a little bit of cooking

things have been very hectic here lately so we've slowed up in the evenings to do a bit of cooking.

not from this book but from the tv programme on 4od

I really want all the children to be able to cook for themselves by the time they leave home and these meals are even uncomplicated enough (but interesting enough) for my seventeen year old so I'm going to buy him the book for the next time he's home alone (he can cook meat to his heart's content then!)

we cooked this. 

I should point out that this is a picture of Jamie's pie not ours as ours was eaten too quickly for us to photograph it

It was utterly delicious, the best recipe we've tried (we had to use puff pastry as we had no filo, so not authentic but delish anyway)

and today classic school cookery, rock buns, I don't think I've eaten these since I was school age!  We used the recipe from this book which I love despite all the meat recipes.  She just has some great ideas for people like me who are never organized!

We're away celebrating J's sister's 40th this weekend so we will have to wait until next week to make Jamie's mushroom risotto!  Yum!!

Teaching each other

Teague has just started piano lessons.  It was something he suddenly decided he wanted to do and he seems to be really focused on practicing

Annis would also like piano lessons but we can't really afford two lots at the moment so Teague has started teaching her, and he is a wonderful teacher.  More patient than me (that might not mean a lot!)  and they don't seem to bicker at all while they're learning together.

I think this is one of the nicer things about home learning.  Sharing their skills with each other seems so much more meaningful than simply showing me what they can do. 

and we don't have to pay for a second lot of piano lessons yet ;o)

Annis on gardening

i'm Annis and i'm ten years old and i'm guest blogging.

we have been doing some gardening at a friends house.

she has a BIG garden and four cats and two dogs.      

we had to move some top soil (below) down a hill in

a wheel barrow.            

                                          

we are sharing everything we grow. these are our seedlings we have

quite a lot of seedlings and are biggest is kale (eurrgh).

this is Tulouse she is sausage dog cross jack russel.

she is very friendly.

this is kitsie pitsie he's very friendly but a bit clumsy.

this our little plot and the poly tunnel with rased beds in.

Perfect stitching, but not mine

I am slightly astounded by the perfection of this stitching.  Not least because it's my 'I don't like hand sewing' daughter's perfect stitching.

when Annis asked me if she could make a purse for her auntie's 40th and I suggested she find a pattern to embroider onto it she said she'd changed her mind because dad was taking some metal poles apart with an allen key and she'd rather do that

Not to be defeated I brought out the exciting iron on transfers (it feels like magic!) and she came back (after playing with metal poles for quite a while) and chose a pattern that's definitely too big for a purse and proceeded to stitch far more perfectly than I ever do!

I know this bird will look beautiful when she finishes it but I don't know what we will make it into for her auntie.  Oh to be able to move from metal work to perfect stitching!  Oh to be ten years old again!!

flowers without gardens

Because we don't have a garden, more of a yard with lots of steps, we have to use our town parks for garden stuff.  The kids and Jason do grow food with some friends on a plot of land, but this time we wanted flowers

so this is Morrab gardens, full of beautiful flowering magnolia trees at the moment

and of course daffodils, we sketched and sketched, there are so many beautiful flowers there.

we photographed too

We feel lucky to have such a beautiful garden a five minute walk away

we did have some crocuses in a pot in our yard but they died so quickly

and I just love magnolia trees when they're flowering.  It feels like summer is on its way...

Just reading

and so quiet

books and books and more books

Reading is just about all that's happening in our house at the moment.  The weather has turned grey and cold so all we want to do is snuggle up and read

I should be writing an essay on Orlando but instead got caught up in Hermione Lee's biography of her. 

This is our book club book.  The children voted to have book club once a fortnight so I tend to read the book to them, otherwise we would have to get two copies.  And I am enjoying this one.

Annis is reading the time wreccas which she has just started and says 'it's funny and I like the names of the characters, snot and scratch and killjoy'.  Ours is a library copy, for some reason the copies I found on the internet are hugely expensive but maybe it's awaiting a print run.

Teague who cannot be photographed is reading Clive Cussler The Chase which is an adult's detective story set in 1906.  He really likes the historical aspect of it and finds it exciting. 

Did I miss two days?  So early in February?  Hmmm I think so.

New Books

Today our new books arrived from amazon. 

