Begun in 1377, the Cathedral was financed entirely by the inhabitants of Ulm. The most famous feature of the building – the spire, which is the tallest in the world – was not added until 1890. It is possible to climb the spire, but we parents declined as it was just too wet and windy. Willem was very disappointed with this! Don’t let our slackness put you off – if you are there try and make the effort. Here is a lovely youtube video that includes views of the climb up the tower and the view from the top.

The interior of the church is huge, and rather cavernous – our host in Ulm told us that the local saying is that in Winter you will never get a full church as it is so cold! The architecture is certainly imposing, but it is also full of interesting things to look at. There is a lot of art dating back to the formation of the church, including sculpture, stained glass and choir stalls. Just as lovely are the faded paintings, painted directly on to the walls and columns. No ‘full’ images remain but there many lovely images of saints, people and plants.

As well as the religious artworks, there is a lot of heraldry on display, which Willem found fascinating. He wandered about the church looking for recurring heraldry, trying to match shields and helmets on various displays.

Opening hours for the Münster are Nov-Feb: daily 9am-4:45pm, Mar: daily 9am-5:45pm, Apr: daily 9am-6:45pm, May-Jun, Sep: daily 8am-6:45pm, Jul-Aug: daily 8am-7:45pm and Oct: daily 8am-5:45pm. Entry to the Münster is free, but to climb the tower it costs tower 3€ for adults and 2€ children. Buy tickets an hour before the climb.

*Technically it is not a Cathedral, as it doesn’t have a Bishop attached to it, but it is commonly known as Ulm Cathedral by many people.

Since I finally took the plunge and started home educating Willem in September of 2010, how we go about this ‘homeschool’ thing has evolved. Here is a post I wrote about our approach in November 2010 and here is a post I wrote about our (short lived) use of the Workbox system. I am still not ready to approach following a total unschooling method,  but I am slowly realising that highly organised/structured learning just isn’t the way forward for us. So this post is about why we are doing things they way we are for now and how I approach structure.

Daily-ish learning

We are always learning. And by ‘we’ I mean humans in general. I also mean ‘we’ as a family, as we truly believe that a) learning is not just about hitting the books for a designated period and b) learning is something you stop doing once you leave school/university. But for the purposes of this post, by learning I mean dedicated time where we are pursuing a set learning objective or topic. I have set a goal of learning four days a week, with time in the morning and in the afternoon. At the moment, these days look a bit like this:

AM

Piano Practice (this is for about 10-15 minutes)

Latin (this can take anything from 20 minutes to an hour)

Expert topic – this is the most flexible period of set learning. Some times it is reading for twenty minutes. Sometimes it is watching a documentary for an hour, then looking stuff up on the computer, then playing related games or doing a Brainpop exercise.

And that’s it for the morning. Often Willem will also watch an episode of something off BBC iPlayer or a DVD, as long as it is learning related. Often we will watch part of it while eating lunch.

After lunch we have a period of ‘quiet time’ where Willem has to go up to his room and read or play quietly. Again, this time is flexible depending on what time we finally get around to it!

PM

Maths – sometimes this is workbooks (Singapore maths), sometimes it is reading a Sir Cumfrence or Mathematicians are People, Too! book and discussing the concepts it covers. Sometimes I will write out a few problems for Willem to work on to check he is remembering things we have worked on before. Again, this can take 20 minutes, this can take an hour (or more if Willem faffs around …)

Coding – Willem will work through a CodeAcademy lesson at least two days a week.

Japanese – at the moment Willem is learning hiragana. We can get through things in 20 minutes or stick at it for over an hour.

Most some afternoons we try to go for a run, and then Willem plays on the computer or watches BBC iPlayer until dinner.

And that’s it – the total of our daily organisation. I don’t have set days either – it is a kind of  ‘as long as we do 4 mornings worth and 4 afternoons worth, I’m happy’ system. For example, yesterday Willem spent the morning helping out at the stables where he has riding lessons. I had planned that we would get an afternoon’s work done, but it just so happened that in the afternoon we got a whole day’s worth done. Brilliant.

Structure

I am one of these people who loves the idea of structure and schedules. More than once since we started home educating I have written up schedules and structures – long-term, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily. And stuck to them for about a week. Don’t get me wrong, in many families, having long-term and short-term plans work. And having a schedule or rhythm is important for some people (Frontier Dreams blog is a great place to read about putting this in to practice). Problems I found with a schedule is that things came along to disrupt it – illness, opportunities to travel, friends visiting, a chance day trip – I found things too rigid, and the schedule would fall apart. HOWEVER when I tried a bit of a ‘go with the flow’ lack of schedule, we seemed to get to four o’clock in the afternoon and I would ask myself ‘what did we get done today?’ So I have tried to find something in the middle.

