Hi

Another busy week starts!

Our local home-ed group organised an Art morning, which was an intereesting experience. We had booked an Art teacher and the first thing she wanted was that all the parents left the room, so she could “teach Art”.

For the children the morning was supposed to be fun and creative, as well as a social time for them. Most of the children do Art at home, although as far as I can gather, no-one is planning on making a career out of Art.

The teacher had very different ideas and seemed to think the children should all be working towards a formal Art qualification.

I have come across this a few times, where someone seems to think that in order to work towards a formal qualification, all fun, laughter and joy of learning must completely disappear.

All children are expected to be at the same level and the prevailing belief is that children best learn by criticism, by telling them what they have done wrong, by insisting on silence and threatening to split up groups of friends.

Yes, that about summed up this experience, along with rudeness to the children, telling them how far behind they were as compared to children of their own age in school and how their work they had produced would be an abysmal failure in college.

Hmm, no wonder she didn’t want parents in the room!

Don’t think we’ll be doing that again!

This very much reminds me of Stephanie’s Art experience in Year 6 at school. She hated the subject. Hmm, wonder why!

Art is a subject, which really should be subjective as to what is “good ” or “bad”. Yes, there are some basic techniques you can learn, however you only have to look at paintings that sell for millions of pounds to see that talent – or lack of it- is also a very subjective subject!

When we got home, we did Maths. Jacqueline is working with simple Algebra, including brackets. Stephanie is covering Vectors in Maths. Greg has realised that there is a lot of Vectors in IGCSE Physics, so he is going to be starting that subject with her very shortly.

After that we spent some time learning the Acting pieces for Speech and Drama. Both pieces are coming along very well.

Have a great day.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, home education by Amanda
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Yes, really, someone has dared to come out in support of Home Education!

 Dr Bernard Trafford is head of the Royal grammar school, Newcastle upon Tyne, and chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, has written this article in today’s Guardian Newspaper.

Why Point the finger at home educators?

Someone understands us! Yippee!!

The only comment I would disagree with is the one about Home Education already being monitored.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, home education by Amanda
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Hi

I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago that Greg had decided to do something to help Jacqueline with her Times Tables and Mental Maths.

He has devised a simple Times Tables Multiplication and Division Worksheet Generator, which creates a sheet of 100 sums (and answers).

Greg and the girls are doing a sheet every day, with the idea of improving accuracy and time. At the moment we are working with positive numbers up to the 12 times table, although the software has the capability of doing negative numbers as well.

That will be fun when we get onto that!

So far the results are as follows:

Jacqueline- day 1- 67 questions completed and correct in 5 minutes and day 2 – 97 questions correct in 4 minutes 12 seconds- what a tremendous improvement!

Stephanie – day 1- 98 questions correct in 3 minutes 12 seconds and day2- 100 questions correct in 2 minutes 37 seconds!

Greg- day 1 – 100 questions correct in 3 minutes 45 seconds and day 2- 97 questions correct in 2 minutes 46 seconds!

Stephanie was delighted with these results, especially on day 2!

As the Times Tables Multiplication and Division Worksheet Generator, creates a new sheet each day, we are going to do a test each day.

The idea is to understand the relationship between numbers, so that the answers are on the tip of the tongue. This makes all Maths a lot easier.

Not only is there some healthy competition being generated over the Times Tables, there is also an interesting situation around the Singstar kareoke singing games.

Singstar

Stephanie, Jacqueline and Greg all have different singing styles and each have songs that they are stronger with. However, there are certain songs that have also generated a healthy competition.

Each time one person improves, even just a little bit, there is great celebration of their success. This is especially so if one of the girls have just beaten their Dad’s best score on one of his “favourite” songs!

Like a big kid, he heads straight into the playroom to have another go, with the intention of beating their score!

Competition to have the top score has certainly improved the singing all round!

It is all done with the best of intentions and taken in the spirit of fun and entertainment that it is meant to be.

Have a wonderful day.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, fun, home education, maths resources by Amanda
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Hi

I am still awaiting a reply to the letter I sent back to the EHE in response to their attacks on us and their threats of School Attendance Orders.

We did have one bit of good news on the Official front. We got a letter from Social Services apologising for the distress caused to our family over their intended “Initial Assessment” after this business with the Pen Pal letter.

Such a massive over-reaction with unproven allegations and police and social services involvement was totally unnecessary and has caused huge stress.

I suppose if we belonged to any other minority group, we would probably have cause for a huge compensation claim for harassment.

In terms of the requests for information from the EHE of the Local Education Authority as to their answers to the 60 questions in the recent review, it does not look as if information is going to be forthcoming.

I got an email about that matter and I quote it here:

“In relation to this request I can confirm that the release of this questionnaire may be subject to a Freedom of Information Act exemption and therefore a Public Interest Test will be held. In accordance with the County Council procedures a panel will decide if this information is subject to the exemption and if the information will be withheld, or if the information will be released.

