Seven days with food (Or, make it last all month)

Fantastic! Next up in the Grit series, Living with elephants!

Now, assuming your four-year old does not stagger home from playgroup clutching a stomach injury due to the 15p the nursery spends on the nutritious midday offering, or does not need A&E treatment after the black eyes and plastic hammer dents around the head from the energetic playtime - and is still not effing and blinding so liberally about your late pick-up that you may have to put them on the naughty step for the next three years - your little kidlet might be in the right Spring holiday mood to enjoy a festschrift to food.

I recommend it. Lay aside all motherly pain-in-the-arse worries about 5-a-day, your guilt nutrition, and any fears about the food police inspecting Tinkertop's lunch box as an excuse to haul you off to parenting classes. With Grit's fantastic guide, kick your heels, ditch the diet, eat crap, and be free. All in the name of real life learning.

Word of caution: some things I take for granted, and it is only when people say Erm... that's not normal, Grit, that I wonder. Like, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger always serve themselves with food. I never serve them. If I do, it is a punishment for serious violation of rule, like RULE 1: Food is sharing and social. END of RULES.

So the time one of the little animals spat at the table? Quick and instant dismissal to another room with a plate of spaghetti. Judgement is swift and YOU DO NOT SPIT AT MY TABLE.

That said, the instances of rule violation are rare, and I have three fantastic, beautiful creatures who serve themselves sensibly, enjoy food, sit and talk over lunch, laugh, have a go at green, say thank you, and leave an empty plate. (I have failed in that they are not dragging themselves to shop at midnight, then next day preparing, cooking, waiting, clearing up, and serving me with chilled Pinot Noir, but I'm working on it.)

Now, take the benefit of Grit's experience. These are my guiding kid/food principles, and if they give you ideas, then I am happy.

1. Anything goes. We are vegetarian/wannabe vegan; those boundaries means pig's eyeballs and goat arse, out. Apart from dead animal and parts thereof, we try anything. Once. Really. Pineapple, peanut butter and mashed potato with accidental glitter? OK, sounds like lunch. Blame Heston Blumenthal.

2. Eat round the world. A favourite home educating project. For which read, find out about China, the beautiful countryside, the elegant writing, the poetic language, the sprightly fish, the dancing pandas ... do all that in a half-hearted manner so you can feel smug that evening when you send out for a takeaway.

They get leopards in China, don't they?

3. Make food shapes. Take every opportunity to make ships from pasta, trains from cabbage rolls stuffed with rice, clockfaces with vegetables, horses powered by sausages for legs. Once you start, you can't stop. Flowers, butterflies, trucks, space rockets... your toddler will join in! Elbow them out the way. Now it's serious, and you're competitive. I can rearrange your entire pantry to look like a map of Mexico City. Indeed, fruit and vegetable modelling is an art.

So crap it has to be labelled.

4. Model with mash. The alien offspring will soon know what it's eating and will scream after clapping eyes on the colour green. Or it will brain explode because it is all too horrible! LOOK! The tomato is TOUCHING the potato! So get this one in early and blind kids with colour. Mash up half a dozen piles of potato with the following: broccoli, red kidney bean, cheese, blueberries, beetroot, turmeric. Dollop it down in tempting mushy colour mouthfuls on the table to be scooped up and patted and belly stuffed. Truly disgusting and horribly pleasurable all at once. Make sure, while your kid is spreading goo all over their face, that you have a nice little salad and a half-bot of red from Waitrose.

5. How many colours? A favourite supper game. Pile white rice in mountainshape in middle of table. Put any colour food all around. Instructions are to paint a colour wheel. Does it matter if it comes from a tin? No. It won't kill them to eat tinned peaches (orange) red berries (red) blueberries (not blue) and green cabbage (yellow). You don't have to eat it. Put something of what you fancy round your whitericemountain. Black eyed beans with garlic dressing, roasted green peppers, baby tomatoes, rocket. That's more my taste.