Long-term planning

I am only planning as far ahead as a semester at a go. By semester, I am going by the semesters I am used to from school and university in Australia: two per year. So I have a rough plan of what we are doing up until June. I know how many chapters from our Latin programme and how many lessons from our Japanese programme I want to get done. Why June? Well, a semester is half a year,  and hopefully we will get to go away in the Summer.

Weekly planning

Even though I am a great lover of technamalogical gadgetryliciousness, my planning both weekly and long term is done in an old fashioned Day Timer, with a week to two pages set up. I write what I want to do for a week, and then each day I record what we did. In the UK there is not the requirement for home educators to keep a record of their progress, so I am doing it more myself. I did have huge storage boxes and binders to keep Willem’s work in, but he now does so much of it on the computer most things are stored there (even the dreaded worksheets – we have trackpad and pen he can use to write on PDFs, which we then save).

Planning, old-school style

Checking he’s doing okay, what about national standards?, why not just unschool? He spends how much time in front of a screen?

One of the most regular questions I get about home educating, other than ‘so are you a qualified teacher?’ is ‘so how do you know he’s doing okay?’ My stock answer is now that I can check against the national curriculum to make sure he is going okay and keeping up with kids he would have been in school with. Of course the important word in that sentence is can. Fact is, I know that if Willem was still in a classroom he would be ahead of his peers in quite a few subjects, a bit below them in others, and would not be doing a lot of the subjects he is doing now. And that is fine as far as I am concerned. I try to keep abreast of roughly what children aged 7 – 10 would be expected to know in school in the UK, USA and Australia (systems I know about) but also keep in mind two important principles for guiding where we are going:

a) Willem should be challenged as we go along. Not struggling, but the whole point of learning is developing. I am not going to work through certain material he can already do in his sleep just because he would be doing that in a regular classroom. If I thought that learning standard subjects at the regular national standards and curriculum was important, I would send him to school. Sometimes as home educators we can forget the flexibility we have – this is an opportunity to teach our children what they need, when they are ready for it, in a way that suits them.

b) This learning thing is a long term project. We are most likely going to be doing this home education thing for at least another nine years. So if the boy next year of the same age is better at explaining what a noun and a verb is than Willem, I am not going to have conniptions, as there is plenty Willem knows he doesn’t, and we will be learning about nouns and verbs in future, it is not holding him back right now.* If we haven’t quite mastered times tables by the age of eight he is not damaged for life – we have time to work on this. My new ‘mantra’ is trust the process over time rather than expecting a perfect day.

After all that, you are probably wondering if maybe I should just unschool. However, there are a few reasons we won’t be doing that. Firstly, I want Willem to learn languages and at this age that takes regular ‘lessons’ if you are not in a position for immersion learning, which we are not. Secondly, while I realise that many children learn subjects such as maths because it relates to things they are interested in and they therefore seek out opportunities to learn it, I am not convinced that always works. What if Willem is completely not interested in maths or maths related things? Does that mean he doesn’t learn maths? What if when he is older he is interested in something that needs advanced maths and he hasn’t done the basics at a young age? I think interest-led learning is a fantastic thing (hence the fact that a major part of our learning is an ‘expert topic’ and Willem gets to choose that) but I feel that part of my responsibility as my son’s main educator is to make sure that at this early stage he has a good grounding in the basics. Perhaps when he is older and better at independent learning things will be a lot different.

Finally, a word about the amount of time Willem spends using the computer or watching DVDs. It’s a lot. I will admit that like a lot of home educators, I started out with a plan that Willem would rarely use computers, and I would severely ration his screen viewing time. I planned on a Charlotte Mason style education with lots of reading and time in the outdoors. Has it worked out that way? No. And I have given up feeling guilty about that. There are some fantastic programmes out there for learning across a huge range of subjects. Youtube and DVDs have been fantastic for me finding materials to explain engineering topics as he does an expert topic on engineering (and we have engineer in the house who also explains things). I know there are some families that don’t let their children watch TV or use a computer for various reasons, and if that works for them, great. But Willem is learning a lot by using the computer for both learning and some of his ‘play’ time, and he has learned a lot from watching DVDs (and has also often been entertained).  And he still reads voraciously and spends time each day drawing, building things with lego and running around outside.

