A couple of weeks ago Martin’s brother came to stay for a few days, so we went touristy for a few days. First trip out was to Calbourne Water Mill which regular readers will remember I blogged about here. Luckily Jonathan was at a friends house so we had enough car space in our normal [Continue]

A few friends came over a little while ago and we had an ice cream dream party.  Everyone brought tubs of ice cream with them (just nice yummy ice cream – not Tesco value – more like Minghella and Ben and Jerry’s) and we provided yummy toppings.  Here we are happy from ice cream [Continue]

Yesterday Jonathan and I had a quiet morning.  We listened to a story on Big Toe Books and Jonathan started a new jigsaw. We also dealt with the fungi we had found the day before on one of Sue’s wonderful fungi walks. Jonathan sliced off the stalks and put them on coloured paper to make [Continue]

During half term 13 children, 1 adult (poor Nickie) walked over 75 miles round the Isle of Wight (oh yeah, there were also some cop outs who didn’t manage the whole thing!) We started off with a night hike in the rain! we walked along the narrow, muddy slippery cliff path along Sheppard’s chine. Slipping, [Continue]

We don’t artificially divide learning into set “subjects”, preferring to take a more holistic view. Most of what our family learns is not through planned learning, but through incidental learning. On some days a planned activity will yield little actual learning, whereas a chance tangential conversation will spark new thought processes... [Continue]

So I took Rebekah back up to London yesterday.  On the way there I had a text back from my friend Anita to say she could meet us for lunch. Once we arrived we walked from Waterloo along the Southbank to Southwark Cathedral. We spent some time remembering our last time walking along there in [Continue]

So aside from attending the bubble picnic protest and lobbying the MP we also managed to fit in some other stuff too. Firstly we managed about 10 mins in the visitors gallery of the House of Commons which was yet another chance for the children to see politics in action.  And boy was it action [Continue]

Just  a few more piccies “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire” Yeats Some of the children around this banner had fire coloured pom-poms which I thought was great Our signs were a little less sohisticated! We still had to leave them outside when we went in to [Continue]

I think it’s really important that we show the children the different ways they can be involved in the political processes in this country.  So far the children have been writing articles for journals and visiting the MP and been involved in a really positive picnic showing home education as fun as well as raising [Continue]

…..we did kitchen table maths.  We had a group round to do fractions and decimals activities, games and investigations. I really strongly believe in using manipulatives.  I think we tend to expect abstract thinking in maths far far too early and continued use of concrete objects keeps things real, as they say.  Anyway I still [Continue]