No inference should be made from this letter that we currently hold the information that has been requested.

The Public Interest Test panel will meet in due course and I will contact you with the outcome as soon as possible after the panel has reached a decision.”

Hmm, very interesting…

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they are absolutely terrified that home-educating parents will find out what the LA have written about them and that there will be such a public outcry over it that they will be unable to force through their intended draconian bullying and harassment policies.

When parents refuse visits from the LA, the argument often levelled against them is “well, if you have nothing to hide, what is the problem?” I would have to ask the same question of our LA.

Their 20 day deadline for providing the information under the Freedom of Information Act has now passed. I doubt I am going to get an answers because the LA has already made their position clear in another FOI request on the What Do They Know site.

Apparently they have chosen to take advantage of an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act and claim that releasing the information (whilst still claiming that they may not actually have it) could prejudice the conduct of Public Affairs!

Interestingly only a handful of LAs have been willing to release this information. Many have not replied to requests or have claimed that the form was filled out online, so no hard copies were retained!

Others, apparently including Bradford, have claimed that they were not “invited” to take part!

What a load of rubbish!

Clearly they were not expecting home -educating parents to find about this secret 60 questions questionnaire. Obviously they were not expecting people to want to see what they have written!

No doubt all this secret, hidden, unavailable and non-existent data will miraculously make an appearance when the next round of unfounded, unproven allegations and attacks start.

This data will suddenly prove “significant numbers” of home-educated children are at risk from all sorts of nasty things from parents.

So, in the meantime, we await a reply to our response to the threats of School Attendance Orders and being placed on the Children Missing Education Register.

Life has to go on!

Have a wonderful day.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, home education by Amanda
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The days seem to really fly by.

On Wednesday, Greg took Stephanie to see the show WICKED in London. It is great for us because we can travel down and back in a day, and watch the afternoon matinee performance.

We went this time last year and Stephanie so loved the lady who played Elpheba, the Wicked Witch, that she wanted to see the same person again.

Stephanie was delighted because the person who played Glinda, the good witch, was the stand-in and Stephanie thought she was even better than the original.

Jacqueline had a friend over to play. They spent most of the day on the Singstar. When they came downstairs, Jacqueline asked me if I had heard the “cats yowling” upstairs – i.e. her and her friend singing. I am very glad my daughter does not take herself too seriously!

When her friend went home, she baked and iced some gorgeous biscuits. We did manage to save Greg and Stephanie ONE each.

Thursday 26th March

On Thursday Jcaqueline went ice-skating with the local home -ed group. Stephanie decided to stay at home and she did some Maths instead. Greg got her on Vectors and Matrices. I am glad he is teaching her that subject!

Skating was followed by a treat lunch at Macdonalds. This was a great opportunity to catch up with the other parents and to plan some more activities over the next couple of months.

Greg did some Maths with Jacqueline in the afternoon. She is on Algebra now.

We have come to the conclusion that Maths is not Jacqueline’s favourite subject because she does not really see the relationship between numbers. She has never really been taught her Times Tables, or at least not in the way that Greg and I were taught them.

There are a lot of sums she has to think about or work out, as the answers are not on the tip of her tongue.

I can really see the difference in the girls on this front. Stephanie started her school life in an independent prep school and the children had already done three and four times tables by the Easter of Year One (5/6 year olds).

Jacqueline started her school life in a state primary school and did not really get to 3 and 4 times times until at least year 2, and then it was never by rote.

It appears that Stephanie had also had regular tables tests at one of the later independent schools, whereas Jacqueline’s year had not really done them.

Greg decided to fix that! More on that shortly.

Jacqueline was then busy at Guides in the evening.

Friday 27th March

We spent the morning working on the Speech and Drama pieces. Stephanie has written her 4 minute speech on Rottweilers, so we just need to practise that and get it down to bullet points on a card.

We went through her Acting pieces. She informed me that one requires a Cockney London accent and the other requires both a Westcountry accent and drunken slurred sounding words.

We can manage the Devon bit, although for a family that doesn’t drink alcohol, the slurring might be a tad harder to practise.

Jacqueline’s pieces are also coming on very well. She has written both of her speeches now and her acting pieces are coming on well. We have a few weeks yet until the exam.

Before they went out, Greg printed off a 100 question times table sheet, with his new Times Table Worksheet Generator and gave them a quick 5 minute test.

Today was the last day of Stagecoach for the term. It was a sort of Open Day where new people were able to come along and take part.

Busy Week.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, home education 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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Today, Jacqueline went to a workshop on the Greeks, which was organised by our local home-ed group and led by a person who does a lot of History Workshops.