I had seen these books several times over the last year on Angry chicken.  She uses them as starters for enviable home ed projects.  So, in need of a kick start, we ordered four of them last week.  They are suited to younger children, my ten year old is happily reading them.  There is a lot of information in them and they do make a good starting point for a project.  We just ordered the non fiction books, we didn't bother with the story books as they seemed a bit too young.

I let Annis choose three of them, she has a fascination for ancient cultures, especially the Egyptians, so we went for Romans, Greeks and Egyptians.  I also ordered Leonardo da Vinci for my son who doesnt' like to read, the language is quite young but the information is interesting.  Some good comparisons of Leonardo's inventions with modern equivalents.  I'll post more as we work through them and create our projects.

A bit of late night art

just when I thought we weren't going to have a picture for today a sudden late night art attack created three

The last master of the Biram

Oh I wish I'd taken a camera.  It's always the way, it didn't even occur to me!  Last night we went to Mount Pleasant Ecological Park to see Mamane Barka play the Biram, the last instrument of it's kind.  If I'm honest I didn't really know what we were going to see, there were free tickets for the children and we just booked it.  But it feels as though we spent an evening in Niger.  Barka spent as much time talking about Niger and the stories around the Biram as he did playing and it was wonderful.

It is a five stringed instrument that is shaped a bit like a boat and comes from a fishing community on lake Chad.  It was played whenever there was sickness or other bad things happening in the village to call for protection from the spirit of the lake.  Barka (who is from a nomadic tribe in the North of Niger) came upon the instrument when he was researching the instruments of his country.  The old man who had the Biram had not played it for fifteen years because the villagers had become (in his words) 'modern' and no longer needed him to play.  As a result there was no-one to take over and when he died that would be the end of the Biram.  Barka was so moved by this that he spent four years finding funding to go and learn from the Biram master.  The old master has died now leaving Barka as the last master of the Biram. 

Barka is touring Europe to talk about the instrument but also to talk about the incredibly rich cultural history of Niger.  He is a fantastic speaker and we all loved it.  We came away wanting to visit Niger and the museum of musical instruments that he and his drummer work for.

His drummer Omar was incredible too, he is a griot which wikipedia describes as a 'repository of oral tradition'.  He played two drums, the douma or talking drum and the calabash below

He played the calabash using his hands and his foot to get different sounds.  While Mamane is an excellent talker and his instrument is interesting because of its history Omar's drumming was just amazing.  I feel as though the children (and us adults) learned so much in those few hours.  Stories of spirits and old ways of living were brought to life.  We all want to go to Niger although he didn't talk about any unrest there.  Failing that perhaps WOMAD next year.

One final thing he told us was that the village where the instrument is from has a market full of fish and the fishermen are not allowed to take money for fish so the people in the village will never go hungry.  Sadly the village he described is a dying way of life.  One where everything is natural and they fish and farm their own food, selling fish outside the village when they need money.  Barka and Omar live in the capital city and do not live such a natural life.  The master of the Biram used to be fed, housed and clothed by the rest of the community because his value was recognised.  The idea of not charging for food in your own community seemed so moral, a community where everyone has their role to play and everyone gets fed. 

stuff we're enjoying right now

I have been very slack with my blog recently.  My laptop is utterly unreliable at the moment and I may have underestimated the ammount of work needed for a level three literature course!  But I'm starting to organize my time a little better and all of a sudden I find I have a few minutes spare to share some home ed stuff.

I wrote about the scientist cd in this series a while ago, we are still listening to that one.  We are often distracted, and rarely do anything in any kind of order.  I like to think that this leads to interesting connections in our learning!  Anyway we love this explorers cd just as much as the scientists one.  It's great for those mornings when we all just want to curl up on the sofa, I can feel as though we're learning while we're lazing.

Annis is obsessed with fashion, she absolutely wants to be a fashion designer.  We saw this great book on fashion illustrating by Bethan Morris in the Tate St Ives at the weekend.  Unfortunately it was about £7 more in the Tate than it is on Amazon so we will be ordering it for christmas.

Back to essay writing and sewing after this brief interval.

The Athena book club

Now my children would have called it 'Penzance book club' or 'home ed book club' but there was some lateral thinking at the first meeting of this children's book club set up by our very efficient and lovely friend Jojo. 'Is there a god of books' said one bright spark, to which another replied 'Athena is the goddess of wisdom' and so their book group was named, 'The Athena Book Club'. I especially like the fact that Athena is a she and the book club is all boys apart from Annis.

