Today we received a book in the post called “Forward Press Poets 2009 – The North and Midlands” and on page 200 is a poem written  by Jacqueline to celebrate 100 years of Girl Guiding.

This is a collection that was put together by Forward Press to celebrate their 21st birthday.

Here is Jacqueline’s poem that was published.

 

Guides

100 years on

and still going strong.

Can you guess what it is?

It’s Girl Guiding of course!

 

It was 1909 when everything began,

with a man called Robert Baden-Powell,

He started the scouts for boys only,

which made the girls very angry!

 

They thought they should be included too,

so they went up to him

and demanded something for girls.

He thought over this for a while,

 

And he thought and thought and eventually,

the idea of Guides came to his mind

And the Girl Guiding organization was born!

And in 2010 girl guiding will be 100 years old!

 

I have been involved with guiding since I was seven years old,

from when I first joined Brownies

And since then

I have learned lots of different things,

 

Such as cooking, teamwork and more,

I have also made some great friends through Girl Guiding

And I love Guiding-

So much!!

Well done, Jacqueline, we are really proud of you.

Amanda Goldston

 

 

Tags: children, english by Amanda
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Hi

We spent most of the day preparing and writing talks for the Spoken English component of the next LAMDA exams.

Jacqueline has settled on “My Dream Holiday” and “A hobby” (for which she is doing Stagecoach). The dream holiday sparked off some very interesting ideas.

Stephanie finally settled on “Rottweilers” for her free choice piece and “Aliens” for the subject from the given list.

We talked about Rottweilers as a breed of dog in general, as well the public perceptions of them, and then decided how we can bring our own rottweiler, George, into the talk.

Is he a typical rottweiler? If yes, then how does he fit the mould and if No, how is he different?

Aliens was another very interesting subject and I think we will be doing a lot of research into the presence of aliens, or not, in our society.

This will probably include looking at ancient buildings that reputedly had some influence by beings from out of space, such as the pyramids or Michu Pachu (Peru).

No doubt Roswell and the flying saucers will also come into the discussion.

I am sure at some point we will manage to include Jeff Wayne’s fantastic film and music, the War of the Worlds. Greg (husband) and I saw that as a show a couple of years ago and it was absolutely brilliant.

We also talked about aliens in films and TV programmes, including things like Doctor Who.

Having discussed the Speeches, we turned our attention to the acting pieces. Stephanie’s cockney accent is coming on really well.

After the Drama lesson she told me that, for the other acting piece, she needs to listen to me in full flow of my best Devon accent.

It doesn’t come out very out very often, so maybe I need to practise some of the Wurzels’ songs or read some Pam Ayres poetry! Cider anyone?

It looks like we may have found an opportunity for Stephanie to do a theatre-related work placement, so that is looking good.

We had another SINGSTAR come today. This one is boy bands vs girl bands. There are some great songs on it and Greg and the girls really love it.

Their singing is coming on really well!

Greg is shortly going to be teaching the girls to make pastry, so I can feel some excellent pies, pastries, apple turnovers, strudels and cream horns coming on. Yum!

He has also just completed building a Orrery, which is a working model of the solar system. He has done a great job with it, so we shall be having some conversations on Astronomy (and maybe some Astrology thrown in for good measure) very shortly.

Have a wonderful day.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, drama, english, home education by Amanda
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Hi

Today was a quiet day on the Home Education front.

We thought we would test out the recent theory that teenagers’ bodies are not designed to be awake and working in the mornings and that they function much better later in the day.

This was the Telegraph Newspaper article on the subject.

The girls did seem brighter and fresher when they got up.

We started our day with Maths and English from the IGCSE course books. For both subjects we have been using the Cambridge CIE books. They are really good with plenty of room for practice.

Maths

English

We did some work on prefixes in English earlier in the week. The topic was about cars and the girls had to design a safety leaflet about driving, to be given to newly qualified drivers. As we have quite a lot of physical writing recently, we did this exercise on Publisher on the computer. I was very impressed with the results.

Jacqueline is working through a SATS, Key Stage Revision book for levels 3-6. Considering this is for tests that would be taken at the end of Year 9 by 13/14 year olds, the level of difficulty of the Maths has not increased very much, if at all, from the work she was doing last year, in what would be Year 7.