6. Lie. I tell the children that the green bits in the stew are chopped herbs and they are delicious. When Squirrel gets suspicious, I throw in some real chopped herbs and lie some more. I am going to have some pissed off children when they read this. Really, I use chopped spinach in cubes from the freezer. But HA! I GOT AWAY WITH SPINACH FOR EIGHT YEARS, LADIES!

7. Serve it funny. Plates (paint them with tomato puree on the edges) napkins (fold them, add wiggly eyes and string, call them cats), napkin rings (curtain rings), home-made place settings (large cork tiles from the DIY shop and the kids paint them up), plus a home-made tablecloth (take an old one and get the kids to draw all over it with fabric pens). It all makes dinnertime a day long event. Round here, we call that fun. (Shut up and suffer it. These days pass too soon.)

8. Make shopping list books. Cut, fold and staple little notebooks to take to the shops. The kids can write shopping lists inside, or simply scribble all over them. Then you can interpret the scribble as onions or carrots or jam tarts. Whatever you want.

9. Make a food book. Add food words and pictures, let your offspring write in it alongside you, then take it shopping. To be honest, this is no help for your child but after two hours sleep I've found the food book quite a useful aide memoire. It stops me coming home from the weekly shop with three bottles of scotch and a bar of chocolate.

See? Handy, when you cannot remember why you are in Tesco in the first place

10. It's your turn. Let the kids take over the cooking, no matter what the age. Yes, I am still recovering from the fruit soup. Yet I still defend it! That's how far gone we are.

11. Let food be a celebration. I don't care whose celebration it is. Persian New Year? Let's celebrate that and lay the stuff on a tray. Next week? I'm sure there's a Hindi celebration. Yup. We could order a take away.

Suffering an education at Persian New Year

12. Go mad on what you fancy. Fruit salad. The gritlets consume vats of the stuff. They make their own. At age three, they went to the shops and I said Take whatever fruit you want! They did. I bit my knuckles and paid the £245 bill. The kids weighed it, butchered it, composed their own bowls of fruit salad, and scoffed it. We did that every week. After a few weeks of an overdraft, I suggested options to bring down the cost to £50. Now they are more responsive to seasons, airmiles, quality, selection. And still demand blueberries so let's burn up the atmosphere.

Cute, huh? Fruit salad at 35 quid a throw, what with the fresh raspberries and all

13. Fry it. Boil it. Bake it. Mash it. If you usually do something with your food, do the opposite. We fry fruit. Quite a lot. Fried bananas, fried pears, fried apples. Mandarin segments fresh from a tin. In butter with a little Satan's sugar, squeezed direct from his behind. Delicious.

14. Go childlike in John Lewis kitchen department. I discovered how the kitchen should look if you are aged four. That means wipe away the tears because I never had this stuff before, and now I own 150 food cutters, ring moulds, lolly sticks, ice cream maker, toasty machine, popcorn maker, jelly moulds, cake tins, heart-shaped muffin trays, sundae dishes and sixteen fruit salad bowls...

15. Don't stop until it crawls away. I am too mean to throw out food. Boiled potatoes are roast potatoes the next day. Lentil bake becomes sandwich spread. Stale bread is cut into cubes, sloshed over with olive oil, subjected to a twist of dried herbs, pepper and the salt of death, and shoved in the oven on high for 10 minutes. They are Tiger's crunchy favourite. Perhaps they remind her of the bones of small furry animals.

16. Make food a joint decision. Set the kids up browsing through a cook's blog and pick something. That way you can blog at the same time and pretend not to.

17. Be old fashioned. Leaf through cookbooks. We all have favourites? Mine are Mark Hix, Miriam Stoppard, (no, really!) the Australian Women's Weekly cookbooks and the old old cookbook we dragged from Northumberland.

18. Get the right Dahl. Shove off with the saucer eyes, Sophie. We want to eat the wallpaper.

19. Do all the rest. Visit a farm, grow your own, cook outside, eat at a restaurant. Do what you like, but don't make it guilty. Look, I can get to 20.

