Last weekend the girls both played in a Rock Concert organised by the local branch of Clive’s Easy Learn Pop Music Schools, where Jacqueline has Drums lessons and Stephanie has Guitar lessons.

The concert was terrific and Pudsey Bear put in an appearance as well!

Photographs were taken by my very talented photographer husband, Gregory Goldston.

I am not sure how much money was raised for Children in Need, however everyone had a brilliant evening.

Tags: home education, music by Amanda
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As many of you will have noticed from this blog, we follow a “semi-structured” approach to home education. We are working towards IGCSE exams in some subjects, we have tutor come in for Speech and Drama, we are part of a group doing Science IGCSE and we also have days when we totally go with the flow.

Last week was a “go with the flow week.” The girls got up when they felt like it and we did precisely what they felt like doing, apart from (obviously) our fixed, regular commitments.

We managed a dog walk on two days and Jacqueline got some great photos of us in the woods with the dog. He seems to have taken a liking to water, for some bizarre reason. Well, he is going in as far as his knees, so I suppose that is a start.

The girls practised their Speech and Drama pieces for their LAMDA exams. They are doing devised performance (writing and performing their own pieces) and Mime. The exams are in a couple of weeks.

Stephanie will be starting her medals shortly, which then count towards UCAS points for University.

They managed to complete a huge chunk of Biology for their IGCSE Biology course. I know they say that home educated children learn so much faster than children in school and this Biology course has got to be the proof of that.

Both girls are covering a 2 year Biology course in 3 months! Stephanie is looking at taking the 3 sciences as single subjects and Jacqueline will probably do the double award.

As well as that, Jacqueline baked cakes and went swimming. In addition to that, Stephanie progressed several levels on the Nintendo DS Brain Training and Jacqueline set up a huge theme park with her Roller Coaster Tycoon game and was in profit by the end of the week.

We even managed to draw out a pretty plan for the next 4 weeks until Christmas.

It is surprising how much you really get done when you appear not to be doing very much!

I did manage to get loads done on my business and managed a complete re-vamp of my website and I am really pleased with the way that is looking. It has more of a flow to it now. You can see my efforts at http://www.getyourdreamlife.com

With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education by Amanda
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Yesterday, we went to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the Museum of Witchcraft and Wizardry, aka as the Wyrd Museum.

I had to laugh just before we got there. Stephanie had a text from a friend that lives in Stratford saying “Nothing scary in the place- it used to be a shoe shop!”

That kind of takes the sting out of anything creepy!

We have been to Stratford a couple of times before and visited most of the Shakespeare sites, including the Mary Arden’s House and Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Last time we went, we did an open bus tour and visited the Teddy Bear Museum.

The Wryd Museum was quite good, even if it is quite small. It was originally an Elizabethan Coaching Inn and is allegedly haunted by numerous spirits. I did not feel anything unusual there.

There is an apothecary room, where you there is a quiz to determine which of the potions are different from each other. We spent quite a bit of time doing that one and the girls, with their very sensitive noses, got it right and got a prize- a copy of the Wyrd Museum’s version of the “The Daily Prophet” from Harry Potter.

The museum is well laid out with lots of interesting information, although I found it quite hard to read some of it because the lighting was very poor.

Whilst not feeling the presence of any spirits, it is very interesting to note the feeling of general uneasiness that a draughty, dark house with narrow, creaky staircases can create. This is especially so when you have a fresh dose of information about ghosts and spirits flowing round in your brain.

We then went for our customary coffee and cake in a cake shop. This was following by our even more customary trip to Waterstones book shop.

The girls had Speech and Drama later in the day. We have only got a couple of weeks until the exams.

Great day out.
Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education by Amanda
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I have got so fed up with fighting over my right to be able to home educate our children.

It is so very easy to get caught up in all the negativity of one pointless government consultation after another and then spend numerous hours working on it- firstly trying to understand what it is saying and how it could impact our family and secondly trying to write a suitable response to it.

What a total waste of time, effort and energy! It totally takes away from the main thing we are trying to do, which is to home educate our children!

Having just got past the “Statutory Guidance For Children Missing Education”, now there are a plethora of other things. These concern the subject of PHSE. In particular this is about the teaching of “healthy lifestyles” and “Sex education”.

This latter subject has brought out a whole army of other busy-body, do-good organisations that claim that the teaching of sex education should be standardised right across the board and should also include home educating families. That is a huge lot of twaddle, if ever I heard it! (IMHO)

It seems that there is an ongoing onslaught to make home education as difficult as possible for parents and to make it into “school at home,” with all the same rules and curriculum.

Perhaps the idea behind it is to make home education so regulated and so hard to comply with all the rules that parents won’t want to even consider it.

Or maybe it is to take us towards home education being totally illegal as it is in Germany, or close to illegal as it is in California (where parents now have to be fully qualified teachers before they are allowed to home educate their children).

I have to wonder though, is the idea is to ban home education and get all children back into schools under the watchful eye of “experienced” and “qualified” teachers, who brainwash the children with the latest “one world” thinking?

If that is the case, where would they put everyone? No-one seems to know exactly how many children are home educated, although estimates range between 50,000 and 150,000 pupils.

According to the Education Act, every child is supposed to receive an education appropriate to their age and ability, whether in school or otherwise. I have to wonder where my children would receive such an education, other than at home?

So many schools now have classes that consist of 30 + children and many of those classes have such a high percentage of immigrant children, that English is no longer the first language of the class (and in some cases of the school itself).

The same could be said of our Christian Religion. Unless your children attend a school of specific religious denomination, they are forced to accept whatever is handed out to them. Interestingly how some religions seem to carry far greater weight, importance and tolerance factor than others and how some seem to be systematically destroyed!

Schools are so full of Political Correctness that it is very difficult for children to interact with their peers for fear of saying something that offends someone (and the parents being on the receiving end of a law suit for racial/religious/cultural/some other discrimination).

A friend of mine got the English teacher moved from her daughter’s school because the teacher was not a native English speaker and had such a poor command of the English language that she could not communicate with the children. I am not quite sure how she got the job in the first place!

We removed our children from an expensive fee-paying school for various unresolved educational and welfare issues. We had already had unhelpful experiences of lack of stimulation and bullying in the state sector. As far as I can see education in that sector has only gone downhill in the last few years, so where do we go from there?

I think, over time, we will see a lot more parents taking control of their children’s education, whether that is through creating their own local school (as happened in Suffolk a few months ago) or home education or perhaps a mixture of things.

I think home educating parents are coming together much more to pool resources, especially when it comes to the taking exams.

One of the arguments often levelled at home educators is “what do you do about subjects you can’t teach or know nothing about?” Well, there are many answers to that and one of them is to come together with other parents, who can offer those subjects (perhaps) better than you can.

We have done that with the Science subjects.

Studies have shown time and again that home educated children are equally as capable (if not more so) of having successful lives and careers in whatever field they choose. Studies have also shown that home educated children, for the most part, do not seem to have disadvantaged in any way by being at home.

So, my final thoughts are:- Just leave us alone and let us get on with the task we have chosen to do, i.e. home educating our children!

I am just going to focus on that from now on and give as little time and energy as I possibly can to the destructive nonsense that comes from highly-paid government bureaucrats!
Anyway, enough musings and ramblings for today.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education by Amanda
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