My Life in books!

At the moment I'm reading My Natural Life by Simon Barnes. It's the story of how the love of nature helped to shape the author's life and it came to me that there are many things that shape the direction of our path as we go through life. For me books have always been a passion.They accumulate dust in a pile under the bed of those I've yet to read and they have been a major part of our home education journey.In fact I'm only reading this book now because of Ross Mountney's blog the other day about How to be Wild by the same author.

As I look around our house I see that Google has a pile of books:

Soldier

The Military History Book

Java for Dummies

History of the Second World War

and Into the Unknown

My pile on the other hand contains

Short walks in the Southern Lake District

Map of the Cumbria Coastal way

Wainwright The Biography

A Child in the Forest

A walk in the Woods

The English Lakes- Memories of times past

Surviving the Iron age

What do your books say about you?

All Booked up!

I'm reading The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie society. I'd recommend it. Just  the title intriuged me and ,when I read the reviews I couldn't resist having a peek. The story covers the occupation of Guernsey by the germans during the second world war and follows the lives of some very different characters who 'were accidently  brought together  to share their love of reading in the local Literacy society.

That got me thinking about the role of books in our own home education journey. As a child I devoured books but as I progressed further through the school system the books I read became more and more dictated by the subjects I was studying so that by the time I was studying for my Law degree the only books I read were Law books .Reading for fun had just disappeared.

It was only years later, when I started down the road of home education that I began to read again.Initially to learn what I needed to 'teach' (I know better now ) and then for fun.

The other day I came across this article in Brain Pickings which featured letters to children about the joy of reading. No one can make a child 'enjoy reading' but if you allow children to read what interests them then the majority of children will want more. School puts children off books. I know that for me I never ever want to see or read Waiting for Godot ever again, whilst for my son it's John Steinbeck's Mice and Men.

One website which offers reviews of great childrens' books is Love Reading 4 Kids. It's there that I uncovered a fabulous list of children's books about the First World War. I devour The Book People catalogue when it drops through the letterbox and it's a great excuse to grab a cup of coffee and choose books with my son. He has just chosen a Minecraft book on Redstone and an Usborne book about world war 1.

Books provide an education by stealth. Take The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie society as an example  I didn't intend to learn about the german occupation of Guernsey.It just happened. It reminded me to of a Michael Morpurgo book called Why the Whales came ,a children's story  of the Scilly isles during world war 1 and The Mozart Question when musicians were forced to play in concentration camps as Jews went to their deaths.

Books are sparks which ignite an interest in a subject we then follow through. If you are stuck for ideas it might just be worth opening one to see what ideas pop out!

Book deals on Wheels!

I wonder if any one else reads several books on the go? I have my 'car' book, my 'bath' book and my 'bed' book.

This morning whilst waiting for my daughter to finish her shift at the kennels I found myself engrossed in The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth - in particular the poem Michael by William Wordsworth. I'm fascinated by Lake District authors and have dipped in an out of Beatrix Potter, John Ruskin, Arthur Ransome and Wordsworth from time to time - there have been smatterings of information in our studies on Victorian and local history and I have even followed Wordsworth up to Loch Achtray near Callendar in Scotland and marvelled at the distance travelled by horse and cart in rough and mountainous terrain.

My car book travels with me everywhere. It is on hand when I wait for my daughter to finish her dance class, when I pick up my eldest to finish work, in fact anywhere where I find myself waiting around for someone (which happens a lot)

Although never a fan of kindle or ipads for reading. I'm coming around to the idea after straining my eyes under the dim lamplight in the car park during the winter months. I plan to download Shakespeare on toast' and Mary Poppins

My bath book is about travels in New Zealand A Land of two halves. It is a country I've always longed to visit although so far I haven't been impressed by the descriptions of the Eastern coast of South Island. Having circled the coast we have just reached the North Western coast and things seem to be improving.

Meanwhile my 'bed book' is a fictional story How to fall in Love         by Celia Aherne, daughter of the former Irish Politician Bertie Aherne. It lasted two evenings. I'm not a great fiction reader but I am a definate fan of Celia Aherne.

I learn so much from my 'travelling books' and they fill those inconvenient gaps when you only have ten minutes or so before your next task. It's a great way to set an example to the children too, so if you don't already have some books 'on the go" Why not give it a try?

Ex Libris a Home schooling mother!

I have been admiring my new library.Well it's a book case really but a VERY LARGE one! I found it at our local charity shop and it was perfect for the stashes of books we have got piled under the bed, the sofa, in the entrnce porch even the window sill. As I started filling it I was surprised at how much space seemed to be left but as I have added to it from the little hidden piles in every room the spaces have gone and I am going to have to be strict with myself. When the book case is full the rule is 'one in, one out' (That's the theory anyway!)

As I was going through my hidden stash I uncovered a book about Abraham Lincoln. I learned that the man was 6ft 4" at a time when the average person was only 5 ft 6".It put things in perspective.We  often forget how man has evolved. It reminded me of another book on my 'to do ' list " The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England". I started reading it a while back .The descriptive prose had me breathing in the pungent Medieval air in the towns and eating the food. One of my main recollections of the book however was how much smaller people were in Medieval days and because they died much younger then. village leaders were in their  20's and 39's rather than the 40+ we have come to expect today.

