Learning last year

In and amongst the new year celebrations here, I’ve been thinking and chatting with the children about what we all learned last year. It’s probably quite easy for me to list some of the skills that some of us mastered:

Swimming
Driving
Reading
Russian
Keeping accounts
Holding conversations
Getting dressed
Playing guitar
Playing piano accordion
Dismantling, fixing and rebuilding piano accordion
Resolving certain laptop malfunctions
Multiplication
Division
Map reading
Drawing faces, with BIG smiles (but no noses)
Building Lego ships
Driving a computer mouse

I’ll let those of you who know us work out (or remember) who learned which of those skills in 2009!

And I think most of us have garnered quite a lot of information, in response to our own curiosity. Some of the areas that some of us have been learning about last year have included:

Wildlife
Space
Where other countries are on the globe in relation to the UK
Other cultures, beliefs and customs
Trees
Letter sounds
Politics, economics and the history of these
The development of technology
Balance

But it’s a lot less easy to list what we learned in terms of thinking, ideas or principles. I’m struggling to do that for myself, let alone for the children.

I think I learned that it’s ok to apply a certain amount of teaching to completely unschooled children, as long as they’re happy about it and interested in what’s being taught. This was difficult for me to grasp at first because the older three, having been in school for a few years as younger children, had so much resistance to the idea of actively being taught something that they just learned more, better and easier under their own steam.

I assumed all children would be like that in non-coercive situations, but I now know from the younger two that they’re not, if they haven’t been damaged by the violent coercion of schooling.

I don’t think I worked that out in its entirety just in 2009 though. It’s been an evolving train of thought and experiment for the past three years or so. But last year probably provided enough clarification for me to accept it as being ‘true’.

I also learned that it’s ok if I don’t say ‘yes’ to every request that’s made of me, although after a childhood of violent training to the contrary, this is a hard realisation for me to put into practice all the time, even 30-40 years later. Those childhood lessons really do run so deeply, which is why our relationship with our children is so fundamentally important. But that’s nothing new, is it? Just yet more verification of something very old.

Walking in a winter wonderland

Christmas has come early for the children here: it’s been snowing! Such fun and excitement – it’s wonderful, which is kind of what this post is about.

I’ve been studying a bit of NVC with some friends, and the chapter we’re working on this week is all about “how to request things to make life more wonderful for us”, though I found that this phrase irritated me so much I couldn’t get past it, and had to keep putting the book down.

So I started thinking about the word “wonderful”. Full of wonder.

wonder v. 3 tr. desire or be curious to know

It has other meanings of course, such as: surprise mingled with admiration and curiosity; a strange or remarkable thing; having marvellous or amazing properties; a miracle.

In general, it’s a word that means good things, isn’t it? Wonderful! Great! Terrific.

But it also means ‘curiosity’, and that made me wonder whether these dual meanings are accidental, and to decide that they’re probably not.

When I’m at my best, I’m full of curiosity: wondering about the world, how things work, why things are and so on ad infinitum. When I’m a bit ill or down, my curiosity leaves me and my life, like my head, is really not full of wonder.

When I’m being kept to task on something against my wishes, there is no vestige of curiosity, or any other kind of wonder, left in my being. Just something approaching misery or resentful tolerance, or numbness and a feeling of being switched-off. A non-feeling, more precisely, that might well be stifled anger. As I’ve got older, I’ve learned that that’s a toxic state of mind for a person to be in: one of the many arguments in favour of autonomy – it’s good for your health!

Recent wonderings expressed around here have been about space, the relative size and structure of planets and stars, languages and politics (as ever) and a bit of physics too. The baby has started on Letterland already (though it only seems like too minutes since we were doing that with Lyddie!) But we’ve got these flashcards now, which have ordinary words on one side and Letterland-illustrated words on the other, so Lyddie reads the words while the baby names the characters.

I never, in a million years, imagined I’d use flashcards. Even less, that a child of mine would ever want to. But they do.

