I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment. Not since virtual non-reader, 8 year old Fran suddenly picked up a Rainbow Fairy book and launched into fully fledged literacy, has being a home educator felt quite so good. The honey, all of it, is not in the achievement, but in the path to the achievement.
And it happened, of course, in one of those ‘I’ll die before I…” home ed moments. One of those “I’;ll never camp, never eat vegetables, never breastfeed longer than 6 months…” ooops, look at me moments. Sometimes things taste best when you can poke yourself with a self-deprecating finger end and snort derisively at how far you’ve fallen. 😆
Over the last year, we’ve done very little maths. The girls have all dipped in and out of Mathletics but their text books have taken a big back seat. We’ve concentrated on writing and art, on expressive stuff, on making stories and using language and picking up a pen and making it do what you want. I’ve never particularly worried about maths, none of them are the dunces I was, but it felt like we needed to concentrate more on other things. That’s how home ed tends to work around here; not terribly balanced if you think in a timetable sort of way, more chunks of things done to death and then moved on from.
I have to admit that when it comes to maths, I’m not totally comfortable with that approach; I struggled terribly with the subject at school, had no vision of what I was up to and tended to forget what I was doing from lesson to lesson. But the girls, if anything, are worse when they do concentrated blocks of stuff in a book and move on and I think over the last little while I’ve stopped forcing them because I know it bores them and doesn’t really suit them. But I’ve not been feeling any good about being so slack and making sure we do mental maths and tables hasn’t felt quite enough.
Things tend to take a while to filter through my brain, but it suddenly occurred to me that the big three could perfectly well do the same maths and it would make it easier for us to plug any gaps and holes; Fran is okay but disinterested, Maddy seems okay and Amelie is pretty quick for her age so they are of a similar level. So I thought I’d pull out an easy-ish KS3 SAT paper, see what they knew and didn’t know – and go from there. I told them that, in the time honoured supposed nature of SATs, I genuinely wanted to know what I’d failed to teach them, not that they could ‘fail’ in anyway.
To my surprise, they did really well. In fact, for the record, Amelie got enough to be more than passable if she was 2 years older than she was (on a KS2, not KS3 paper) and Fran scored 125/150, admittedly on the lowest tier paper, but still one aimed at lower ability children who’ve had a good 18 more months than she has yet. Maddy scored 131/150.
To be honest, I was gobsmacked. I was gobsmacked on all sorts of levels. How come minimal effort and very little (if I’m brutally honest!) in the way of *yawn* numeracy can mean 2 home ed kids can do so well they’d be well inside the top of of their class? How come if they can achieve that with no formal maths lessons and no qualified maths teacher, schools are turning out children who can’t count? While it was by no means the top end of what I’d hope Fran would be able manage, it was a good basis to start from and for Maddy, it was excellent.
And how has a maths education that essentially relates everything to cakes on plates worked so well? And never mind all that HOW, HOW HOW do I have children who said “can we do a harder maths test tomorrow so we can see if we can still get really good marks?”
However, since they asked, and as it making me feel much better to know they have in fact learned to count, we may be doing some harder maths tests over the coming weeks to see how hard it gets before they can’t score 30 marks above the top threshold 🙂
This blog post is brought to you partly by a Proud Mummy Moment and partly to encourage anyone who thinks “I’ll never manage to teach them maths…”
This was *absolutely* what I needed to read today! Our visit from the council EHE person is tomorrow & I’ve just been sitting here trying to find ways to make the complete lack of maths stuff seem like all part of a ‘grand plan’. (even though I know full well that it’s a) none of her business and b) my decision how to teach/what to teach etc … but then I also know that she won’t be inspecting the floor *under* the play kitchen … I still felt I had to clean it though lol ). Anyway – thank you 🙂
fabulous to hear – well done all of you!
This is particulary great for me to hear today as maths is my big fear re home ed especially for 2nd oldest dd who is 9 and has been at school since 5, for the 1st 2 years everyone told us that she was fab at maths and she really loved it then a change of teacher lead to us being told that maths was a serious problem for her – no amount of telling them that she was bored would help. This year we have the sort of teacher that you dream of …. enthusiastic, talks to children like equal human beings, thinks homework means that she has failed and dd loves maths again, unfortunately lovely teacher has been headhunted and due to other reasons dd has develpoed school phobia (only willing to attend maths lessons) so we are now preparing to home ed but I have been really worried about her maths (she is good and i am pants!) so all this waffle equates to me really saying thanks for sharing and if you have any tips on books, resources etc i would love to hear them
I found this really encouraging, thank you. Funnily enough, I’ve just realised that my big 3 (well big-ish; they are 7, 5 and 3) can do quite a lot of Maths together. The 7-year old is like Fran, I think, okay but not very interested, the 5-year old is very good at Maths, and the 3-year old is happy to shout out random answers to questions, and is starting to get an uncanny number of right answers along with the wildly wrong ones! Somehow it seems to be working (that sentence sums up my home ed life, I think…) I have been trying to hold my nerve about letting the 7-year old develop at his own pace, and it is beginning to pay off, I think. It’s so hard not to worry how they compare to others of their age, even though you know that is ridiculous and the great advantage of home ed is they can learn everything in their own time. Anyway, sounds like your girls are doing really well. I love that they are asking for Maths tests!
Yes, yes, this happened with us, too. When we started home ed, Tim (just 9) had been in the ‘top group’ for maths at school, but only just, and mainly due to his excellent reading ability. It turned out that he actually understood almost nothing mathematical, and wasn’t much interested in it, either, although he had good conceptual understanding and was great at logic.
So, at first kind of played around with workbooks, off and on, and I tried to explain things, mostly in vain… and for the second year of home ed we did maybe twenty minutes of maths per week, at most, which was a battle for us both – and as I’m mathematically inclined myself it was very hard to see where he simply didn’t ‘get it’. It was easier to ignore maths altogether…
Then we spent six weeks in the UK and he had the opportunity to go into ‘his’ class (now Year 6) at their old school for a few weeks. Numeracy hour had been introduced in our absence, so all his classmates had done an hour of maths PER DAY… and I was pretty sure he’d struggle to get even into one of the middle maths groups.
To my utmost amazement, he came home on the first day telling me that he was ‘so good’ at maths that he was BEYOND the level of the top group, and they’d had to put him to work with the one child who had always been brilliant at maths, and who was taking GCSE in Year 6.
I still have no idea how it happened. But that, probably more than anything, was what convinced both Tim and me that home ed was the path to follow…