20. Craft it. Make food seasonal. Blow and decorate eggs. Stain them with tea, paint them, wrap them in string, how many ways with spring eggs are there? Unless you are vegan, obviously, and then you can look at pictures of battery hens and cry. If you are not vegan, not allergic to eggs, do not worship them, and cannot beat them, then you could join them and throw eggs at your four year old in a game of Catch! and see who cracks first: you or the egg.

Seven days with Spring

Oh dear people.*

It's been a while, but I must do this. The alternative is to typeset an academic article about Revised Extended Standard Theory.

I know which one I'm choosing.

We already did boxes, water, and sight. Let's seasonally adjust and do SPRING.

1. Make your own blossom.
Take your offspring walking in your local wood. Pick up thin sticks to bring home. Preferably without beating a sister around the head with them in the back of the car.

If we come home safely and everyone's in good humour, then we can destroy it all by asking the kids to do something pointless, like twisting crumpled up balls of pink, white and red crepe paper round the little twigs. Because look! You made blossom!

Because the mood is now turning ugly, stick the twigs in a vase and call it Spring Art. If you count the number of crepe balls on the twigs, call it Maths. If you count the number of crepe balls littering the floor, and add it, subtract, divide or multiply with the number on the twigs, brilliant. Advanced Maths.

2. Lambing.
Not the bloody visit to see cute little lambs again. You can't take an ex-vegan to a farm without complaints. Let's make lambs fly instead.

Attach paper wings to your lamb. Throw it out the bedroom window. Measure how far the lamb can fly. You can try timing the seconds before it hits the ground.

He says he likes to fly and he wants to go.
Even if his wings do keep falling off.

Build bigger wings. And fix them on properly this time. Make them of different materials. Like bamboo skewers and nylon. Off he goes! Measure the distance. Did the wings make any difference to flight direction? Distance? Speed? Time to impact? Is the weight or density of lamb causing a problem here? Has anyone got a smaller lamb?

Attach a selection of plastic bags, large and small. Keep throwing. Record the results.

After a couple of hours of cheap entertainment, create some theories as to why lambs don't have wings then call it Science.

3. Falala. Music!
Put on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or Vivaldi's Spring from The Four Seasons. Dress up and dance along but try not to dance yourself to death.

What did you feel and hear? Dawn? Angry weather? Evening? Birds? Tractors? Flying lambs? The sound of a sister crashing to the floor when you pushed her over by accident on purpose?

4. Visit a sensory garden.
These are all over the place, so if you can't make Kew, there could be one near you. Round here there's Luton's Stockwood Park, with sensory area and garden exhibits.

You can always make your own garden sensation, even on a windowsill. Go off to the garden centre and see what they have. If you are too mean to actually buy any of the plants (and I do not blame you, having been a person that spent £3,000 on a garden only to see it systematically trashed by small people) then just let the tiddlers run around the garden centre. At the sound of smashed terracotta claim the kids are not yours and you have never seen them before.

Set your kids a challenge wherever you are to find plants that are smelly, prickly, hairy, noisy, sad, droopy, bold, dead. Call this Science. And if you come home and write a poem about the experience, English. If you can persuade Tinkertop to call her poem le jardin, you get to call it French.

5. Think big. Start your own spring festival.
Let's face it, there aren't enough spring festivals around the world. One brief scan round t'Internet shows every belief, religion, minority, nation, all human groups catered for, each using Spring for a big blow-out party. Start a trend. Make up your own.

One year we had a party called Yellow. We painted the garden tree with yellow paint, hung yellow decorations in it, blew up yellow balloons, ate yellow iced cake, wore yellow, and made paper daffodils and stuck them in the ground. It hasn't caught on, but you never know.

6. Be inspired by paint.
Off to the library for paintings research before getting out the paintbrushes and going berserk.

Berry's Book of Hours does nicely whatever the month, and you can tick Art again. And History. Or there's Arcimboldo and his Spring face, which means you can compose your own self-portraits using only flowers you hand-picked from granny's garden when she was at the shops. When she comes home, you can call it moral discussion.

7. Set up your weather station.
Stick up a dozen cheap thermometers over the house and garden, and take daily readings, if you can remember. Take the temperature of the soil in evening or deep shade and after a day of sunshine, if we get any sunshine. Any difference? More Science.