One question I’ve started asking is: “Have you got any questions about that?” and amazingly, lots of questions come by way of reply! I never realised to what extent people of all ages internalise their wonderings, perhaps not quite realising they’re there until they’re specifically asked about.

I feel better about the NVC thing now, anyway.

More happens when you leave it alone

Lyddie and I haven’t done any reading practice for weeks. Peter and Jane have been abandoned on the sideboard since she lost interest in them back then. I started getting a bit concerned this week, thinking the development of her reading skill might be stagnating, especially since she’s been really enjoying hearing me read to her for about an hour a day, when we started on the Famous Five series ten days or so ago, but not expressing any desire to try to read them to herself.

I mentioned Peter and Jane this week, when my throat was aching from Famous Five reading, saying something like: “You’re not too far off being able to read these to yourself, you know. We should get back to Peter and Jane and work on your reading skill again,” and she said: “Hmm, well, I’d quite like to be able to read this Thumbelina book to myself.”

I opened it, glanced at a page and told her: “Well, you might be able to. Give it a go?” – not, to be quite honest, at all confident that she could, it being quite well in advance of the Peter and Jane she’d abandoned on the sideboard in frustration weeks before. She picked it up and read a page out loud – slowly, but quite smoothly. And another, and another. She was as amazed as I was that she could do it so well, and so easily. We were both delighted: it was a lovely surprise.

I’d forgotten that about the natural learning process. There often has to be a period of leaving it alone for quiet absorption and/or deep processing to take place. If you systematically push something every day remorselessly, even after the student wants to stop, that’s damaging – or at best, impeding. But if you’re able to be completely responsive and stop at the right time (i.e. when the learner says they’ve had enough) then something seems to happen subconsciously in the break – a consolidation process.

She’s picking up books a lot now, reading the odd page here and there and delighting in the fact that she can.

The same has been happening with numbers. We haven’t done any workbooks for a while, and she’s been doing mental arithmetic. “Do you know, Mum, 7 and 7 is 14, and 14 and 14 is 28?” A visitor made the mistake of asking her what 28 and 28 is then, and she told them she didn’t want to know the answer to that.

There’s always someone who wants to take charge of her learning process for her and start trying to lead it! But I’m sure that slows her down.

Magna

Now that Lyddie is seven, we’ve decided to get out and about a bit more, to facilitate her learning. So we visited Magna – the ’science adventure centre’ last week, pricey though it was. I’d taken the older children there quite a few years ago and remembered that it seemed good for them, so – with Lyddie’s interest in science, thought it might be the best place to start with her.

Housed in an old steel foundry, Magna uses mostly interactive displays to demonstrate principles relating to the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. There’s a separate section for each, reached from a series of dramatically dark, clanging steel gantries. Signature pieces include the fire tornado:

and the outdoor ’scientific’ play area:

So, was it worth the money, time and effort (an hour’s drive on the M62 and down the M1, for us adding up to something like a five-hour long outing)? I’m not sure. We took Tom, to be on hand if Lyddie had any questions of a scientific nature – but she didn’t. He kept trying to explain some things to her, but she plainly wasn’t curious about how or why anything worked there. She just wanted to see everything, play with things like the remote control full-size JCB diggers and giant scrap steel magnets (the water play was good too – especially the miniature canal locks and boat) and then get outside to have fun in the playground. Which, I have to say, for all its ‘Sci-tek’ proclamations, didn’t seem to raise or answer any scientific questions for her either. It was just a lot of fun.

I think this further teaches me that when you present information and all wealth of ‘educational stimulus’ to a child on a plate, the child’s curiosity – and therefore its interest in learning – is switched off. Lyddie learns best when her innate curiosity comes from nowhere and is answered there and then, at home, with whatever is to hand.

Magna was fun, but I think we’re not going to be spending too much time and money on those kinds of outings.

I confess

I have done something that I never thought I would do, in a million years.

I have bought some components of.. a proprietary reading scheme.

