Reading Twenty Miles Per Cookie: : 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures, what I got was even more pleasurable than that, though this could be due to a streak of Schadenfreude-ness in my nature. The book starts with a disaster – a lost child. Sathre-Vegel continues to document the disasters, the petty problems, the disappointments, the fights, the uphills being longer than the downhills, the strong winds not in their favour, and that fact that often the ride was a grind. I loved it – not so much because I wanted to wallow in another’s misery, but because I loved the honest, raw and often hilarious writing. Rather than making such a trip seem like something I wouldn’t want to do in a million years, it actually made it more desirable: this family was obviously real and human and normal, and they still got out and did it, actually had fun (don’t worry, the book isn’t really a pity-party, there is plenty about the fun and the love this family grew) and didn’t kill their kids in the process. They went with their dreams, had an adventure, and in the process grew as a family, as individuals and as travelers.  Even if you are not planning your own continent spanning adventure with your family, Sathre-Vogel writes in a way that entertains without being to schmaltzy.

However, what if you are more than entertained – what if you are inspired to strap helmets on your kids and hit the open road, two wheel style? While Twenty Miles per Cookie includes some passages about camping, and the importance of tarps, and how much the family packed, you might not quite know what to do if you are not experienced long-distance cyclists. Never fear, you won’t be using that as an excuse for not setting out will still be able to achieve your dreams. Sathre-Vogel has written a short but highly informative guide Bicycle Touring with Children: A Guide to Getting Started. This volume has not only arguments as to why you should get out and do it now (rather than wait until the kids are bigger), but also goes through all the technical information you need to consider – what bikes should you use? What do you need to pack? Where are you going to sleep? What are you going to eat? Who is going to push me uphill? (okay, maybe not that last one). It is a great book for any family considering riding together for more than an hour or two – whether you are going to ride to the next town or are considering an extended tour (there is even a section on that). Whether you are already considering a family cycling trip, or are just looking for some travel reading material to give you new ideas, I highly recommend getting your hands on these two volumes and settling down for an inspiring, informative and highly entertaining read.

First we went to have a look at the Severn Bridges (also known as the Severn River Crossings). The first Severn  Bridge was opened in 1966 to replace a ferry that travelled from Aust to Beachley, and to provide a direct link for the M4 from England to Wales. Due to a large increase in traffic numbers and subsequent congestion a second crossing was built 5 km away from the first bridge, and was opened 30 years after the first in 1996. Here is a twelve minute video about the building of the second crossing.

We walked along the waterline looking at the bridges before walking up and on to the First bridge, discussing the construction of the bridges, bridges in general, the painting of bridges, cabling, the differences between different styles of bridge construction … we talked a lot about bridges.

As well as the bridges, there are some amazing cliff faces where you can see well defined strata of different sediments and rock formations.There are some good interpretive signs so you know what you are looking at. Of course Willem wants to go back and dig for fossils (can’t say I blame him). Despite the overcast weather it was a great morning of rambling around, combining learning about everything from prehistoric rocks to modern bridge construction with general appreciation of both the man-made and natural landscape, and the usual off-beat commentary Willem gives whenever he shares his opinions.

We had parked our car in the little village of Aust, and after a nice lunch in the pub there we explored the church, which is said to be built on the site where St Augustine met with the  Welsh Bishops. And supposedly John Wycliffe was the prebend there in the 14th century (don’t worry, I had to look up what a  prebend was too.)

From Aust we headed to the outskirts of Bristol to the suburb of Clifton, and specifically to one of the most outstanding bridges in Britain, the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Spanning the Clifton Gorge this is, quite simply, a spectacular bridge in a spectacular setting with an amazing history. Extra bonus points are awarded because it was designed by our household hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (he was only 24 at the time and it was his first major project).