*Willem does know what a noun, verb and adjective are, he is just not that great at articulating it at times.

Neues Rathaus Carillon, Munich

While we were staying in Ulm, we decided on a day trip to Munich. Partly to check out some of the extensive Christmas Markets, partly just because it is a large city with an interesting history and pretty buildings.

The Christmas Markets – yes, there are more than one in Munich – are pretty extensive.  The great thing about this is because they are spread out, there is less chance of the crowds getting too constricted. We left the train station and started walking towards the Neues Rathaus, soon encountering stalls selling ornaments, sweets, sausages, nativity scene parts and kitchenware. All of it great quality, all of it enticing. We arrived in the square in front of the Neues Rathaus moments before the famous carillon started, so we got to see the whole show. If you are in Munich, make sure you catch the carillon in action.

Asamkirche, Munich

Once we had wandered around the Markets a bit, we decided to follow the walk on the Lonely Planet Munich iphone app (I was lucky enough to get this when it was going free, but it would still probably be wroth paying for if you are visiting the city). This walk included one of my favourite churches in all of Europe, Asamkirche. Think of the most baroque, roccoco over-the-top religious decoration you can, then add some. Built by two very dedicated brothers who intended it as their own private church, it’s full of gold, gilt, glitz and perhaps a bit of glamour. There are putti, skeletons, clouds and saints. It’s tiny, yet every surface seems to be covered in ostentatious decoration. We also visited the Alter Peter, and took in the outside of the Cathedral Church of our Lady, the twin tours of which are the symbol for Munich. Another striking religious building in Munich is the new Ohel Jakob Synagogue.

Not all of our trip to Munich was walking around outside. We also did some walking around inside, at the Residenz. Former seat of government and home of the Bavarian Dukes, the items and interiors span a range of eras, though almost all of them seem to have had an emphasis on ostentation. Take for example the Antiquarium which was a hall to house a collection of classical sculpture. Rather than build a large impressive hall, it had to have decoration on nearly every available surface. Somehow it still seems to have an almost stark magnificence, perhaps because of the huge barrel ceiling.

The Antiquarium was probably Willem’s favourite part of the Residenz, and he had a lot of fun looking at all the busts and trying to work out the Roman emperors, generals and consuls. He spent a lot of time thinking about how it would be great if he had his bust in a hall like this, and what he would like his Roman name to be. The Residence Museum is open daily in the summer from 9am to 6pm and in the winter from 10am to 5pm.  Adult admission to the Residnce is 6 Euros with concessions at 5 Euros (2010 prices), children are free.  Separate admission prices are charged for visiting the Treasury and the Theatre.

By the time we left the Residenz it was snowing, and we spent much of our remaining time walking around deserted snow covered parks or up and down streets marvelling at the architecture. Willem was a bit put out when Steve threw a snowball at him, but soon got over when he was allowed to return the assault.

A single day in Munich is barely enough time to scratch the surface, but it is also perfect for a day trip as the city centre is compact, there is a good mix of historical periods, and there are lots of interesting buildings, fountains, statues and people to look at. And if you can combine it with the Christmas Markets, all the better.

Coding

I have already written about our signing up to Code Year. The first email was yesterday, and rather than just going by the emails, we have decided to log in and do a few lessons at a time. Willem did three lessons yesterday morning before he found his head was getting ‘complicated’. Some people have complained that Code Year is too basic or easy, or that there are better training programmes out there. I have to say that with the little we have done, it is perfect for us: it is at a level that it is challenging Willem but still understandable. He is already learning Boolean Logic, and also learning the importance of carefully reading instructions and following them – if you leave out the ” or the ; things just don’t work. And these ideas about logic are helping with Willem’s understanding of …