Stephanie has been doing algebra and re-arranging equations. Today, we printed her off some worksheets from the excellent CIMT Plymouth University Maths project. If you have not seen this site, it is really good. It has a complete Maths programme from Reception to A-Level. The resources are all free.

I have been surprised by the topics the CIMT site covers. A few weeks ago, we did Sets and Venn diagrams with Jacqueline in Maths.

Apparently this is a topic which is no longer part of GCSE, although it is required for IGCSE.

The extension work for Year 7 on Venn diagrams was of a high enough standard that Stephanie was able to use most of it for her IGCSE questions.

This was followed by a bit more singing on the Singstar, a bit of energetic bouncing on the trampoline and then Stephanie went out with some non home-ed friends and Jacqueline watched the latest Prince Caspian DVDs.

We seem to be spending a lot of time discussing why Home Education in general seems to be under constant attack and what we as a family have done to deserve the things that have recently happened to us.

It is a great topic for discussion. As the knives come out from all quarters, you really have to wonder how much of it is genuine and how much of it is government-infiltrated spin!

A couple of examples over the last 24 hours:- In the letter section of the Independent Newspaper today, there was an item by a lady who is allegedly a tutor to home educating families. It has the headline “Children brought up to be ignorant”.

She is basically saying that children educated at home are shielded from so many “real-life” subjects and become aggressive and intolerant when these subjects are discussed.

Last night I came across a post on a forum relating to an upcoming court case between Education Otherwise and a member, who has requested certain information from Education Otherwise. According to the evidence submitted to the court, part of the reason for refusal to provide information was that…

“... individuals who home educate their children comprise a significant proportion of individuals who were abused as children, this often being the motivating factor in that individual deciding to home educate their child. I also understand that another reason for seeking confidentiality is because in some cases individuals are hiding from a former abusive partner, hence their desire to home educate their children.”

Apparently this has now been retracted as a big mistake that some legal person made up without the knowledge or approval of Education Otherwise.

So, fellow home educating families… it now appears that not only is Home Education merely a cover up for abuse, neglect, domestic servitude and forced marriages, but the reason we home educate is because we were abused as children and are hiding from an abusive partner!

So abuse follows abuse through the generations!

Well, neither Greg nor I were abused as children and neither one of us are on the run from a former abusive partner!

Whatever next?????? !!!!!!!

I suppose it actually reminds me of the medieval ducking stool, which was used to determine whether a woman, who had been accused of being a witch, was guilty or innocent.

She was tied to the stool and put under the water in the pond or the well and left there for several minutes. If she drowned and died, then she was innocent (oh dear, whoops, shameful miscarriage of justice and unfounded, unproven allegations).

If she survived, then clearly she had some magical powers that had protected her and so she was found guilty and carted off to be burnt at the stake! (Got to look hard enough to find something wrong- the smallest of anything will do to build a major case).

Anyway, enough for today.

Have a wonderful day.

Amanda Goldston

Amanda Goldston BA (Hons) (Modern Languages), TEFL with input today from Gregory Goldston BSc (Maths and Physics), PG Cert (Business Computing systems)

Tags: children, english, home education, igcse, maths resources by Amanda
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After much deliberation we decided to opt for the English Language exams offered by CIE, Cambridge International Exams.

This was for a few reasons. Firstly we were rather out off by the substantial anthology required for Exexcel English exams, not because of the quantity but because of the rather depressing or somewhat boring nature of most of the set pieces.

The other challenge with Edexcel has been finding a centre to take the exams. For us, personally, the process has been much easier with the CIE exam centres.

The CIE exams seemed to based purely on reading and writing English,as it is presented in the exam papers on the day.

I bought some excellent books from Amazon for the CIE English and we got to work.

For those of you old enough to remember “O-Levels”, you will find a lot of the material quite familiar. There are sections for reading, comprehension, picking key words and points from a paragraph, summarizing, paraphrasing, finding synonyms and use of language in general.

I was surprised to find how few of those basic skills my children had covered previously in school. I was astounded at their lack of knowledge of basic English Grammar. To me these things are vital to be able to communicate in written English.

We bought both the textbook and the workbook. So far, we have not had any of the diet of violence and unpleasantness that seems to be very prevalent in the texts studied in schools!

The books are fun and easy to work with and so far we are enjoying them.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: english by Amanda
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