Not only that. It’s the very same reading scheme (Oxford Reading Tree) as the older three were made to use in school and quite similar to the one I was put through as a child too. (Probably Peter and Jane, some of which I’ve also used for Lyddie.)

And I always hated reading schemes. Instead of using that ghastly process, I was going to rely on our room full of books, the enthusiasm of some of the adults here for reading them, and the children’s freedom to browse them and learn to read by osmosis. So what happened?

Well, first – when Lyddie was about three – I read John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education (no, we’re not American but it was still an eye-opener) and this particular section made me wonder whether I would be doing Lyddie a disservice by relying on look-say and osmosis to enable her to read.

The thing was though, that I knew for a fact that leaving them to it does work, because we have some family friends who learned that way, and I was lucky enough to witness them doing it. When the girls were about nine or ten, they were asking to be told what the traffic signs said on journeys and you could see them starting to piece it together and work out for themselves how the language is constructed. Within a few months of that they were easily reading epic novels, with enthusiasm.

This was inspiring to me because I’d also known many people who had been structuredly taught to read from an early age who would never read an epic novel, nor want to. (Though I didn’t include myself in that group because I was both taught early and I always loved reading – except for the dreaded reading scheme books!)

Out of my older three children who were taught to read at school with the Oxford scheme, only one was an avid reader a few years ago, although interestingly all three now are.

I really hoped all of my children would love reading, because it was often the only thing that made my childhood bearable. My saviour: to be able to escape into a book. But then I realised, as the older three settled happily into home education, that they didn’t have anything odious to escape from, so perhaps they didn’t have the same incentive to become so immersed in the printed page.

But then reading Gatto made me wonder again as to the best approach of all the available options, for us. Having the ability to decode words into their component sounds is important – or at least very useful, isn’t it? I was musing along these lines during one of our weekly home ed meetings around that time (and I also blogged my thoughts) after which someone brought us their old Letterland machine. If you follow the ‘reading’ thread from the drop-down menus in the sidebar of my other home ed blog, you’ll be able to see how we progressed with that, and the making of some tactile letters and so on, then doing a lot of blending the sounds together into words.

But I wanted to stay involved in the process. One of the things I hated about proprietary schemes is the sense one gets of delegating the teaching/learning process to the scheme. It seemed to steal some of the creativity and individuality of the learning process. We did some Letterland, but we avoided Jolly Phonics (and glancing at it in Borders yesterday made me quite glad that we did.)

So when a well-meaning relative (ex-teacher) turned up with some Peter and Jane books for us, my heart sank. They brought back very unhappy memories of my own school days in which, a read since the age of three, I’d been forced to read every single book from every single level of that and several other schemes, before being ‘allowed’ to choose anything to read ‘for pleasure’. It had felt like torture to me. That’s why in our house at that time, Peter and Jane stayed on the shelf for quite some months, if not a year or more.

“We can do this in a fun way,” I was thinking. “We don’t have to resort to Peter and Jane. Lyddie can choose for herself what she wants to read because she doesn’t have to comply with an asinine school system.”

So, she chose. She chose Peter and Jane.

“Do we have to read these?” I complained. “There are lots of other fun stories on the shelves..”

“Yes, we do,” she said. “The others have too many words on the page. These look a lot easier.”

She was quite right. We’d kept trying to read (I’d kept trying to inspire her to read for herself) some of the other books we had, but it was the number of words on the page that put her off every time. She became overwhelmed and overfaced and lost the ability to focus on each individual word.

“Oh well,” I consoled myself as we plodded doggedly through Peter and Jane. “At least it’s not the dreaded Oxford Reading Tree.”

The older children had those books from school, when my hatred of reading schemes was confirmed. But again it was probably the lack of choice and personal involvement that annoyed me. The regimented, impersonal detached procedure of sending every child home with every book at every level in any old illogical order (I think the Oxford books really need reading in the right order, especially the Magic Key ones, or they don’t make sense.) regardless of the child’s actual ability, much less their preference, really irritated me. Factory schooling. Horrible.

