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Mum’s Gone To Iceland (part 1)

January 28, 2020 by Susan

This seems to have turned into an occasional blog for holiday posts so here is another one of those posts.

If you just want to see my holiday snaps scroll to the bottom.

I have gone back to uni, part-time and blended, to study behaviour change.  I am loving my course and enjoying being at Derby albeit for only 3 days once a term.  I am finding my fellow students and tutors to be interesting, engaging people and I am learning a lot. 

When I saw the opportunity to apply for an International Travel Award to go to Iceland with the university I initially felt like this sort of opportunity was not aimed at people-like-me.  However, in the last year I have applied for both a summer school and a summer internship, both not aimed at people-like-me, so thought why not.  The purpose of the award is to enhance my global mindset, increase cultural awareness and grow confidence.  I only saw the opportunity at the last minute, put in an application and forgot about it. I was astounded when I was accepted not to mention excited but also approaching the idea with some trepidation.  I would probably be the oldest person on the trip (likely even older than the leaders), I have only flown 3 times and hate it, and I am not confident walking in slippery places (Martin usually helps me and even Jonathan keeps an eye out for me on steep downhill walks).  However, with my limited travel experience and a determination to embrace opportunities I took the opportunity on.

A key part of the trip was considering what we had learned and what challenges we had overcome. So what did I learn/overcome:

  1. I found that I didn’t really hate flying nearly as much as I thought I did and didn’t even feel too nervous when the pilot said “we’ll try to land in the high winds” in a similar manner to the ferry captains.
  2. I was the needy person in the group when we did glacier walking. I was determined to do it but before we had even got to the bottom of the glacier I was struggling with the slippery down hills. Luckily our guide gave me his walking pole and I was able to complete the glacier walk with just a little support. My learning was definitely that being needy can be harder than being the supportive person and accepting that I can play different roles in different circumstances is important. I found this particularly hard in this situation as these people barely knew me so their main image of me would be as someone who needs support and is apprehensive. Also that goals can be achieved, even if they are hard, with the right support and it is OK to ask for help.
  3. From my Positive Psychology module last year I had been learning about the principles of Broaden and Build (fredrickson – Positivity) and this really did broaden my experience and has buildt my confidence in exploring options outside of my comfort zone.
  4. I learned that Iceland is an amazing place and I definitely want to go back again in summer
  5. There is a huge outdoor swimming culture in Iceland that I could fully embrace

Now the pictures:

Northern lights through a camera, in reality it looked grey rather than green so good to see but not as exciting as the photos make it look. (not my pic – taken from our group whatsapp page – my phone doesn’t appear to have a night mode – think this might have been one of the course leaders pic (Adrian) but not sure)
Glacier walking was definitely the most challenging part of the trip for me physically. It was absolutely stunning but such hard work.
The crampons gave me blisters but it was well worth it.
I got to be at the front of the group as I had taken the leaders snow depth finding pole and he needed it every now anf then to stop us plummeting to certain death down a crevasse
The Images really don’t do it justice – our group was the lead group so we really felt like there was noone else around.
Despite my go slow, our group ended up a good 20 minutes ahead of everyone else , so we got a side excursion into a cave, probably my favourite bit of the glacier walk.

Filed Under: Family

Shrove Tuesday 2018

February 19, 2018 by Susan

Today is a good day for pancakes (well last Tuesday was anyway) I’m not sleeping brilliantly at the moment so an early start meant that I had some scotch pancakes in peace and quiet with the sunrise and there were a few ready for Jonathan to quickly scoff on the move as he left for his paper round. Second round of pancakes was with Ebb and Sally and involved revision of circle theorems, it is surprisingly hard to control the dutch pancake syrup but here are a few attempts! Tangents from a point are equal and a tangent is perpendicular to a radius: Angles subtended by the same arc are equal:  The angle in a semicircle is 90 degrees: Angles in alternate segments are equal: My friend Sally says that from this activity you can tell I am a home educator of 20 years stranding and a maths tutor! We were aiming for pancake soup at lunch time but were too stuffed.  We waited until my mum had come over to stay and had more pancakes for dinner – dutch style with a topping of leek, bacon, mushroom and sweet potato in  a creamy sauce.

