Democracy – homeschoolery

the candidates meeting

I am delighted my child chose to come to our local “meet the candidates” meeting, in fact she didn’t want to miss it! It is our local body elections and Helena knows that her grandfather and I care… we talk about it, tell each other snippets we have read at the dinner table. The School…

drive

I love my job. I think it is because there is so much to watch and think about. I get so much energy from the children. It’s like their excitement is contagious. It feels like you are somehow involved in the most exciting project ever and there is no boss to take you back to…

I believe this..

We can not teach someone something unless there are one or more of the following conditions: The thing is actually relevant to a learner’s genuine life. The learner genuinely finds the subject/thing actually interesting (this one is hard as you don’t always know what you will find interesting) and this can also be because the…

and they will come

We have just been at our version of school – it’s school like in the way that you HAVE to be there early in the morning until 3pm and that there are lots of other children there… but however it is a holiday programme so other than an obligation to come when the whistle is…

Is lego just lego?

The kids are playing lego, or is it playing with lego? So far they have discussed: the increase of motivation you get when you are “paid”.. (they are paying each other in desirable pieces to find other pieces), equality, fairness, vegetarianism, the qualities of various pieces (using words to describe a piece in a mutually…

Going to a dyslexia course..

I thought this would be brilliant as I know people, big and small, who are dyslexic. I want to know more, to understand. I want to know; how we know, how to work out if someone thinks differently, what skills they have that I can help foster because I can only see thinking differently as…

War

At the holiday programme the kids like to play war “lots of war… raaaaa” and we let them. It looks like chaos, lots of kids running around with long bamboo sticks and a few with bows and arrows all pointed at people with the accompanying loud roars. Hardly anyone gets hurt, and none badly. We…

Non democratic meetings

Helena and I have a weekly meeting, mostly on Monday mornings. They are not much fun. They are mostly for me. I am honest with her that as a homeschooling family we have to document her learning, the government requires us to teach “as well as and as often” as a regular school. We can…