Maths

Maths is a tricky subject in our house. Not that we present it as tricky – to us Maths is interesting, and vital, and important and fun. And Willem will often sit work through geometry with his Dad, or the angles of a circle whether it relates to learning the points on a compass, or understanding what pi is. Willem is also pretty good at much ‘practical’ maths – for example if we are baking and I ask him to figure out how many milliliters are in half a cup he can do it pretty easily in his head. And I know there are quite a few home educators who say that kids can learn most maths, at least at this age, purely through ‘practical/everyday maths’. But I am not quite reconciled to that approach. However, Willem has a real block about ‘doing maths’. He just can’t learn his times tables, for example. Often if we sit down to ‘do maths’ he will take an hour to do work he could probably do in 15 minutes if he just got in and did it, rather than faffed around, argued about it, tried to avoid it and threw a hissy fit. So I am trying a bit of a compromise: we are still following the Singapore Maths system, in that I bring out the work book maybe once a week and do the section we are up to, using that as a rough guide of where we should be at (we are currently using the 3A level books). Once Willem has grasped the concept, we move on even if that means we don’t finish all the exercises in that section. If he is finding it difficult, I provide extra problems and activities. This is probably a once a week thing, at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week I will recap to make sure it has ‘stuck’. For example, we are up to the section about dividing by six. Once he got his head around the concept of long division, he found it all very easy. So every morning this week I give him half a dozen long division problems to solve (a three to four digit number divided by a one digit number).

We are also reading and ‘using’ some great books that present maths in a more narrative sense: the great ‘Sir Cumference‘ series and Mathematicians are People, Too. We find this ‘fun’ approach is a great lead in to maths ideas. We will read about a problem, or the biography of a mathematician, and then we talk through the idea. Of course this is part of a combination – the background ‘basics’ Willem learns through sitting down and doing worksheets and exercises now gets put in to place exploring these new ideas. The same as with the discussing problems with his Dad as I mentioned above.

Languages

Languages has been a bit of a tangled path for us so far. However I think home education is an amazing opportunity for a child to start learning a language at a young age, and one I really want to take advantage of. It is also part of the reason I am not going to be unschooling. While some children, when a bit older, will be motivated to learn a language and sometimes pick it up relatively quickly, at this age Willem needs the discipline of working on a language regularly if he is going to learn.

However, what languages to learn?

As part of my attempts to involve Willem more in his learning, I decided he had to choose what language to learn. Also, if he is learning something he wants to do rather than something he is being unhappily forced to do, chances are he will do a lot better! So what did he want to learn?

Japanese.

Why Japanese? His explanations were:

• He likes Japan and Japanese ‘stuff’
• We can get (and have) things like DVDs and books in Japanese that he can use to help learn, and they are fun
• I (Natalia) did Japanese at highschool and understand it a little bit so that helps with the learning

All great reasons, so I agreed to learning Japanese. And I was keen to revive my lost language skills as well.

However, we as a family thought it would probably be helpful for him to learn a European language. We already had a great Latin programme to work on. But Willem was not keen on Latin. It evenutally came out that the reason was that there are no DVDs in Latin (!!!) and very few interesting children’s books in Latin (fair enough). Willem wanted to learn French. And Italian. Hmm. We talked it through a couple of times, and Willem came to agree that learning Latin was probably a good idea because

• It would help him learn Romance languages (such as French and Italian) later on
• The little Latin he had already done is already helping him understand how English works, and he has fun seeing English words that developed from Latin
• It would be cool to know Latin as he continues to read and learn about Rome

So how did we decide which one to learn?

Well, we are doing both.

Now, at first it might seem a bit too complicated or overwhelming to do both. Isn’t Willem going to get confused having to learn two new vocabularies? Two new grammars? Two new ways of seeing and explaining the world? I don’t think so for two reasons. Firstly, I have met various children who speak three or even four different languages at Willem’s age – I have an acquaintance who lives in Switzerland. She speaks English to her children, her husband speaks Italian, and they speak French at school. And they speak all three languages very well. Children I worked with in Papua New Guinea were speaking English, Tok Pisin and two or three village dialects by age 10. Children have a great ability to pick up languages if it is just presented to them as what they do, rather than some hard task they have to master.

Also, Japanese and Latin are so different that I don’t think there is much chance of ‘mixing them up’.

We are not just learning the languages, but taking a cultural approach, learning history, living, culture as well as the language. And we are loving it!

To learn Latin we are using the excellent Cambridge Latin Course (which I will review in a later post). This approach is not purely language-learning based, it also covers Roman culture. We are using both the textbook and a DVD-rom that has exercise to work through on the computer along with videos. Hugely helpful, especially with pronunciation. We also use Learning Latin Through Mythology, and I am looking for other materials to incorporate as we go along.

For Japanese, we have decided to go with LinguaLift (which I will review in a later post). The two deciding factors were

• It starts on the premise you will not use Romaji (read Say no to romaji! to find out why)
• The customer service was excellent

So far Willem has been learning how to read and write hiragana, as the approach we are using requires you know this before moving on to anything else. I was worried he would get bored, and start asking when he could learn how to ‘talk in Japanese’. Actually, he is loving it! As well as using the iphone and computer games we have to help learn, he will happily sit down each day and write them out again and again until they are neat and correct. His hiragana so far is actually neater than his English handwriting!

