testing

There is always something in the press about testing and how the kids are failing. Testing is a thing I associate with science. The importance in science is a fair test and this requires This makes sense right. If, for instance, you grew a plant in two different places but were actually testing the the…

learning from your kids

I am starting, at 52, to enjoy Shakespeare after nearly 40 years of total aversion. Why? Because my child loves the language and the drama of it all. Weirdo. She is at the moment at the end of the table reciting from a book of Shakespeare’s poems and excerpts from plays… getting more and more…

the Cello

Or as I initially wrote the Chello. It was Helena’s idea that she wanted to learn the cello, I was dubious as I wasn’t sure she knew what one was but then she knew how to spell cello before I did. We have been listening to classical music for a while – my music Education…

Argh

I don’t know what to do. After a week of Helena madly working on paper dolls… well they started off paper dolls with photocopied cut out clothes (she’s not interested in designing her own) but blue tacking the clothes on was unsatisfactory so then it was tiny tabs, then tiny magnets followed by gluing the…

the farm

Yesterday Helena told me that although one of the projects (making an island) a friend of hers did at school appealed to her there were aspects she was glad she didn’t have to do with a similar project she is working on…. a project started months and months ago! One was that she got to…

it’s not fair

We have been back home from work in Wellington for 2 days. So far every morning Helena bounces out of bed and goes off to do one of her weird and wonderful tasks… In fact the moment we walked in the door off the bus she was making flour and water glue to start doing…

first day back in homeschool land

We’ve been away on and off for nearly 2 months and just had over four weeks in the big smoke. Helena has been itching to get back home, mostly to see her “babies” (the rats), and has been doing lots of complaining that I drag her here, there and everywhere and she never, ever gets…

Little bits of work

This project has been going on for months and months.. ever since the Dr told H to stop using soap and washing her wrists due to eczema. Of course H sees all the instructions to wash so she was given a special cream to use and has been so very good about it (probably because…

homework

I don’t like homework as I have seen how it is detrimental to parent child relationships, all that nagging, all that implying that whatever project the kid had in their head is less important than what someone external to the family believes is important… I did get kids to take home stuff they didn’t finish…

schema

You hear about people who had obsessions when they were kids, like dinosaurs or trains and how this fueled their desire to go on and be a paleontologist or something like that.. or of people who had a trajectory schema (a repeated interest/compulsion) that lead on to a love of ball sports or some such……