Exploring in the rain

 A drizzly day a couple of weeks ago near the New Forest on the Dorset/Hampshire border in Southern England.  But just because the sun is not sunny, it does not mean that the fun is not funny.

So we went off on an adventure in the rain, with sticks for antlers, for making trails and for poking things.

 A frond of bracken newly emerging after
 a heath fire gets a gentle poke, as does an interesting rock.

 Poking the sun dews is discouraged, although it is tempting with their lovely sticky fly catching goo.  The recent heath fire followed by rain seems to have made this normally rare plant spring into action and it was amazing to see so many.

Someone who came along before us had indulged in a little white rock on burnt post sculpture.

Interesting tunnel making spiders were spotted and tickled into making an appearance by gently wiggling a blade of grass on their webs (we're in the UK, I don't think I'd do this anywhere with scarier spiders).

Beautiful blue butterflies were also spotted - I think it was possibly the vulnerable species the silver studded blue as the habitat and time of year was correct and the top side of the wings had a dark band around them.  I've only seen the more common holly blue and common blue before though so I can't be sure.  The conditions were certainly right - strongest populations occur where the ground has been recently disturbed e.g. by fire.

Lots of exciting natural history observations were made and habitats explored.  Of all the things discovered however, the most funny fun (as far as two small boys and their mother were concerned) was when Daddy fell into a boggy puddle while trying to lift a heavy and wriggling Toby over it.  There's our common denominator of humour right there 'don't step in the bog boys, don't step in the bog boys, oops, fell in the bog'.

 

 

 

Disclaimer: our adventure was in our well known stomping grounds near where we used to live, spiders and other wildlife were not harmed during the making of this adventure and they were known to be reasonably harmless.  Bog navigated was actually a soggy bit on a path, as opposed to the disappear up to your neck never to be seen again kind of bog.  Usual common sense applies during your own adventures.

Everyday beauty and small adventures

One of the greatest gifts we can give to children is the time and the encouragement to experience the wonder that comes from the everyday beauty and the small adventures you have every time you step outside your door.

The success of climbing a hill and being master or mistress of all they survey, as their minds lay out stories of dragons and goblins and fairies.















Gazing at the shimmering magic of dew drops on spider webs, rolling their tongues around the slippery, whispery new word 'gossamer'.

Lying full stretch on little tummies to look at the stained glass window of sunshine through dandelion leaves and flowers, green and gold.















Carefully exploring the softness and prickles of teasels, the deliciously naughty risk of a pricked finger.  Staring up from the webby leaves of this year to the sentinels of last year standing tall against the bluest sky.









Playing shops, with flowers as toys and leaves as money. 

Prising apart the flowers to learn about stigmas, anthers, pollen and ovules.  Tripping out the word 'compositaceae' as though they'd known it all their lives and not just heard it for the first time as we talked about how the inflorescences of dandelions and daisies are many tiny florets closely packed, and comparing them with the blue speedwells growing nearby to see the difference between a single flower and a composite one. 


Laughing as they dusted themselves and each other all over with yellow pollen - the daisies are the best.  Grumbling as we head home, because there is always one more adventure still to be had.

Forest School

 One of the benefits of home education is that we can match our curriculum to the kids energy levels, the weather and what happens to be going on that day. 

Today was warm and gloriously sunny.  We started with Guitar, then a play date, then home for snacks and French and Phonics, then lunch followed by the afternoon spent in imaginative play in the local woods, where we also told stories, sung songs and chatted to dog walkers.

The main game was part of a story Ollie was dreaming up about living in the woods, so naturally we needed a den and a campfire.

 The boys worked co-operatively and showed perseverance in gathering the materials they felt were needed, giving and taking directions from each other and assigning themselves areas of responsibility.  I could not have crafted a lesson plan to have as effectively drawn these features from them as simply going to play in the woods achieved with no pre-planning.

 There were times the boys were feverishly active, and at others they just sat by my side on a log, eyes closed, faces up to the sunshine listening to the birds.