8. We're all going to die with global warming.
Perhaps not expressed quite like this if you have a three year old. Half an hour with the newspapers or radio these days and you'll know in the UK that Spring is late and we're all doomed. This may well raise some interesting discussions about ecosystems you can have with a four year old. Or not, in which you can wipe your brow in relief and get out the Lego instead.

* You can see how important is a comma.

Are you having enough fun with boxes?

Back by popular demand!

OK, Mamacrow asked. Plenty of encouragement for the socially misaligned Grit.

So, here we go.

Seven days of crafty education with a kid and a load of boxes!
Have you noticed how kids and cats are exactly the same? Both investigate boxes. And neither laugh along with you when you slam the lid shut and take them off to the vets. Here are some other things to do with boxes this week apart from lock your baby up in one.

Day 1: Make a feely box.

A wondrous item.

For this, you need a glue gun and 14 extralong gluesticks, so get down the DIY shop.

Next, give your kid away. It is more fun if Tinkertop does not witness the preparation. And this project might be fun for you; you don't need small people asking where are you going? why do you need scissors? what are you doing with daddy's trousers? why are you laughing like that? At this point it would help very much if Tinkertop wasn't hanging onto your leg or eating the gluesticks.

Get your cardboard box. The bigger and stronger, the better.

And clear out your wardrobe. Look for fabric to cut up. Like your leather trousers. I know it's tough, but let's face facts. You bought them to impress kinky Simon with the bleached hair. He disappeared with your bezzy mate and your Duran Duran CD over fifteen years ago. You have never worn the trousers since. Scissors are therapy.

You've started, so may as well continue. Howabout that velveteen red pencil skirt, size 8? If you have a stomach like mine, it has motherhood stamped all over it and it ain't going inside a size 8 pencil skirt ever again. If it does, it is clearly near death's door, and will want comfort food on recovery. Enjoy the sound of those scissors.

Try the faux suede coat. It made you look like road kill. Unlike the bitch of a neighbour, ten years younger and size zero, who looked like a filmstar. Scissors are infinitely more satisfying than a plasticine poppet and pins. With faux suede, no-one can see what you are thinking.

While you're seeking vengeance, find those skinny jeans that gave you a muffin top and consider the pointlessness of Victoria Beckham. You'll feel better for it.

Now you're on a roll. Hack apart that string vest you deny ever having bought in 1988 when Madonna turned them into sex for one week. Afterwards, they became you like Rab C Nesbitt. You know even the Oxfam shop will hand it back.

And why stop with the wardrobe? One turn round the house yields torn net curtain, worn out satin cushion covers and velvet throws covered in vomit. And we haven't even started on the table linen yet. Or the wardrobe belonging to daddy. He's out and will never notice. If he discovers one leg of his linen trousers is missing, you can tell him Tinkertop did it.

By the end of three therapeutic hours you have amassed a fine pile of cut up leather, string, cotton, silk, voile, plastic, linen, satin and nylon, all in a glorious riot of colours and textures.

Unless every item you possess is black. If so, realise this fundamental problem quickly. The RSPCA shop may have a pound rail. Bulk buy fabrics here in every colour but black, bring them home and cut them up instead.

Next, rummage in your drawers. I told you this would be fun.

Five minutes in a cutlery drawer round here and we find cork, wooden blocks, tinfoil, pan scourer, feathers, cardboard, bootlaces, cotton reels and a bent cheesegrater. Perfect. It might suggest why dinner times are problematic.

Back to your big cardboard box. On two sides, cut holes, round enough for your arms to get in.

Set to work on the inside. In our feely box I glued hard stuff like wood, ridged plastic, cold metal, scourer, a small cardboard box, and a bent grater. You might be nice, and line your feely box with soft stuff. Cover the holes in the cardboard with curtains, hanging down on the inside. I used a see-through black polyester fabric from a 1980s Dorothy Perkins top. I'm so classy, it hurts.