We are also continuing to read a lot about Japan, and watching lots of documentaries about Japanese history. Being Willem these are focusing a lot on Samurai and swords

Music

Willem is continuing weekly piano lessons, and he is also doing music theory with the same teacher. He is starting to really enjoy it, helped by the fact his teacher is teaching him things like the blues and also encouraging him to compose his own work. Every learning day includes practice and theory, but at this stage it is only taking 10-15 minutes a day. We often have music playing in the house, whether it is The Beatles (Willem’s current favourite), Vivaldi operas or something from the ridiculously ecclectic 27 DAYS worth of music we currently have on itunes. However, the only music I will have on as background music when Willem is working is instrumental – he is a developing a tendency to get distracted by music and concentrate on that rather than what he is meant to be working on (I am the same – I can’t ‘do’ background music when working). We are not bothering with Music history, learning composers etc. at this stage, though of course if Willem asks about something we are always happy to talk about it and get books out or search the internet for information.

Flat on his back learning about bridges.

‘Expert’ topic

I read somewhere about the idea that kids have an expert topic each week, and they read and work through this topic (I can’t remember where I saw this idea, and if you know where I might have seen it please let me know so I can credit it). As part of making Willem more involved in his own learning he is choosing topics, and has four so far. Rather than making them only a week long each, we are just working through them for as long as they are full and interesting. The first topic Willem chose was ‘Engineers’. He started out wanting to learn about famous engineers through history, but this has morphed into what is engineering, and then looking at different aspects of structural engineering (this is because a) structural engineering is interesting for him because he can ‘see’ things to do with it and b) his Dad is a civil engineer, so he has an expert on hand ).

The way we work with this expert topic is to give Willem time to work through it each learning day by mainly presenting him with opportunities and letting him work through it himself. Our job is to provide him with the materials, answer questions and ask questions now and then to see how he is going. And to listen to him talk things through! The materials we provide include:

• A section of the bookcase in our reading room* dedicated to books on this topic (or at this stage, books on the floor. Many of our bookcases are away being repaired at the moment). Willem is free to pick them up and read them whenever he wants, and sometimes I tell him that his next activity is to read one of those books. Where possible I also put books on his Kindle relevant to the topic.
• Documentaries about the topic, whether this is DVDs, Youtube/Vimeo or iPlayer.
• Computer games relating to his topic.
• Websites about the topic.
• Brainpop videos and quizzes about his topic
• Trips to see things relating to his topic

I will write a post about the Engineering expert topic when we are finished, listing what we did and what materials we used.

What about ….

I know that I haven’t listed a lot of explicit topics/subjects that many people would consider important for education. What about reading? Science? Geography? History? Writing?

I think all of those are important too. And we cover them. Many of them through the expert topic (for example, with Engineering we have been doing a lot of science, but also quite a bit of history and  both physical and human geography).

Reading is not an issue for me with Willem – he reads fluently, and happily reads for pleasure as well as ‘learning’. Much of what he reads has a large history component, so there is more history again. We are not explicitly working on things like spelling and grammar right now however. Willem’s spelling can be ‘interesting’ at times, but it is interesting to see how as gets older and reads and writes more it is improving. I don’t think it is particularly important to explicitly work on grammar now, and it is interesting to see how much Willem is learning about English grammar while learning other languages. We will work more on language arts when Willem is older.

One last important skill that we are working on yet not really doing ‘lessons’ – touch typing. Willem had previously worked through BBC Dance Mat Typing, and while this did not mean he was a ‘touch typer’ once finished, it gave him a grounding of where his fingers should go. And now every bit of typing he does – coding lessons, typing a message, using a search engine, playing computer games – Willem touch types. It might be slow, but the more he does it, the better he gets. And he has realised for himself how useful it is.