While not all things we learn about at home can be translated in to hands-on day trips, or at least not within the bounds of being something we can reasonably get to from and back from home in a day, it is nice when we manage it. Willem is by no means a bridge expert, but getting to see engineering in action has made the concepts just a little firmer in his mind. And even if that wasn’t the case, we had a nice day out, which is what really matters in the end.

*I realise that engineering is about more than bridges, skyscrapers and dams. Oh trust me, I know – I live with a civil engineer and the physics of engineering get discussed very often in this household.

Note to Australian and UK readers: in this instance, read ‘college’ as being ‘university’ not senior or sixth form college.

Boles has aimed this book specifically at teenagers who are thinking of leaving high school to potentially ‘unschool’ but who still want to go to university. This is not to say it won’t be of interest to parents, or to teenagers who are already home educating. He starts by outlining how school is not necessary to learning, and can actually be a hindrance to achieving learning outcomes. He also points out that teenagers are able to get on and live life (or as he puts it ‘Life Doesn’t Have to Wait Until Age 18′) and have adventures and this is not necessarily an irresponsible thing to be doing in your teens. He then spends the rest of the book helping teenagers figure out exactly what it is they want to achieve, and the steps they need to take to get there. There is a wealth of useful and practical techniques here from ‘dream maps’ (not nearly as new-agey as they sound!) to time management techniques and explanation of how to get out and have adventures but still do the work required to complete college admission procedures. Some of the information to do with college entry requirements are specific to a US audience, but readers from other countries should be able to adapt them to their own country-specific needs.

Just as important in this book as the techniques is the philosophy. And this is part of the book I really loved. Boles truly believes that young people are capable of a lot more than society gives them credit for, and also believes that you don’t have to live a boring life as a teenager to get to where you want to be as an adult. This is something I really agree with: just because something is the way most people do it (going to high school, suffering the tedium of learning stuff you are not interested in, going to university to study something others think of as prestigious or ‘useful’) it doesn’t mean it is the best way, or the best way for you. Boles advocates an unschooling approach to learning through your teenage years, but don’t let that put you off if you are not a fan of that approach – there is still plenty here for you and your young learner to use and learn from.

The book is a quick read, but an engaging one. At this stage (the teenage years are a little while off in this household) I just read through the book in one sitting, taking note of bit that particularly interested me. For teenagers contemplating what Boles suggests, I would recommend reading it through then going back and slowly working through the techniques Boles talks about. Even if you are not interested in going to college, there is still a lot of interesting suggestions on how to go about achieving your goals (even if you are a parent who doesn’t plan on going to college, there are still a lot of useful techniques you could pick up from this book for yourself!)

So whether you are a teen (or pre-teen) wondering if you can still get where you want in life without going to high school, the parent of home learners entering their teen years, or even if like me your learner has a few years to go before the teen years hit, I recommend this book to you as an interesting, engaging and inspiring read.

• I want to be able to make practical gifts for friends and family. I can’t sew (no really I can’t. I’ve tried), and since all my family and many of my friends live on the other side of the planet, foodstuffs are not really possible. But knitting means I can makes stuff.
• I wanted something I could do while sitting around that didn’t need much in the way of equipment or supplies.
• I covet yarn. Okay, this is one of the main reasons – the amount of times I have walked in to a store, seen all the beautiful textures and colours and wanted an excuse to buy some.

But I never learned. It was one of those ‘I’ll get around to it one day’ type things. Finally, it got the best of me, and when I saw this post on zakka life about hexipuffs, I decided I had to get my act together and learn how to knit.

But how? Then I saw this kit Knit One, Purl One. Great – sure it is aimed at kids, but that is probably what I need. It has everything I need to knit a toy rabbit, and hey, I get a toy rabbit out of it. Perfect, right?

Um, no.

I tried following the directions to cast on. Multiple times. I just couldn’t get it. So I went online and found directions and managed to cast on.

Then I tried to follow the instructions in the book on how to do a knit stitch. Just couldn’t do it. Went online, found a video tutorial on how to do it, finally managed to do a few rows of knit stitch.