I thought I’d seen the last of Biff and blooming Chip and I was very glad to have done so. Until…

Well, we ran out of Peter and Janes, and there just happened to be some of the basic Oxford books at the supermarket last week. Lyddie wanted them. We bought them. She then raced through them all in about ten minutes flat, and said “I want some more of these.”

And that is how we found ourselves in Borders yesterday, buying one from each level (I’m so glad I’ve got another, younger child to help to justify all this buying of books). Lyddie raced through them all last night, only slowing down a bit when she got to level 6 but even then she could still read independently by decoding and blending the sounds of the words on which she was stuck.

I’ve since ordered some more of the level 6 books from Amazon, and I reckon that we’re only a few more Oxford books off her being able to read about half of the children’s books on our shelves. And there are a lot of those to get through.

So. It wasn’t the schemes that I hated, as much as the lack of choice involved in the way they were delivered and the tick box mentality that was required to get through them in a school system. On their own, for an autonomous child, the schemes are actually really useful. Amazing.

“How do you know when you can read?”

Lyddie (nearly 7) asked me this last week, and I thought it a fascinating question. I answered with words to the effect of: “I think it’s when written words start making sense – when you can tell what they’re saying. Is that what you meant?”

She said: “Sort of… but what about when only some of the words make sense?” and I began to understand her reason for asking.

After some thought, I said: “Well, learning to read is a gradual process – it doesn’t happen all at once. I think that if you know how to break a word down into sounds and then say the sounds together to work out what it probably says, then you can read.”

I know, that’s not how everyone learns to read but it’s how Lyddie has learned, so she was happy with that answer.

She’s recently been to Emley Moor Mast which is quite near to where we live, and she wanted to know how it worked. Tom explained it to her, with many diagrams, over several sessions. She kept asking questions throughout, which I think is always a good sign that someone is engaged with the learning process and she now knows more about the workings of television transmitting stations than I do. She is generally more technically minded than me by aptitude. It’s lucky that Tom’s around to explain things, or I might be thinking about buying in some tuition for her at this point, if she wanted it, or at least having to look further afield than the people here for help in explanations.

“Hey Mum, five and five is ten…”

“So it is.”

“And three and three is six. And six and five is eleven!”

“Yes! How did you know that?”

(I know she ‘knows’ that – we’ve done various bits of number work – it’s an ongoing thing – but I didn’t think she had those sums fresh in her mind right now and anyway, she seems to come to it from a different, fresh angle every time.)

“From the clock!”

It’s funny, Lyddie’s always been obsessed by clocks even in her first year of life. She could tell the time before she learned anything else to do with numbers or reading. I’ve noticed her using it as a reference for numbers before: in writing them she always used to glance up at a clock to check which way round they went.

Anyway, I then made the cardinal mistake of trying to interfere with encourage this natural learning process, as well-meaning parents are so often wont to do:

“So. What’s four and four then?”

She clammed up. “I don’t know.”

“Well, look at the clock…” I pressed on, in spite of alarm bells loudly ringing.

“No thanks. I’ve had enough of that now.”

Then I left it alone, at last. One day I will learn to just say: “Oh! That’s nice, dear,” like the wisest parents always did.

Bedtime reading and the history of inventions

The baby and I are currently having sections of this book read to us by Lyddie every evening:

It’s not something we could plan for, as Mr Badman seems to think we should be able to.

If I tried to insist that she did such a thing, Lyddie would be sure to resist. She’d close the book and we’d never hear any more of it.

But I currently don’t have to insist, so she’s reading – struggling with some words, but making definite progress every evening. She’s even talking about writing out some of the stories because she wants to improve her handwriting skill.

How could I have written this into a plan three, or six, or twelve months ago?

Ditto, her recent obsession with the solar system, or again with the months of the year and the seasons, which led to my scrawling of this chart as I supplied the required lengthy explanation and answered her questions:

In school – or Mr Badman’s vision of home education hell, [opens pdf] she’d have probably been made to sit and colour it in, or learn it by rote to be ready to churn it back out at the next inspection, to order. As it was, she was free to look at it, ask a few questions, understand and move onto the next thing.