One of the things about living in the country is that we are accustomed to frequent power cuts as the overhead powerlines are buffeted by the wind and rain off the sea. Yesterday the power was turned off for maintenance and we found ourselves without power for most of the day. Unable to access the computer my son snuggled up in a sleeping bag next to the bookcase and took down an encyclopedia of British History.

I thought that the books in our library reveal a lot about us. There are history and gardening books,books about the Lake district and barely looked at craft books (I love to look at the pictures but lack the confidence to make very much). Now that they are on display I plan to overthaul our books (something which I routinely do at the start of each homeschooling books) to make way for books on our new hobbies and interests. My son has suggested that one of our first jobs should be to categorise them like in a 'real' library. That will be a lesson for another day!
 HAPPY READING!

Why bother teaching anything when they can teach themselves?

Cooking counts as maths too!

This morning my son was explaining how you could ascertain the direction with a watch and the sun.He had been reading a library book on survival skills on the way to the supermarket. I tried to show him how to do it last year in the garden but he switched off and refused to listen because it was maths! The legacy of school is that the word 'maths' builds up an insurmountable problem in my son's mind and when at school he would hide under the desk or pull the plugs from the computers out of their sockets!
My son then went on to explain that the compass is split up into angles the main pointers being 90 degrees,180 degrees,270 degrees and 360 degrees with the angles also being marked every 45 degrees. He has talked about angles before when teaching himself to skateboard so I've experienced  his way of learning maths and it never fails to surprise me that in many ways formal maths lessons are redundant. I jumped at the unexpected opportunity to explain that the angles inside a triangle added up to 180 and that the angles inside a square added up to to 360 degrees. All this he took it between a burger and a pepsi , as he tucked into his wicked zinger meal at KFC!
Maths is a subjects which at the very least would have caused his face to glaze over or at worst would have caused a meltdown if I'd broached it but because the subject interested him he had fathomed the details for himself.
Once  in the car I glanced over to find him reading about map reading skills and contour lines and once again I found that my growing faith in autonomous learning was being reinforced. The book he is reading is written for the Royal Marines and designed for adults but the content appeals to him so he's reading it!
Every day conversations are an opportunity to learn too. Only this morning my son turned to me as he was watching t.v. One of the characters in an American tv show referred to a 'test monkey'. "Oh he means a guinea pig, mum", said my son showing me he'd taken in the new idiom he had learned yesterday. Words are fascinating and we are always discussing their meaning.Seeing a lad on a mono cycle one day  resulted in a discussion  of what 'mono' meant and a competition to see how many words we could find beginning with mono. We did the same with the word 'sub' when my son asked the meaning of  subversive.
If you are teaching an oppositional child you have to 'find' the right way.It may not be conventional but your child has the benefit of one to one and you have the luxury of as much time as you need and the flexibilty to change tack if your method isn't working! Don't give up!

The Learning Curve

When we embarked on home education with my youngest son it quickly became apparent that everyone has their optimum time for learning. For me it has always been early in the morning but for my son it's late into the evening. At first I worried that he didn't surface until ten in the morning, didn't eat breakfast (didn't the experts say it was essential to achieve learning potential)and often sat in his pyjamas wrapped up in a duvet whilst playing or watching tv. It went against everything I'd been taught about school. Gradually I learned we weren't at school. It didn't matter if you weren't sitting at your desk by 9.00am, what mattered was the quality of learning and that information was absorbed and understood.This seems to be born out by new scientific evidence about teenagers who generally are more receptive to learning later in the morning because their body clocks are changing http://makingminds.net/why-every-country-needs-later-secondary-school-start-times/ Not only do we not need to be learning from 9.00am until 3.30pm Monday to Friday we can learn whatever day of the week it is. Take today for example, firstly it's a Saturday, not a normal school day. I was up early as my daughter and I are involved in a community choir and orchestra. One of the weaknesses of my daughter's school is that it doesn't have a strong music department so we found our own. Whilst my daughter practised with her orchestra for a concert I popped into town and bought three books from the charity shop. Total cost 60p! The book for my son was a Lisa Simpson book. Not exactly a school text book but he spent half an hour in the car reading. I know now that all reading is valuable, you just have to tap into your children's interests and if that happens to be the Simpson's it really doesn't matter all reading is beneficial. In fact if you study the Simpsons carefully you will soon discover there is more educational value in those programmes than you think. We have talked about the classical music on some of the programmes, learned it takes 9 months to animate an episode and that's just for starters! After orchestra and choir my daughter and her friend went for their first ever. independent shopping session without an adult. Such an apparently small incident helped give them confidence, taught them to budget and look for bargains and gave them a much needed freedom which in more populated area of Britain they wouldn't get for a few years yet. Every new experience teaches something. At first glance it may seem immaterial but like a jigsaw the small pieces build up to form the bigger picture.