Filed Under: Family

A level Results Day

August 18, 2016 by Susan

So the headline news is Ruth got A*s in psychology and sociology and A grades in graphic design and her EPQ. We were already happy going into the college to get the results as her UCAS track had been updated and she had been accepted at Bath very much her first choice! This made getting the results envelope a much less stressful thing. The history is not what you may expect. Ruth would not have been my predicted child to get the academic qualifications. She didn’t read until she was nearly 9 , didn’t write a paragraph until she was 13 and doing her environmental management IGCSE. We didn’t hot house her we had a pretty autonomous approach to home-educating and Ruth definitely was more artistic and physical rather than academic, although she always had a great instinctive feel for maths ( and did her maths GCSE when she was 12 having done no formal maths before starting the GCSE study (blog post about maths here)). She studied 4 IGCSEs/1GCSE at home before fighting to get a place at the local 6th form college – they weren’t happy to accept the English IGCSE – bet they are pleased they took her now! At this stage she was ready to do more formal study and really apply herself, she worked amazingly hard whilst still keeping her job at Robin Hill. We are so pleased that she got into her choice of university and very proud of her – regardless of her results we were so proud of how she decided what she wanted to do and really applied herself to it – but we are delighted that she got grades that reflected her hard work and dedication. Well done Ruth  

Filed Under: Family, Home Education Tagged With: A levels, bath, celebrations, grades, Home Education

A Long Gap

May 17, 2016 by Susan

We have had a very very long gap between blog posts, and like writing to friends, the longer you leave it the more it seems like you need to write something really long and impressive not just a few lines, the task becomes overwhelming so you don’t do it at all. So I feel like there have been a few reasons for my blogging to fall by the wayside: 1. general busyness. 2.Jonathan is usually on the main household computer and it’s the only place IO can easily deal with uploading photos. 3. now I only have one 14 year old at home we don’t do things which are so interesting on a day to day basis certainly they are things which don’t make for such nice pics. This leads on to the next point 4. my blog was mostly about our home educating life, despite still having Jonathan at home we seem to have a very different life now to even 3 years ago when I still, just about, had 3 children at home being home educating. It seemed then like we were a “home educating family” it made up a big part of our identity, now it seems like we are a much smaller family who happens to still be home educating one mid teen boy. We don’t go to many HE events anymore and Jonathan is pretty independent. For us things seem very very different now. I am unsure whether to carry on with the blog or give it up but I feel we have had a number of milestones in the last 6 months that I haven’t blogged about and would like to so I am going to catch up with them and then make a decision.  

Filed Under: Family

Our Home Ed Maths Journey

January 23, 2016 by Susan

Because I tutor maths and have got mine through a few GCSE exams I sometimes get asked about exams and maths so I thought I would layout what our maths journey looked like. Two out of my three children did no formal maths before starting their GCSE studies aged between 11 and 13. In the interests of complete honesty I will declare that Ruth did do some worksheets that I found lurking about that involved packets of M&Ms and I taught Jonathan to add up in columns aged about 10; we were going round Lidl and I had a money off voucher to use but not much extra money so needed to add up. Rebekah was strange and liked doing worksheets or, better still, activities on the computer where her work would get a score and come with a printable certificate, so she sometimes did some formal maths. Our general philosophy about education is that we (the adults and kids in the family) tend to learn things either at “point of need” or “point of interest”. Jonathan learned about adding in columns when I needed him to keep a fairly accurate idea of how much money we were spending from a complex list of numbers, until this point he had had no need to do this. It took him about 1 minute to get the concept. So what maths had they done to that point? They had done counting when they were small; we counted steps the same way as we would name colours of cars. Maths came up as we cooked: counting, approximating, doubling, halving, imperial measures, metric measures, times etc. etc. without making it a forced or contrived activity; as we cooked together these thing just came up as we talked and baked. Going to the shops, halving and quartering toast, playing with Lego – and I really mean just playing with it, not turning it into a maths activity, just playing with it automatically built the skills of estimating and realising that that you need four of this size to make one of that size. I remember my girls spending car journeys from Fife to Edinburgh to go to church chanting counting in twos and fives and tens – I never got them to do this- I have no idea why they were doing this but they did. The other thing we did was play games, not made up “maths” games but real games. Obviously we played things like snakes and ladders,ludo and some strange game about snails by Orchard Games when they were little. Then endless games of Yahtzee as they got a bit older along with some Rummikub (and on very very few occasions because actually we all hate it – Monopoly). Card games at all levels from basic versions of Pontoon and Crib to the more complex games of Canasta we now enjoy. We discovered real games like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride etc. possibly not using so much arithmetic but the amount of probability that is informally calculated when we play Settlers is enormous. For us game playing and cooking are a very real part of our lives so inevitably our learning has come during theses activities, not in a contrived way but in a natural way, yahtzee started with counting the numbers on the dice but quickly developed into doubling and Ruth, who liked to think about such things, would ask probing questions about the scores and what the best way of arranging answers etc. would be – the others never did. Some current game playing pics to break up the waffling about maths:

Scatergories and cocktails at Christmas
Scatergories and cocktails at Christmas
Exploding Kittens - the most serious game in the world
Exploding Kittens – the most serious game in the world
Seven Wonders - complicated but good.
Seven Wonders – complicated but good.
Some rather serious scrabble playing.
Some rather serious scrabble playing.
I like maths so and again inevitably it gets talked about, when the girls added something up to work out costs or something we would discuss which methods they had used for it and they would be different, Ruth’s were always more creative – we called this Sum Talk at uni and it was one of my favourite things. So how was our transition from informal, need to know, maths to formal GCSE? In all honesty, mixed. Rebekah wanted to do it and I couldn’t face the prospect of doing it with her and then a year or so later starting with Ruth so we did it together. Firstly I am not good at maintaining a self imposed structure so I asked a couple of friends to join us following the syllabus so I would have some external pressure to keep me focused – lets face it there is always going to be something more interesting to do than a GCSE syllabus maths session, there is no way I would have been able to keep to a timescale to help them through the GCSE. I have recently done the Gretchen Rubin Habits Quiz – it turns out I am an Obliger and respond well to having some external pressure so obviously this was the right approach for me to take. So we structured ourselves to do a class a week for about 18 months. These were supposed to be two hour classes, but sometimes they went on for as long as 5 hours – with runs round the garden and biscuits to keep everyone going. I had two different types of people in my group two “I have an instinctive feel for maths but no structure” types and two “I like to learn the method and stick with it” types, which was interesting. We had to back-fill a lot as we didn’t have 9 years of previous experience to draw on. This was usually done pretty quickly but all added to the time required to manage to get through the syllabus. It was definitely doable for us to go from no formal maths to GCSE but it did take a fair amount of back-filling of the formal aspects of things and my kids all seemed to have a very good informal grasp of numbers and how they worked before we started and some weeks we spent hours and hours going over things. This was my girls’ first proper experience of sticking with a syllabus and it wasn’t always easy for any of us – we had to make sure the work was done in a timescale and we stuck to it – none of us really liked doing this but it got easier over time and we’ve even managed some other exams now with only the external pressure of the exam date to keep us going. Don’t let me leave you feeling that this was easy for us, despite everyone wanting to do all the exams we have done there have definitely been tears and the odd tantrum during the process. We also had the massive benefit of being able to do the modular exams, which sadly are no more, which really helped with spreading out the stress and were great for my group who had never experienced formal testing so the tiny exams were not very scary. I hate doing GCSE exams; to me it takes away from the real process of education but they have been done by the kids as a means to an end, a hoop jumping activity. I think Ruth is finding A-level study to have more point to it and to be far more interesting but the idea of exams to test a huge amount of remembering still seems a strange thing to do in our current society. Do I think it would have been easier for my children to do the GCSE maths if they had had more formal understanding of maths before we started? The short answer is yes, however I wouldn’t have wanted to have encroached onto our earlier time together with formal “work”. I would also say that despite not having done formal maths their informal maths skills were great; they didn’t know multiplication tables but they knew how to work them out, they knew that 1/8 was half of 1/4 and so 2/8 was equivalent of 1/4 so moving on to formal fractions was fairly easy as they knew about them informally. Without having those informal skills working through the syllabus would have taken much much longer. I run GCSE maths groups despite the fact that I think that people can do it themselves at home with a book and some of the great web resources that are out there. A group can be helpful for a number of reasons: it can help you stay on track, it can help to have someone who isn’t mum or dad imposing the work (when she was little Rebekah always responded better to someone else other than me asking her to do something), as a home educating parent it is sometimes just nice for someone else to be doing the work of finding the resources and teaching the subject (I’ve certainly been grateful to people who have done Biology and English groups so it was something I didn’t have to think about as much). You may wonder then why I teach a pre-GCSE maths group. From my perspective it is largely about time; in a 2 hour GCSE class we don’t have time to back-fill so if a group knows some of the skills beforehand we can spend more of the time on the syllabus. From the perspective of the students or the parents it can be about confidence, or about building up to working in a more formal group or concerns about their own maths skills. I have absolutely loved teaching the pre-GCSE group for the last year, I don’t have the pressure of sticking rigidly to a syllabus so can teach the things I/they think are important and have time to do it in ways that can really try to build understanding and we have time to play games and investigate things. In my GCSE group I don’t have much time so we can’t spend lessons playing battleships to teach co-ordinates or board games for algebra substitution but in my pre-GCSE group they can do this. This week we had some very competitive algebra game playing!     IMG_20160121_130955
Photo bomb
Photo bomb
       

Filed Under: Family, Home Education

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