She’s been re-watching the Narnia films as well, and the beginning of the first one made her wonder about World War II again, about which she’s been interested for a long time. What were Anderson shelters? How did they work? What happened to them at the end of the war? And we got onto talking about evacuations as well.

We might make it to Eden Camp this year, in support of this recurring interest of hers, although we’ve also recently got into looking at castle times, thanks mostly to this book:

(which allows for endless peering at the tiny people, each doing something interesting in every different room) so a visit to here is still very much on the cards.

The juxtaposition of those two time periods in Lyddie’s mind at the same time gave rise to some extra questions, like:

“How long ago did they build the castles/ have WWII?”

(Explaining the concept of ‘hundreds of years ago’ to a six year-old isn’t easy, is it?)

And:

“Why didn’t they have guns and bombs in castle times? Why did it take them so long to invent such things?”

So we got out another book:

- which opens out like this:

- the relevant parts, I suppose, being this:

and this:

At least it gave some perspective, and context. Lyddie poured over it for hours and then her brothers joined in and kept pointing out various aspects of it to her.

A massive amount of learning took place in that one relatively short session with the timeline, but I could never have planned for it beforehand in a million years. Lyddie’s older sister, for example, wasn’t interested in such things at all and hardly ever looked at those kinds of books.

How are we supposed to know in advance where our children’s curiosity will lead them?

Driving again

Both Zara and Tom’s driving is going very well. Zara’s had more practice though, so she’s a little more accomplished than Tom. She can do three point turns now, and reversing around corners, uphill starts and backwards uphill starts – on steep hills! And she can drive forwards in the normal way, you know – which is also useful We’re running out of challenging off-road places for her to drive now, but she’ll be 17 in just over a week and is planning to have her first official driving lesson on that day. So we spent a good half hour yesterday looking at the various driving schools’ websites, trying to work out which one she should book with.

I learned with BSM and they were very good for me (even though that was 21 years ago) but now they charge £25 an hour! We looked at the all-female school, KanKan, which offers 10 lessons for £99 but insists that these are spread out over the whole course:

NOTE: the 10 lesson offer is split 5 at the beginning, 2 for your test day and 3 floating lessons during the course of your learning with your instructor.

and seems quite cagey about the price of the ones in the middle.

So then we got onto Bill Plant, who offers the first lesson free and another four lessons for £56, but who is also not telling us the price of the other lessons.

There doesn’t seem to be any available information online about any of their pass rates, or the answers to questions like:

• What’s the average number of lessons people have before they pass with you?
• How much actual driving do you offer, because we don’t want to be paying for very expensive roadside theory lessons?

and so on.

There is a Compare Driving Schools website, but it wants to harvest all of your details before it gives you any information.

I dunno. It’s quite tempting to get a quote from my insurance company and try to do the onroad teaching myself as well, if it’s cheaper. We should make a lot of phone calls, I suppose. I wish people were more up front with their online information!

As for Tom, his driving is coming on but I don’t think he’s sent off for his provisional licence yet: he’s evidently not quite as determined to be independently mobile as his sister is. But I’m pleased that they’re both learning so well and that they seem to have such good control of the car when they’re doing it.

Reading again

Lyddie wants to play some of her favourite computer games – online. This means she needs to be able to interact with the other players, which means she needs to be able to read everything they’re saying to her.

“So help me learn then,” she said.

“I will then,” I replied.

We started pulling books off the shelves to find her exact reading level. Guess what fitted..? Only Peter and Jane!

So we spent two days patting the blooming dog, ad nauseum, etc. I was on the point of going and spending yet more money on yet more books (though we really do have enough) when it suddenly occured to me that I’ve got a printer, and a brain, so we ended up with a stack of these:

– which she loves, and which are definitely helping. I’ve been making a few more every day and will carry on until we find more books she can read for herself. Or until she wants me to stop.