 I love the rich social element to our lives and frankly go a bit mental when I don't see friends for a few days, but I also relish these other times when it's just us and I am focused entirely on the boys.  No housework shouting at me, no trying to hold on to the thread of a conversation with a friend in the midst of constant interruptions of 'I done poo! Wipe my bum!' and the like.  Just us, the wind, the sunshine, the birds, the trees, the mud and the bugs.

Ollie found he could swing himself upside down under a log.  Toby found, repeatedly, that he could not, but he seemed to enjoy the sensation of falling off enough to keep doing it. 

I have read that spinning around, hanging upside down and moving all parts of their bodies in all ways are vital to children's development of balance and the eventual ability to sit still.  There's a theory that children fidget in class because they haven't had the opportunities to develop in this way.  I think children fidget in class because they're children and their brains haven't yet learned to ignore the messages from their body that sitting still for long periods of time is horrible for your health.

We watched little hunting spiders racing around on the log piles, and examined the perfectly sculpted tiny sporangia of the moss growing at the base of the coppiced sweet chestnuts.  We talked about how coppicing works, why it was done to produce poles and wood for charcoal manufacture, what that charcoal was used for (the name of a nearby estate 'Tilekiln' gives a clue).  We looked at newly coppiced areas compared to those with a full season of regrowth, and others that looked like they hadn't been cut for 30 years or more, and the difference this made to the light levels reaching the ground, and the flowers that would grow, and the butterflies that would come.

There was even time for what Ollie called 'arts and crafts' where the boys used charcoal they found to decorate the cut faces of the log piles before our slow meander home when the little voices piped up 'I'm huuuungry'.


Note to folk reading this and thinking this is some kind of magic because walks with kids don't go down like that for them, or feeling incompetent because the parenting blogs make it all seem so easy:

        It all sounds pretty idyllic, and it was, but I don't want to put pressure on folks whose experiences of going out with kids may differ by not giving the full picture.  This day was lovely, but we've had our fair share of whinging, griping, incessant demands for food, or the toilet, or being too tired on other days.  We've had dog dirt.  Lots of dog dirt. 

On this day our walk to the woods was marred by the discovery on the path running behind our house of a load of fly tipped pig parts including trotters, an abandoned cooker and a kettle barbecue.  All of which had to be reported to the council when we got home. 

I walked home by a different route despite the protests of the boys who wanted to see the 'dead meat and flies' again (not sure if this is just because they're kids, or if our being vegetarian adds an element of interest in the less known).  This different route took us through the thickest stickiest yellow clay you ever saw, which necessitated me standing outside for 20 minutes scrubbing boots under the outside tap.  Fortunately the boys are now big enough to be given instructions to put dirty clothes by the washing machine and put clean ones on and to mostly do it first time, although sometimes it's 'funner' to run around with pants on their heads instead.

Is doing stuff with kids tough?  Often.  It can be tougher than anyone would ever believe before they had kids.  Just leaving the house with everyone dressed can be a major challenge in the early days.  But the key to anything is perseverance - the same thing we want to see in our kids.  So, you went for a walk after spending 45 minutes trying to get everyone out of the house, you got a bit lost, someone wet themselves, you had a moment when you thought you'd lose your mind if you told someone one more time not to put that stick up their nose.... if nothing else you had an adventure, the kids were away from four square walls for a couple of hours, you saw them light up inside when they got filthy and didn't get told off, and each time the outing gets easier, the kids get more self reliant and you get more and more idyllic moments to hold in your head for when you need it most.

Sand writing games

 If you want a child to learn to write, it may come as a surprise that sticking a pencil in their hand may not be the best way of going about it.

Writing in wet sand stimulates more regions of the brain due to its multisensory nature and as such the letters that a child forms with their finger in the sand tend to be more memorable than the marks they make on paper.

The more physically active and multisensory you can make an experience the more it will be memorable, so using our whole bodies during learning the alphabet and counting is a big part of what we do.

I noticed how playing hopscotch had an immediate effect on Toby's ability to count in a correctly ordered sequence, so today I made up an alphabet game.  I wrote the alphabet a line at a time as in the song, then we held hands and shouted the line while jumping on the letters.  At the end of a line we ran down to the bottom and right around back up to the start of the next line and continued until we had done the whole alphabet.  After about three complete alphabets we were puffed out, so it's also good for making up the hour a day minimum physical activity that is recommended for kids.



