flynn011

I'm very excited to announce that my daughter, pseudonymously (is that word???) known as Ellie Firestone, has published her second book about Super Sporty on Kindle. Do have a look.  Do buy it.  Do review it and tweet about it, etc.  I think it's super funny, well written, and her blog can link you to all kinds of fun games related to it (such as, Baby Sporty and her dirty diapers as a lethal weapon against Blarg and Splatt!).

I've just done something very dramatic.  I spent six days away from the children. Wow. I haven't been away from them for more than 2 nights since my eldest was born a dozen years ago. After an advocate for the child sponsor charity called Compassion UK (with whom I sponsor a boy from Uganda) had pulled out from a major Christian youth festival called Soul Survivor , I volunteered to join the team on their stand and promote this worthwhile cause. In the meantime, I learned to camp.  I learned to take sponge baths in the tent instead of queue up for the showers. I learned to knock the slugs off my wellie-boots before slipping them on in the mornings. I enjoyed some of the most awesome charismatic ministry and worship, some thought-provoking seminars, and endured some food that started off tasting pretty good, but by the end of the week, I couldn't face anymore Thai curry and finished up by eating a lot of granola cereal. When I finally came home today, I couldn't believ...

Someone posted a link recently to this blog which satires the position of the Local Authority when it comes to their approach to home educators in England. If you're not au fait with what Local Authority means (as some in the US, for example, won't be), they're the county-level bureaucrats who are mainly in charge of truants and other children who are missing from education, but who, for some reason, think home educators fall under this category (although the law patently says that they don't) and try to hunt down every HE child in their jurisdiction for purposes, they say, of "safeguarding". It's another word for "monitoring", but that word's a no-no since it's been proved over and over that it's not in their remit. I encourage you to go to the link and read the whole article, but here's a snippet: The notion of EHE policy being based on  bias towards school, erroneous conflation of education and welfare, and  a complete misunde...

Killer is my oldest boy; he's 9.  He follows the Ambleside Online curriculum (sort of) and, as it adheres to the Charlotte Mason method, he has a daily expectation that he does something called copywork. In a nutshell, copywork is copying down an extract from another source, such as a good poem or a selection from a book or even from the Bible.  The idea is that a child can practice writing neatly, can learn from a good example about punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and can do so in context (in other words, in a realistic setting and not as a list of random words, or as a fill-in-the-blank workbook). Recently, a friend of mine with a boy the same age was asking me about how much should be expected of her son, as she and her husband were nearly coming to blows about the number of words they were making the child write down every day, and the child was coming unglued because it seemed too much for him. Try to make writing a pleasant experience Just before I "reveal" my a...

Home Education in England has come under the Government's scrutiny in the last couple of years, mainly because of some high profile cases of child abuse which the media still tries to link to home education. The facts of this are misremembered, skewed, and often entirely wrong.  Our most notable case was of a child who was withdrawn from school under Home Education laws, but who had been known by the social services and whose siblings were flagged as being malnourished at school, and yet the authorities didn't act in time to save her life. Home Education was never the culprit, though the newspapers often like to say that it was a contributing factor. A home-educating dad has taken a stand about this and written a very thorough, reasoned response to an article about this published in the Times Education Supplement last autumn.  Pour yourself a cup of coffee and have a look at it. http://northshropshe.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/khyra-ishaq-abused-twice/

We were heading out on a shopping trip during school hours today, and I thought -- just in case the truancy police were around -- I'd better take some "proof" that we're homeschoolers. So I took some snaps of our school room. It isn't clean, tidy, or especially presentable, but it's true-to-life. I decided to post them because someone on a Yahoo! group I belong to had posted a request today about how people organize their school rooms. Here it is: the unvarnished truth! (And no, I'm not intentionally advertising Ikea; however, they do sell some good stuff for homeschoolers!) Tables bought from a supplier of Educational Furniture Ikea "Trofast" Storage

When Mom is ill... school in bed! Right.  Here it is, January, and I'm once again writing about how I coped with educating my children at home while I was ill. Rocky watches Salsa with the pet bird on her shoulder Back in September, I lost my voice.  Over Christmas, I had the flu; but we weren't homeschooling then, so it didn't matter so much. Last week, however, I both lost my voice and had a flu-like illness that kept me in bed for about ten days, off and on. The maths must go on! And did we give up school?  Well, for a few days, it was cancelled.  Then I realised that it was a lingering thing, and that I was going to have to do something about it. Here are some photos of the kinds of things the kids did while I was ill: some with me, some on their own or in pairs/groups, some on the computer or telly, and quite a lot of it in my bed!!! Killer and Phoenix perfect their magic Busy Timmy works on map skills Killer has to get his own lunch Timmy and Phoenix work on th...