All that other stuff

There are plenty of other things we do that I haven’t included as a topic here. We have started going running together a few times a week, which along with horse riding and rugby, could be counted as Physical Education I guess. We have bulbs growing both inside and outside, will soon be preparing a vegetable garden (and Willem has asked to ‘do’ agriculture as an expert topic) and we go walking every Saturday, so we are ‘learning’ about nature. Willem loves to draw, and construct things out of scrap, and sometimes helps me with the letterpress,  so we are probably covering Art. We often discuss religions, how and why different people do things differently, why bad things happen, so there’s philosophy, religious studies and citizenship. Like any home educating family, and plenty of families where children go to school, we realise that learning is about a lot more than sitting down and doing lessons, or even setting aside time to ‘learn stuff’. Kids are learning all the time. Scratch that – humans are learning all the time. And while the priorities of what Willem needs/could/probably should learn change as he grows, hopefully the most important thing we will be able to pass on to him is a love of learning, and knowing how to do it.

*The reading room in our house is the room with the piano, the lounge chairs, good lighting and one of our many bookcases. Of course reading happens in quite a few rooms in this house!

It was the realisation that the reason technology has so much control over the lives of so many of us is that we don’t know how it works. I’m not talking about not knowing how a DVD player works (which I don’t) or even not knowing how a car works (I still don’t despite my husband explain it to me dozens of times). I mean technology as in the systems that have an impact on our lives: the code that now runs so much that we do. The websites and the IT systems that seem to be a part of just about everything.

Image from flickr - Justonlysteve

So I thought that it would be very important for Willem to learn code. Don’t get me wrong, it would probably be a good idea for me to learn a bit about it – as well as the big issue ‘if we don’t know how to work the system it will work us’ issues, I am sick of feeling like an idiot every time I try to do something with this website. But the reason I want Willem to learn code is that I think modern life is going to become more  and more about the structure, the system, the programming: the people who understand that are the people who are going to be able to navigate our future (unless of course the Zombocalypse comes are we are left without Information Technology, but don’t worry, I am teaching him the relevant skills for that eventuality too.*)

I had looked at a few things – Raspberry Pi, Scratch – but not done much about it. Then I read a tweet from Ben Goldacre about Code Year (who says twitter is not worth the time?)

I clicked, I saw, I realised this is exactly what I am looking for.

Make your New Year’s resolution learning to code.
Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week and you’ll be building apps
and web sites before you know it.

This is exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for, without realising it exists! (I have even been to the website to start a little early because I couldn’t help myself …) I am so excited for two reasons:

1. This really is what I was looking for – a programme to teach code to complete know-nothings like me, and hopefully bright kids
2. The weird serendipity of it all

I haven’t started the course at all, so I can’t really endorse it, but frankly it looks great, so if you have been thinking about learning code but haven’t quite figured out how to do it, maybe you could come and join me (and a heck of other people) this year.

*Don’t worry, I am only kidding. Kind of …

I have a confession to make – until we started planning a visit to some German Christmas markets, I don’t think I had ever heard of Ulm. I definitely couldn’t have placed it on a map. But that is the serendipity of Couchsurfing: I post on one of the groups I am a member of (Family Welcome Group) that we were thinking of heading to Stuttgart to see the Christmas markets and did anyone have room for us. A lovely lady in Ulm offered up her home, and, well, we never ended up going to Stuttgart but we did discover Ulm.

Ulm is actually two towns – ‘Ulm’ proper, and across the bridge ‘Neu-Ulm’, where we stayed. They are even in different districts: Ulm is in Baden-Württembergand Ulm is in Bavaria. Ulm is probably most famous for its Minster (Ulm Münster) which has the highest church spire in the world. We didn’t climb up it on our visit (much too cold and windy!) but luckily there was an exhibition at the Ulm Museum about the building of the Ulm Münster, and the hands-on section was particularly great: Willem got to draw designs for arches and windows (using pencils and a

Sculpture on the roof of Ulm Museum

compass – can you imagine any English speaking countries leaving out implements like a compass unattended for kids to hurt themselves with or steal??), use pulleys to move things, and even have a go at carving some stone. Unfortunately the exhibition is a temporary one, but I think it is running through to February 2012.

Even if there isn’t an exhibition about the Minster to entice you, the museum is still worth a visit. It is a very eclectic mix of attractions, with everything from Stone-age figurines to modern art. Almost all the information is in German, but there are brochures in English available at the front desk, and a lot of it is self-explanatory. Adults cost €5.00, but a family ticket is €8.00, so if there is more than one of you that is the option to take. The museum is closed on Mondays (as we learned when we first tried to visit!) but the excellent gift shop is open. Speaking of gift shops, the tourist information shop has a decent range of postcards and knick-knacks as well as very helpful staff who speak excellent English.

We also tried to visit the Bread Museum but when we got there they had a loud fire alarm going and weren’t accepting visitors! So we are saving that one for our next visit.