This was the 1st one where we had funding for the workshop from the Family Learning Unit. The Home Educating Families have rather tentatively accepted the funding. It remains to be seen what strings end up being attached to it.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the day.

Today is Stephanie’s birthday! It is exactly 2 years since we started home education, and it has really been an amazing journey. The only blot on it is harassment from officialdom!

However, that did not allow her to escape Maths this morning. She spent a good couple of hours on rearranging equations and algebra, with worksheets and exercises that we got from the CIMT Plymouth Maths site.

She was very glad to see the post arrive because it brought a copy of “My Fair Lady” that we ordered to help her with her London accent for one of her Speech and Drama pieces.

She spent an enjoyable afternoon laughing at Eliza Doolittle’s wonderful vowels and trying to sing in a cockney accent. It was quite entertaining to listen to.

Her dad is taking her to see “Wicked”, the Musical in London later this week. We went this time last year with a couple of friends and she loved every minute of it. She has practised singing the songs for hours on end.

We have also started looking into this year’s open air theatre productions. We went last year to see “Midsummer Night’s Dream” as performed by Heartbreak Productions and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” as performed by Illyria.

They were excellent. Highly recommended. Take a substantial picnic!

That’s all for today.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: drama, home education by Amanda
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The girls have worked incredibly hard this term for their Stagecoach production. They have had songs, dances and drama pieces to learn from several musicals. These included Cats, The Lion King, Spamalot and Mary Poppins.

They learnt the entire song to “Supercalifragilisticalidocious”, including all the hand and leg movements to make all the letters- in all the right order!

The term finishes next week with a workshop and guests are invited, so one of Jacqueline’s home-education friends is going along as well.

As usual, it was terrific to watch!

Cats

Stephanie's solo in the Lion King

Stephanie and Jacqueline in Spamalot

Jacqueline in Supercali...

Stephanie as Bert in SuperCali....

Just for the record, the teachers who teach Stagecoach are all eminently qualified in Singing, Dancing and Drama.

Their academic and professional qualifications, as well as professional experience in their respective disciplines, are far too numerous to list on this blog, so here is a link to them on the Stagecoach page.

I would highly recommend Stagecoach. It is great for confidence building. It really does stretch the children, as well as encouraging them to express themselves.

To round off our week of home-education, Jacqueline went to Drayton Manor Theme Park on Saturday with a friend from the home-ed group and Stephanie went ice-skating with some non-home-ed friends.

Tags: children, drama, fun, music, sport by Amanda
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Hi all,
After all the hassles of the last few weeks, we have finally had a quiet few days.

I am still awaiting a reply from the EHE.

I am not sure what to make of their tactics. They attack us, accuse us of not providing a suitable education, threaten us with School Attendance Orders and place us on the CME (Children Missing Education) Register and then when I respond, they go completely quiet.

Hmm, is the matter resolved and they have gone away or is it just the calm before the storm of the next round?

Anyway, regardless of what is happening on the bureaucratic front, our children’s education needs to continue.

On Thursday Jacqueline went swimming and came back to tell me that she had just done 63 and 1/2 lengths. Why she stopped halfway through a length I have no idea, and especially 1/2 a length off of swimming ONE mile!

Stephanie is trying to work on her London/Cockney accent for one of her Speech and Drama acting pieces, so she spent most of the day watching a fairly lengthy serialisation of Oliver Twist, in order to listen to the London accents.

I did suggest watching “Eastenders”, but we decided that, as tough as our lives might be at the moment, we are not that desperate or that suicidal!

She also found a song from Blur, which has London accents in it.

Friday 20th March 2009- Spring Equinox- start of Spring and New Beginnings.

After the traumas of the last few weeks, we decided we would all go out for the day. So we packed up a huge picnic, put everyone (including George Canineus Bumbiteus) in the car and went to Foremark Reservoir in South Derbyshire.

It was really lovely. We had a gorgeous walk. There are little sandy beach areas on the the edge of the reservoir and as well as a picnic tables and a children’s play area.

We laughed and laughed at some many things. It was wonderful to release the stress.

Jacqueline decided to go into the children’s play area. we had just opened up our picnic, when we got a text to say that this tall child with long legs had got stuck in one of the swings! So Greg had to go and extract her.

Jacqueline

George

On the swing

Stephanie and the Swing

Jacqueline on the swing

Dad having lunch

George the Rottweiler

Well, Government bods can attack all they like, but the one thing they won’t break is our family! Despite all the stress and anxiety they have put us through, we can still laugh and have fun.

Yes, it was lovely out in the Derbyshire countryside, having fun with our children as part of our home education lifestyle.

The girls played in the playpark afterwards and it was a brilliant day. We got home just in time for them to get changed to go out to the end of term production for Stagecoach.

Have a wonderful day.

With abundant blessings.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: children, fun, 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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