Now start on the outside of the box. If it is a box with flaps, bring them together and seal them up with super strong packing tape. Apart from the holes you cut, it should be sealed all the way round. If you used a box with only five faces, you're in trouble. (I thought I'd wait till step 8 to tell you that.)

On all the six faces of your box, get going with the glue and fabric again. Cover every surface. Make it as fantastically Niedojadlo as you can. Do stuff like tie that linen trouser leg at the ankle with a shoelace, then fill it with polystyrene foam, and attach it to side of your box. Keep going, until the childminder rings up and begs.


Voila! Introduce feely box to child! Introduce child to feely box!

Caution. After you have laboured all day with love, burned the skin off your fingers with boiling glue, and cut up your clothes, do not be disappointed if Tinkertop stares indifferently past your box of delight, or is overawed and starts screaming in horror because daddy's leg is glued to the side. Your child might simply need encouragement to approach the box and stick her hands in the holes. At this point, do not say the box contains demons. Say the box contains chocolate. Be brave, Tinkertop, and find the Smarties.

OK, it's a long-term box. You can try and be an uber parent like Grit. Over a year of managing screaming child temper tantrums I sought to use the soft and hard materials of the box as a vehicle for discussing emotions. Like sometimes we say sharp and angry words which feel like cheesegraters; sometimes we feel soft and soothing words like this old suede pocket. It never worked. The only thing that ever worked for Tiger was smashing up her bedroom.

Day 2: The magic story box!
Now that your feely box lies discarded in the front room, try this one. (This takes some setting up, so plan ahead! Now you really feel the benefit of Grit's fantastic guide, don't you?)

Think up a story to tell. One that includes a magic box, obviously, or there's no point. Introduce a padlocked box. I don't know where you get it from. Be resourceful. I used the office petty cash box. Anyway, alongside the padlocked box, offer a range of different keys in envelopes or containers or, better still, put them in the ruddy feely box. Encourage Tinkertop to find the keys, try them all, and find her way into the padlocked box. Is she going to find anything? Link it to your story. And resolve that next time you won't use your car key because now you have no idea where it is.

Day 3: Make your own boxes
Drag some patterns off t'internet. There are loads. If you can't do that, make some up. I bought this book, which I admit is specialist interest, but I was in love with the design teacher at the time, and bellow dust flap, tuck lock, and auto lock bottom all made for a perfect fantasy.

Day 4: Geometry with boxes
You've probably done this because you are smart, but when I realised after two hours I was actually doing maths it was like the dawn of all divine revelation to me.

Collect lots of small containers in different geometric shapes, like cylinders, cubes, spheres, cones. Or give in and buy a set because it's quicker. Fill them all endlessly with coloured rice or beads or anything you won't mind the baby shoving up their nostrils. Sit happily pouring rice from one to the other, talk volume and ask questions like Do boxes have to look rectangular? What's a face? A corner? A solid? Side? End? Perimeter? Angle?

Oh I bet you could go on for hours. Soon you'll be doing singalong Pythagoras while the kids amuse themselves shoving stuff up their nostrils.

Day 4: Living in a cardboard box
After yesterday's hospital visit to remove six beads from Tinkertop's nose, you need to do something calming with boxes. Throw lots of empty boxes, Playmobil, and kids into the hollowed out front room and ask them to make a cardboard city for all the sad homeless people. With a bit of snip snip snip boxes make very good castles, doll's houses, stables, Travelodges, supermarkets and Barratt homes.

If you are really motoring on this one, or blind and careless to the destruction ahead, the kids can paint bricks and rooves and walls and make roads and hospitals and crematoriums and stuff. Hide the matches.

Day 5: How many can you think of?
Looking back to these old diaries, most weeks I included a discussion day. I take that to mean this was the day I threw the kids in the library and tried to hide for a cry in the toilets. Because you are stronger than me, you could make a big picture collage of boxes for your display wall, i.e. the last visible bit of wall in the front room. Cut up magazines or draw pictures of boxes: wooden sound boxes on guitars, shell inlaid music boxes, tin boxes of snuff, pirate boxes of buried treasure, Victorian food boxes, ceremonial scroll-storing boxes, Roman lead coffins. Oh the fun you can have.

