Musings Part 2

Max fell asleep :~D so i’m carrying on musing since this was the bit i really wanted to muse about anyway.

One thing i am aware of is that its easy to be dismissive of what other people need to ponder if you have supreme confidence in yourself and that what you are doing is right and that as i am not like that, i have to remember its okay to be as i am and not feel threatened by that, or pushed into pretending i am like it. It might be fantastic to have a complete belief that everything is fine and children will learn etc if you are a particular sort of person but for me, what gives me my confidence is to have an occasional peek back at what the people who look out for the majority are doing and be able to say “yes, that IS all happening and so is more besides” or indeed even to say “right, thats not happening yet but i can see that xy and z are occuring and so its probably all just changing shape a bit from some projected average.” TBH, i wouldn’t be HEing if i didn’t have access to things like the NC, and endless worksheety type websites, Letts guides or ‘alleged standards’ as Chris has just succinctly put it. Not because i use them a lot but because a) they gave me the confidence initially to look and say “yep i can do that and if i have trouble i can fall back on this” and b) because i can look at them and evaluate them with an open mind in terms of what you read from teachers everyday on BBC news and say, “yes thank you very much, we can do all that but there is more to life.”

Which brings me back to my point… or possibly my experiment! Which is that i need a change and i also now need something to give myself a bit of a boost, or a bit of confidence for the next 6 months which i think are going to be hard, or a challenge to say the least and they are ones i want to be good challenges. I’ve got a lot of decisions to make and i am finding them difficult.

I need to decide if Moo is going back to nursery and that is a very,very hard choice. A year or so ago Moo was almost impossible – life was so hard for her and so hard for all of us around her – but in this year of better understanding, a bit of specialist help from nursery, a bit of a break and a good bit of growing up from her, she is now just a joy to be around again. I could go on with a second year of it and there would probably be some benefits but maybe its just time to get on with HEing her. I can hardly believe that 18 months ago i was tearing my hair out – she was completely out of control, terrified of the world, didn’t speak, didn’t look anyone in the eye, didn’t talk to anyone but me and occasionally Max, pulled her hair out in clumps if anything changed at all and was completely driven by routines and obsessions that ruled her whole life. And now, apart from the odd slip, she is just fine – a bit quirky at times, but great. I’m so proud of her. The odd thing is quite a lot of that changed before she got into nursery, she was certainly on the up even then. So i am proud of us too.

And then there is Ammi who could go to playgroup but tbh, i am not sure i can be bothered!!! She is SO happy with Fran and Moo and she’ll have babes too and we are so busy and life is so full of people that it hardly seems worthwhile. She and i are great mates now (Max commented today how things seem to have really come right between she and i lately… hmmmm… should that be her and me?) With the first two it was a chance for a break, now i don’t really know if that actually applies!!!!

Oh dear… talk about a brain dump…. right the point IS that i have been meandering about lots of places that go about HE in a less autonomous sort of a way… and i am intrigued all over again. I had already decided to get out my Montessori materials over the summer and use them with the older two, and now i am wondering about using a CM planner for a while, just to see what it might bring us. By which i DON’T mean a sudden foray into 15 minute lessons all in the morning and that kind of stuff but i quite like the notion of this from Ambleside Online…

Week 1
The Bible
An Island Story ch 1 The Stories of Albion and Brutus
Baldwin’s 50 Famous Tales The Sword of Damocles (Greek)
Parables From Nature: A Lesson of Faith
Aesop: The Wolf and the Kid
Tortoise and the Ducks
Just So Stories: Whale
Child’s Garden of Verses: a poem every day
Paddle to the Sea: ch. 1 and 2

I thought that it might be fun to see how Fran and Moo took it over the summer (given my suspicion that Moo may well want something a little more predictable in her life) and help make the nursery decision based on what she makes of it. It might give me something to cling to when babe arrives too!!!! I can easily sub other stuff into places where i don’t have things and it would be an opportunity maybe to hunt out some books it might not have occurred to me to try. I’d quite like to feel that, within a day mainly revolving around play and just finding things to do, that maybe an hour or so a day was stuff that i could just feel like i had “seen done.” I’ve loved this year of quiet middle of days with Fran, but its coming to an end and i want to find a way of maintaining the “today we did”-ness that its provided.

And then finally, i succumbed to some books from Sonlight – having spent a bit of time mooching i am now fairly sure i will never buy a whole “Core” from them but i do like the history stuff they have and in fact was able to get this lot below, which is mainly all from their “Core 2 and 3” – so fairly advanced even for Fran. I actually plan to use it to learn myself and get a load of things pre-prepared based on the books for the autumn/winter – so i can pull things out to do and read fairly easily.

CASTLE DIARY
ERIC.THE RED, LEIF THE LUCKY
JOAN OF ARC
MICHELANGELO
HILL OF FIRE
POMPEII:.BURIED ALIVE
MORE STORIES FRM GRANDMAS ATTC
MARCO POLO
LEONARDO DA VINCI
AND THEN WHAT, PAUL REVERE?
WINTER AT VALLEY FORGE
INCANS, AZTECS & MAYANS 2002
CAN’T.YOU MAKE THEM BEHAVE, KI
PEDRO’S JOURNAL
AMERICAN ADVENTURES I
NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS
STORY USA 1, EXP & SETTLERS
STORY USA 2, YOUNG NATION
POCAHONTAS & THE STRANGERS
SQUANTO: FRIEND OF PILGRIMS
THANKSGIVING STORY, THE
GEORGE WASHINGTON

Phew… i think i’m done!!!!!