it will be contraversial that Hannah is not only attending the funeral but giving a part of the eulogy. I firmly believe in in not excluding children from our rites and rituals; of course the rest of the family children will be at school but I could get her looked after by a  friend if I wanted to. But she wants the chance to say goodbye to her Nana. I will be giving the main it of the euology, but I asked her if she wanted to say something and she did. She sat down today and wrote this:

Nana was very kind, loving and friendly and she was just like a Nana to me. I have two of my own but I loved her just as much. She meant so much to me and my mum. She was like a mum to her. When I was a baby, our heating broke, but we went to Nana's house and Nana let us stay over and Nana looked after me. I loved her very much, god rest her soul.