Day 6: Get rid of all the bloody boxes
When you can't take any more, tell the kids everyone can play Post Office. Dress them up in polyester uniforms, sellotape up the boxes you've collected, write out address labels to teddies, unicorns, anyone, and create some stamps. Rubber stamp everything like mad with a scowl just like at a proper post office counter. Exchange plastic money. Then take all the boxes to a recycling point and dump them. This is called posting them, and in some circumstances is as good as using the actual post office.

Memo: Check for actual box contents before tipping. Buying a replacement classic pooh bear at £9.95 is not a mistake I recommend to anyone.

Day 7: Travel back in time with your box
By now, you are interested in boxes through the ages, aren't you? Stop watching Doctor Who and read Hans Christian Andersen's The Tinder Box. Come on, do some actions. If you really want to come over all English teacher, draw pictures of the main events on different cards, jumble them up, and ask the kids to put the story back together in proper picture order. Make the dogs especially terrifying.

Hmm. Now I think of it, Tiger's terrible fear of dogs might have started here.

There, Mamacrow. I am all boxed up for the week, and hope you are too.

(And I observe there are actually two day 4s. I thought that was a week of achievement.)

Secretly, I'm enjoying it

Hearing the plea of strangers, Grit drops to the floor and crawls under her desk.

She emerges battered and bruised, forty minutes later, crawling her way past the old hobo, three dead mice and the bandaged remains of a mummified cat. But she is grasping, in her bloodied hand, a torn scrapbook from July 2005.

I have mined a gift of pure gold, and I give it with heart.

Because this big, old, bound book, all scribbled over and covered in dust, contains another of Grit's fantastic seven day educational plans! Yes! I got you reading this far! For that!

But wait, because this fantastic plan also tells you why you should have kids.

Kids are not to eat. They are not to throw out of windows. They are not to sell to passing vagrants for £3.50. No. You can have FUN with kids. And not in weirdy mindbusting spookypervy ways, like home educators are so often accused of. No. Normal, shove-a-pigeon-in-your-ice-box ways that are the stuff of the home educating day.

Read on, committed reader, and find out how to survive seven days with any early-learner troll and lots of WATER.

This is especially for Kelly. And because, some days living with trolls, I know that Monday turns up just when you thought it was Thursday.

Day 1: Provide everyone you meet with an old margarine tub.
Tell them to go fill it with interesting stuff. Glitter. Beads. Buttons. Plastic shapes.

If Squirrel brings you a dead pigeon on the end of a spade, scream, run off, and don't come out of the bathroom till Dig has conducted the funeral.

When the interesting assortment is collected, and you have said OK, you can leave the feathers in just this time, then cover it with lovely coloured water, like dilute blue paint, and stuff it in your freezer. When it's frozen, take it out, put another layer of interesting stuff, and no pigeons or rats or anything like that, and cover it with more water. Let's choose red this time. Like blood. Stuff it back in the freezer.

Keep this going all day. By tea-time you'll be fed up with mixing paint and opening and closing the freezer door every five minutes, but on the plus side, tomorrow you get to watch while the ICE SCULPTURES melt in beautiful sparkling colours all over the office table. Gorgeous. You can foolishly drone on and on about the water cycle if you want. Everyone else, captivated by sparkle, will want to talk the poetry of colour.




Day 2: Eat the ice.
OK, You've all done this, I know, so I'm teaching grandma how to suck eggs. Make fruit juice ice cubes or ice cubes with fruit inside. Make vodka ones for yourself. When it comes time to eat the ice, don't mix everything up.

Put a huge pan of water to boil and fill the room with steam while you crunch ice cubes for sensory impact. While your audience is wondering why the room is full of fog or busy spitting out grape pips, you can talk about temperature, solids, liquids, water vapour, condensation, glaciers, freezing points, why vodka tastes crap anyway, all until the pan burns.