 Ollie then decided to draw the big lobster we had seen in the aquarium that morning, and when he finished his picture I suggested he write 'lobster' next to his picture.  He needed a little help working out how to spell it, but each time we write on the beach I notice an improvement in his memory for the letters he sometimes muddles such as 'b' and 'd'.  Lobster was a handy choice as it is a nice phonetic word with no tricky sounds so he was pleased to be able work out most of it for himself.

 Toby has started shouting out 'look. there a T like in my name!' every time he sees a T written down, and occasionally writes a pretty convincing version of 'Toby' on his pictures, so I wasn't surprised when he started to write his name on the beach.  I was amazed though at how clear it was.

I haven't pushed either of the boys with holding a pen correctly - just each time they start to write or draw I will adjust their hold once and then leave them to how ever they want to hold it after that.  With Ollie he was holding a pen in a correct grip at around 2, but Toby at 3 is still preferring a fist grip and regularly switches which hand he uses, so I was interested to see he favoured his right hand during sand drawing.


As a break between numeracy and literacy games I drew start and finish lines in the sand and we ran races up and down the beach in different ways - running, hopping, jumping, running backwards.  The boys also did plenty of digging, stone throwing, making sand angels and watching the gulls fly overhead.  One of the benefits of learning outside is that pure open ended play and learning games can run seamlessly into one another.

We did counting, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing using a 'picnic' made of pebbles.  Our final game before we left was a numbered scavenger hunt for pebbles.  I wrote numbers in the sand and we ran up and down collecting pebbles and adding them in the correct amounts next to the numbers.  Ollie did his numbers by himself and I helped Toby.

All of these games can be done in a back yard with a sand pit, or in mud, or flour or shaving foam.  The scavenger game can be played with numbers chalked on a patio and any item to collect that is in season, such as leaves or daisies.  How you do it is limited only by your imagination, and if that runs out the kids are bound to have brilliant suggestions and are more likely to play games they have helped to devise too.

Our outdoor classroom

 So we're nearly at the end of the first half term of our 'official' home education.  To be honest, very little has changed for us as we have always enjoyed a wide variety of educational experiences.  We do up to an hour of written work on most days using maths and literacy workbooks, but it's not all in one go.  A couple of pages after breakfast before we go out, a couple more in the afternoon when we come home, and maybe a couple more after dinner.    The workbooks probably aren't completely necessary as there is so much learning going on without them, writing labels on pictures, adding up scores in our magnetic fishing game, singing number songs and so on.  For me though the books  feel like a good way to add to our paper record of progress and both boys enjoy showing daddy what they have completed at the end of each day.  Perhaps because they see both Matt and myself studying, doing what they call home school is just a normal thing for the boys.  When I'm helping Ollie with a page from his maths book, Toby will sit next to us with his colouring book concentrating just as hard on that as Ollie does on the numbers. Yesterday Ollie was talking a bit loudly and Toby said 'Shh I doin my school work' as he sat drawing faces on his little whiteboard.  Toby also likes collecting up the work books from the kitchen table and saying 'I put on Daddy's desk now, he look later'.

What forms the backbone of our learning however, and the thing the boys most enjoy, is the outdoor learning.  This can be learning about seasons and weather as they ride their scooters through the park, or something more focused such as a bug hunt.  We are fortunate to have an amazing park a short drive away with all sorts of different habitats, lots of water ways, formal and informal flower beds and an amazing collection of trees which are often helpfully labelled.