Then I tried to follow the instructions in the book on how to do a purl stitch. Hours of frustration. Went online … well you get the pattern developing here.

Serendipitously, just as I thought I obviously had some kind of knitting inability handicap, I was in one of our favourite bookstores and saw in the children’s section an Usborne Art ideas How to Knit book. It was good luck, as while the Cross Keys Bookshop has an awesome range of lovely books, they don’t really have a craft section, and this was the only knitting book in the whole place. Like any other Usborne book, this one was excellent with clear instructions and great illustrations. My incipient knitting mojo was back and I got to work on a bright red scarf.

The scarf was eventually finished. Every time I pointed out a dropped stitch, cursed over a dodgy stitch, complained about how it was turning out or pointed out my knitting was rubbish, Willem would pipe up with ‘It looks great Mum. I really want to wear it’. And bless his cotton socks, he has. It’s not fantastic – there are a lot of dodgy stitches and the odd hole, and the yarn I used was not the most luxurious – but it was proof I could knit something.

Furthering my growing knitting habit is a little store called Beaker Button. Now despite the name, it also sells yarn of all sorts, and even ‘rough’ wool (and they have spinning wheels! In the shop! How cool is that?) Willem goes once a week to a craft workshop and just two doors down was this store. In it I not only found yarn I coveted, but also a fantastic knitting book for beginners like me – Simple Knitting. This book appeals to me for so many reasons. The instructions are clear. It assumes no prior knowledge. It is beautiful to look at. And most importantly, the projects in it are the kind of thing I long to knit – so many beginners’ books are full of stuff I wouldn’t want to bother with. (I also bought Zombie Felties at the same time – I have a feeling this book is going to be borrowed by many people I know. As I type, it is already in someone else’s house)

Another of the reasons I wanted to learn to knit was so that I could do it along with Willem. He had been eager for his grandmother to teach him when she was visiting, but he had not really got the hang of it. Once I could kind of knit, we decided it was time for him to have another go. We had lost the half-length needles he had been using to learn with his grandma so we got some more and settled in for Willem to become a knitter.

He tried. Really, he tried very hard. But it was just too hard for him. So we got a french knitting kit, and even that was just a bit too fiddly. It looked like knitting was something Willem was not going to be touching for a long time yet. Then, at his Dad’s suggestion, I found a knitting loom. First time he tried it he declared it all a bit too hard and put the loom aside. The other day I persuaded him to pick it up again and – Bingo! We have a new obsession. It is relatively easy to do, and Willem was amazed to see how much he had created in a short time. I had started with ‘just knit a basic stitch for awhile to get used to it’ but our little circle of knitting has already been given a purpose – it is the first part of the woolen chain mail armour Willem intends to knit. Of course. (In his defence, it does look a bit like chain mail). Just in case he finishes the chain mail one day, we have a book full of projects – A Beginner’s Guide to Knitting on a Loom – which we are looking forward to using. I have a few different loom sizes on order to arrive next week (big enough to make the armour and/or projects for people bigger than babies) and even a sock loom as Willem and I are now determined to knit some socks. The lesson of the story of Willem learning to knit is there is more than one way to knit a cat. Or something Sometimes when introducing kids to crafts it really is a question of finding something that suits there level of ability, and introducing it when they are interested and able.

I am still at the level of basic knitting, and am currently working on yet another scarf (for a friend) and might even progress to a beanie soon. And a blanket. And some fingerless gloves. Don’t forget socks – we are doing socks soon. I am yet to master knitting in front of a movie, and can’t knit while reading, so am now having to actually think about what I do with my spare time (though I can knit and listen to audiobooks, which is brilliant). Best of all is finding something I can do that I like, takes up relatively little space, has supplies that are easy to get, and is magic. Oh, did I forget to mention how magic it is? You just make these knots on some sticks and then you look down later and there is this material there. Magic I tell you. And we all need a bit of magic in our lives.

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!