Much of the appeal of Ulm is the beautiful old city. Ulm is built on a river, and the Fishermen’s and Tanners’ Quarter is full of lovely old buildings, including many old mill buildings right on the river. There is even the old Ulm Mint.  There are various buildings that look to be lurching into or away from the water, and you are sure to find cute little corners and quirky galleries.

As well as strolling around the old part of town, it is a lovely walk along the remaining city walls.  Built in 1482, the walls run along the river, including past the Fishermen’s and Tanners’ Quarter mentioned below. Even though it was windy and cold we had a great walk along them.

Lastly, something to keep your eye out for when you are visiting Ulm – Sparrows. The Ulmer Spatz (Ulm Sparrow) is the symbol of Ulm. To quote from Abiyoyo:

The sparrow with a stick in its beak is the undisputed symbol of Ulm. Standing out on the roof of the cathedral and walking around the city you will recognize it flies around and crosses with plumage patterns and colors. Legend has it that: “Many centuries ago, Ulm was surrounded by a very thick wall meant to protect the city from unwelcomed invaders. For the construction of their Cathedral, the residents wanted to bring in the city of Ulm, timber which was loaded in a wagon, which caused problems, because the gate was too small. The inhabitants of Ulm had already decided to demolish the gate to allow the passage of the wagon when they saw a bird fluttering around it and carrying, a long wisp of straw in the tip, to build the nest. As soon as the bird introduced the straw in a niche in the bell tower, the inhabitants of Ulm were hit by a flash of genius. They laid the beams along the cart, and thus saved the gate from demolition. To thank the bird, so they say, they placed, a monument in the shape of a sparrow on the roof of the Cathedral”.

We had fun spotting sparrows wherever we walked (including a few that seem to be partially buried in concrete, near the Cathedral!) As well as urban sculpture and stores, you can find small sparrow (and other bird sculptures) in people’s gardens, on the islands in the river, and on balconies. Willem even bought a sparrow shaped cookie-cutter at the Christmas markets as his souvineer from Ulm!

Willem looking terribly suave while travelling by train

The week before Christmas we were lucky enough to travel to Paris and Germany (and yes, I will be writing posts about what we did soon). Before I ramble on about what we did, I wanted to write a quick post about the fact we travelled by train, and how much I like train travel.

We could have flown to Southern Germany. It would have been quicker, and perhaps cheaper. It would almost definitely have been more stressful, and  worse for the environment.

Yes, it would have been quicker. The route we chose was to take was the train from a local station to London, and then the Eurostar to Paris (we got a great return deal). We decided to spend the night in Paris before taking two trains – an ICE and Regional Express which we booked directly through the  bahn.com website -  to our ultimate destination in Germany, Ulm. We could have possibly gotten there in one day, but that would have meant leaving very early in the morning and getting in very late at night. And yes, if we had flown, it would have meant less travel time. But it would have meant getting to an airport (not so easy from where we are), and if we were going to get a cheap fare, landing in some out of the way airport and then getting the train anyway to get to our final destination. It would have meant early check-ins, limits on what we could take on board, and a lot of stress. Sure there are security checks and baggage checks for the Eurostar, but I don’t find them as much of a hassle for some reason. And on the train we could take our own food, and had a lot more room to stretch out in than we would have had cattle-class on an aeroplane. And call me crazy, but I actually looked forward to the hours of reading time on the train.

Yes, it probably would have been cheaper to fly BUT there is the travel to and from the airports. And there is the fact we would not have been able to take liquids on the plane, so we would have been stuck drinking what we were given, or on a cheap flight, paying over the odds for a softdrink or bottle of water. Instead we took our own ‘on train picnic’ on each leg. And to get to Paris, if you can pick up a promotional fare on Eurostar it is not that much more expensive than flying, and you end up right in the city, not on the fringes at an airport.

And it is worse for the environment to fly than take the train. Frankly, if you care about the environment (and think about it – if you care about yourself and/or your kids, you should care about the environment), flying is one of the worst things you can do. And yes, I admit I am a hypocrite on this one, but I do what I can. And if you want to see the difference that taking a train, car and aeroplane are from any two points in Europe, go to the excellent ecopassenger website. As a rough guide, getting from Waterloo Station in London to Ulm by train resulted in 35.3 kgs of carbon output for one of us. By plane that would have been 115.2 kgs of carbon, and that doesn’t take in to account the global warming impacts of flight (there are more). It also meant much lower energy consumption and less revolting polluting particles and nasties were created.