This week Ollie wanted to go searching for water boatmen after watching about them on an episode of 'Minibeast Adventure with Jess' on Cbeebies.  We headed off to the park with out nets, the plastic yoghurt buckets that we use for all sorts of things, and a bug viewer.  On the way to the shallow muddy pond that I thought might be our best bet for finding some we did a lot of sensory exploration.  I pointed out herbs such as rosemary for the boys to smell and try to name, we spend a long time in the rose garden looking at all the different colours and sizes of roses and running around to find our favourite colours and smells of roses, then wove in and out of the bamboos listening to the noise of it rustling and making up stories about panda bears.  A heavy fall of sweet chestnuts provided an opportunity to investigate the prickly outside and soft inside of the cases, and peel some chestnuts, all of which had a little maggot munching away inside to the boys delighted interest.  We looked at the difference between the leaves on the evergreens and the falling leaves of the deciduous trees.  We talked about chlorophyll and why the leaves are changing colour.  We compared leaf shapes of the different types of oak growing along the path, the sharp points of the Pin oak, the deep lobes of the Hungarian oak, the small compact lobed leaves of our own English oak.  We compared sizes, lining up the leaves we had collected in order of size and hunting for the biggest and smallest leaves we could find.

At the pond we gently scooped up some freshwater shrimp with our nets, watched them swimming around with the bug viewer and then released them.  No water boatmen today, but perhaps it's getting too cold for them now.  The 'pond' is more of a silty bottomed scrape in the earth at the side of the path, so not the best pond dipping place, but safer with little ones than hanging over the edge of one of the bigger ponds.  We then went to a place where a shallow stream pours across the path so the boys could play with their nets and buckets - no expectation of catching anything, but the action of repeatedly scooping up and pouring out water is one which the boys really enjoy. We talked about why the rivers in the park were flowing so swiftly today - about the heavy rainfall, catchment areas and valleys, the water cycle and how the valleys were carved out.

If I were to write a lesson plan about the activities of the day I would be running into several pages of learning outcomes, including the numeracy outcomes involving shapes and sizes and the physical benefits of running and playing outside.  Whether little ones are in school or following the home education path, this type of activity is something which is accessible for every family.  It's incredibly cheap - the buckets were left over from buying yoghurt in a far cheaper way than as individual pots and an old tea strainer or sieve are a good stand in for a net if you don't have one.  Most of the activities require no equipment at all (just maybe a notepad to write down anything you couldn't answer at the time to look up later - despite a Biology degree, years of teaching outdoors and in a classroom and being well into a Geosciences degree I still get plenty of questions I have to look up at home, even if it's just because it's easier to find a video of rubber being tapped from a tree than to explain it).  The only thing you need is to really look, listen and experience things yourself so you can draw your kids attention to interesting things, and respond to them when they bring you things to look at.  You are a brilliant teacher and your kids love it.

Outdoor maths - garden stew

Basic maths skills are one of the most important things you can share with your children while their brains are so sponge like and they haven't been given the idea that they can't do maths.

Simple things like counting when you go up steps, hunting for shapes in pictures and using maths language - 'here, you can have two quarters of this sandwich, that makes a half a sandwich' all build up the ideas without ever sitting down and getting out the books.

If you're looking for a way to take your maths into the garden or park, this idea might be for you.

We call it 'garden stew' and it's a way of encouraging counting, shape and colour recognition as well as a little botany on the side.  You can use any props you have to hand, such as plastic plates or an old plastic plant pot, but if you have nothing at all it still works.

Holding an imaginary recipe card, send your little ones off to hunt for ingredients for garden stew.  For example, show them a dandelion flower and send them off to collect four dandelions and bring them back.  If they bring a different flower say 'hey, that's a really pretty buttercup and it's the same colour as a dandelion but right now we're hunting for dandelions, lets save this for later and look for these ones now' then show them the one you want again and help them hunt for it.  If they bring too few, say 'brilliant, that's three, we need one more to make four' and send them off again.  If they bring too many 'wow that's six, we need to take two away to make four for our recipe'.  Avoid saying 'no that's wrong, you need four' because the point of this is to have fun and build their confidence with numbers and the words you use have an incredible effect on children, either building them up or knocking them down depending on how you phrase things.

Continue with whatever flowers and leaves you wish - obviously common, non-poisonous plants that are close by.  You could also do this with pebbles, sticks, or whatever safe items you have to hand.

Once you have all the 'ingredients' tip them into a pile, give it a stir, sit down and pretend to eat your yummy garden stew.  Once again you can use your fractions words - 'help me to give a third to your brother, a third for you and a third for me'.  It's our job to build their maths confidence high enough now that they carry that through their lives.