Wednesday 10 September 2008

Laughing while learning

Cruising round those blogs again, I cannot help but notice that school has started. There's a lot of mummy wailing and guilt mixed up with alternating sighs of relief and shaking sobs from the cupboard under the stairs where I'm sure the chocolate stash is hidden.

Well I do not want to add to your wonderings about school, or dare I suggest, home education, because the decision to remove a child from school and teach them elsewhere, otherhow, someplace else, is not exactly the lightest decision, like on a scale of 'shall we have fish fingers tonight for tea or should it be fish cakes?'

But look here! It is not all bad! Grit is armed with no more wits and ways than the average woman in the street, and she is still standing. Not only that, but this morning, fired up with her new timetable, she opened a maths book because it is maths day and she ran around the front room being a pair of parallel lines destined never to meet each other. After that excitement, she checked up on the maths book again and carried out a dramatic performance of perpendicular lines having a fight at a right angle. From that point we all had a go at being triangles and angles before Tiger shouted out the word rhomboid and we all cut up cake into shapes to celebrate.

You see? Home education can be no worse a way to spend the waking hours than anything else. And it can keep you fit, feed you cake, teach you something and, if you put your dignity in a box, make the children laugh. All at the same time.


And then you can take everyone swimming
and ooh and aah at all the lines in the locker rooms.

2 comments:

Mean Mom said...

There's more than one reason why it wouldn't have been a very good idea for me to educate my children at home - the main reason being that, at times, I struggled a bit trying to help my 3 lads with their homework, whilst they were still at primary school!! I did everything possible to complement their education, but actually educating them at home would have been out of the question.

You are obviously more than able to provide your children with a home education and I greatly admire you for it. I'm sure that your children are benefitting from your hard work!

Grit said...

hi mean mon! there's a secret in home ed but shhh ... we don't want everyone doing it! think of the queues! but it's that children largely teach themselves! some days all we grown ups have to do is provide enough fields, crayons, googly eyes, pots of glitter, books, chatter, seeds to plant, and time.