Natalia looking less than suave while travelling by train

It was almost funny the amount of people who were quite amazed that we were ‘travelling so far!’ by train rather than taking a plane. But I know we are not alone in our preference for taking the train: as the fantastic Trains on the Brain blog says ‘Save yourself the pain and travel by train’, or the pure delight that comes through in posts about rail travel on the lovely Travelwriticus blog. Or if you think it is too hard to travel around Europe by train, check out the website of the excellently knowledgeable The Man in Seat Sixty-One and find out how easy it is to get anywhere (just about) by train. And while UK trains can be hideously expensive, and the trains themselves can sometimes leave something to be desired, there are fantastic train journeys here too (or if walking is more your thing, why not use the historic rail lines of Britain as your guide?) So next time you have to get from point A to B (and even on to C, D and E) whether for fun or for business, why not consider the train. It could be cheaper and quicker than you think, and probably a heck of a lot more civilized than the alternatives.

We hope that you have all had a great year too, and that 2012 is even more awesome for you. As a big thank-you to everyone who reads this blog, I have a little gift for you: a 50% off voucher for our photography website photobiblio.com. Whether it is art quality prints or the digital rights to images, however many you want to purchase, it is 50% off every order, up until 31st January 2012. Just click on the ‘Coupon Code?’ link at check-out, and enter JAN2012 for your discount. We have added a lot of new images, and will be adding more during the month. If there are any images you have seen on this blog you would like but they are not on the photobiblio website, get in touch and I will see if we can make them available.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

and a man who ‘rescues’ old tools to sell at a reasonable price to support his community and local craftspeople:

Then thanks to the fantastic ‘The Kid Should See This‘ we found video of Kokeshi Dolls being made:

and a store in Paris that sells piano parts

What links all of these is that it is showing people who take pride in and love what they are doing. What’s more, it is showing alternatives to the usual ‘professions’ out there. Willem often commented on how what we were watching looked hard, or dirty, but we both agreed that doing something hard but doing it well, and doing something that feels important or that you love, makes up for the difficulty and the mess. I think it is important as a parent to show children that there is a huge world out there, and not just in terms of ‘wow, there are so many great places to visit’. We have to show them that there are so many valid ways of living, and that being fulfilled can be about a lot more than money, or things, or a career that the majority of people think of as ‘successful’. When I was a child (and even a teenager) I remember more than once mentioning things I wanted to do when I grew up, only to be told by my father to be more realistic, and that I should aim for a ‘normal’ job. Well, that didn’t happen, but it did lead me to follow a lot of dead-ends and it has taken me a long time to get to a point where I feel I am starting to find out what it is I want to do in life. I don’t expect Willem to now grow up to be a sword maker (though it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise to many of us!), or own a tool shop, but hopefully he will grow up to realise that doing something well and enjoying it is more important that following a conventional ‘successful career’ or aiming to be a reality show contestant.

The Colfaxes started out as academics who, due to their political convictions, find that their career options become severely limited. After a disasterous move to Africa (they were meant to take up a post in Uganda, then Idi Amin came to power; they spent time in Morocco thinking it would be a cheap place to live but it wasn’t) they end up buying a patch of land in California’s redwood mountains through a mix of necessity and misguided plans. Through the following years they build somewhere to live (often with many mistakes and mis-steps), slowly develop a farm, and raise four sons. One of the surprising, and actually heartening, parts of the story is the fact that there was no real plan to home educate the boys, rather it just evolved. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, and at all times is honest and often self-depreciating. Which is such a relief – so many ‘new’ books about moving back to the land continually rhapsodise how wonderful life in the country is, how great living simply is, how having to do something different automatically means ‘finding yourself’. The Colfaxes are honest about how having to live a simple life is often harsh, uncomfortable and un-wanted; how the country can be unsafe and full of strange people; and how working with your hands is not always about finding your bliss, but can be about mind-numbing boredom. And while the authors often acknowledge how they wouldn’t have made it without friends and neighbours, they are also give many examples of how they were let down by others.

Above all, the message I got from this book is that while sticking to your principles can mean material difficulty and hard times, sticking to what you believe in is the best thing for your health and family, no matter the hardships. Another message was that allowing children to follow their interests and take responsibility can be one of the most effective ways to raise capable, intelligent, interesting people.

I have ordered a copy of the Colfax’s other book Homeschooling for Excellence, which I am hoping is just as an engaging read, even if the resources are out-dated by now.