 

The first book was a difficult choice because at least one of the children had already read whatever was suggested but in the end they all wanted to read Teague's suggestion of Stormbreaker, a spy book.  But Teague has already read it so he is starting the second book choice

Eragon, which sounds like fun.  They decided most things between themselves and it was a joy to see a group of boys getting excited about books or at least being in a club.  Teague managed to drag one of his book shy friends along and the library have asked if they will hold occasional meetings in the library.  I think this is a fantastic idea, they were very supportive and have offered to get hold of extra copies of their book choices so we don't have to buy the books.

We do love books in this house.  Books form the basis of our home education, and as long as they are reading or being read to I feel happy that they are learning.  So I am so so pleased that they all enjoyed the book club, in fact they were so keen they want to meet up in two weeks rather than the usual month.  Better get them reading!

Stuff we're enjoying right now

Every year around this time we seem to get a lot more reading and bookish learning done.  Today in particular it has turned colder so we don't mind staying in and cosying up with a good cd

and this is a great one, it's entertaining and informative enough to make us want to find out more.  Today we listened to the piece about Galileo and it has inspired us to look for a galileo telescope kit so if anyone knows of a good one please let me know

I have begun my Open University course and am back to reading and then reading again, oh and then reading in a bit more detail!  But I'm enjoying Chekhov ( I can't say I have ever read or seen his plays before).

and Annis has bought a fabulous Julie West embroidery pattern from Sublime Stitching that is so cool and funky, that coupled with gold thread... who could resist.

oh and there's nothing I like to see more than a teenage reader.  The oldest (now at college) enjoyed reading but it's been a bit more of a struggle with this one.  Percy Jackson and the lightening thief seems to be doing the trick though.

and Annis has been crafting all by herself (poor thing) with her autumn finds from a lovely walk this morning in Morrab Gardens.

What are you finding to do now it's getting colder?

We love this book

J read the adult version of this book and recommended it, he even tried to read bits to the children but, even though it was funny, they couldn't really engage with it.  Then I saw this children's version of it in Smiths.

We've only just started it but we love it!  Even I understand it.  Bill Bryson is a funny man.

He begins by talking about a school text book he was given as a child which he thought was going to be amazing because of this image (he does admit it was because he imagined cars driving over the edge of the removed wedge and crashing into the burning inner core!)

but when he got the book home he was utterly disappointed because it was dull and didn't answer any of the questions he wanted answering (he now knows that they didn't know the answers then but being a school text book they didn't let on that they didn't know). 

His enthusiasm bursts out of the book, I feel that he is just as excited now about the idea that there is a burning ball in the centre of the earth as he was when he was ten.  This is perfect for my thirteen year old who is going through an 'I'm not interested in anything except sleep' phase at the moment.

The book is Bill Bryson's A Really Short History of Nearly Everything and we thoroughly recommend it to other science phobics (like myself rather than my children!)

that autumn crafting feeling

Annis has got the knitting bug, she has three of these dolls but apparently that's just not enough!  The difference is that this time she wants to knit it herself from one of these lovely books

Then we remembered this sad half finished monkey that she got for christmas and began two years ago.  As far as I know grandma asks her if she's finished it yet every time we visit.  So, I put my foot down and said the monkey has to be finished before we move onto purl stitch.

See the speed she's knitting that monkey in her cheery mish mash home ed tshirt which she adores!

and in the dining room (I thought it was quiet) whole armies are being created

painting warhammer (another gift from two years ago that has just sat around half finished!).  All this leaves me a little time for blogging and...

a little time for embroidery.  I love autumn!

celebrating the diversity of home education

This morning I saw a link on our local home ed list to this article all about the proud  success of a fourteen year old home educated boy having been accepted at Cambridge.  After reading about this great acheivement I went through to see what my thirteen and ten year olds were doing

this is what I found

and no the banger is not in his mouth

I tried to upload the video but it just wouldn't work so I'm afraid you will have to imagine the end result

now, I and most other home educators know that we can pass this off as science, explosions, experimentation, animation, modelling, sculpting, art...  But I don't expect a letter from Cambridge in the next year or so!