Day 3: Get scientific and make a water clock.
We had a go at this with some polystyrene cups nailed to a plank of wood. Don't do that. Rather, don't do that next to your Dualit toaster. Polystyrene tears off the nails with the weight of the water and tips into your toaster. Anyway, look at it over here. I'm not a scientist. But, if you are a smug bastard, you can do this project in Ancient Greek.

Day 4: More science.
Because the only thing that happened yesterday was that you flooded the kitchen and electrocuted yourself with a Dualit, try this experiment instead.

Fill a deep white dish with hot water from the kettle. Pour coloured cold water slowly into it. The cold water clearly sinks to the bottom of the dish! How amazing is that? Well, it is if you are aged five.

If you are aged thirty-five, you can drone on about density and molecules, and pressure, and anything else you can think of until the fruity ice cubes come out again.

Or you could try a variation of this and draw the attentions of the Social Services. Fill a plastic glove with water and freeze it. When frozen, peel back the glove and you have a perfect severed hand. OK, I accept colouring it green wasn't such a great idea when Shark spent the next week relating how mama stores cut off hands in her freezer.

And placing one at the bottom of her lovely bath wasn't such a great idea, either.

Day 5: Oil and water.
Why don't oil and water mix? Does any oil mix with water? What's an emulsion? How do I wipe it off the floor? Why do you keep walking over it when you know you'll fall over? Why didn't I buy a slippery vat of value liquid which passes as cooking oil for 6p a litre at Tesco instead of the extra virgin hand picked by virgins? You see, I bet you're grateful for all this weekly planning ahead now, aren't you?

Day 6: Storytime.
Oh you don't need me for this one. Read some poems and stories and make some up. Like grandma is afraid of water and rides on the back of a hippo to cross the river down to the Co-op. Everyone knows that is true.

Day 7: Water in a drain near you.
And time to get into those fields, if you haven't already. Rain is good. Dew is excellent. Ditches, I've known a few. Rivers, drains, the guttering, the water butt. I bet the sewage farm will take your home ed group. They took ours. Make a long list of as many water related activities, containers, properties, hazards, employments, uses, storage devices, anything as you can. You'll have enough to last all year. Like you need telling from me.

But if you find yourself home educating and you wonder WTF to do today with small people before they trash the entire house, then I hope these activities help you trash the house first, and I bet that's much more fun when you have small people to help.

Seven days with three four-year olds passed like that

This is not a normal post for gritsday, so look away now, unless you are the person with toddlers, and grateful for any second-hand straw you can snatch hold of.

This post is also because I have some sort of compulsive disorder which necessitates record keeping and planning. It is better than hand washing or counting doorhandles, so look on me kindly, for I could have chosen worse.

You ask, How did you do it? I got through the early years by planning, thinking, doing. Each Friday was my library night, where I would sit alone in the library and throw out new ideas for the weeks ahead, browse books, take time to read, reflect, and think freely.

Because amongst all the four-year old activities of fuzzy felt, TV, den-making, clay, garden play, pizza making, was the project week. Here's the seven-day salvation called Sight.

Day 1: Sight test at Boots opticians.
Check out the optician's cool equipment. She has loads of lenses that clickety click and rattle when she drops them in the slots of the glasses that whizz around your eyes. If she's really cool, and you're really good, she shows you her charts and lenses and colours, and all the zappety-zap pictures she can take of the back of your eyes. We come home and make our own charts which we then hang up all around the house.



Day 2: Dogs Don't Wear Glasses.
Seymore's owner needs glasses. That, and lots of other fun-to-look-at books on wearing glasses from the library. (These days, we only need the emergency library toilet five times.)

Day 3: See through it.
The toy library loans us prisms, moire pattern sheets, and colour paddles. We supply the torch, paper of different thicknesses from transparent tracing paper to opaque card, and we play at science. Don't ask me what we're going to find. There is no lesson plan, no target, no goal. Simply observe. Then say what you see.

Day 4: Coloured vision.
Make glam glasses from paper frames and colored acetate, and see how the world changes colour.




Day 5: Distortion tricks.
Bendy mirrors, curves in metal, reflections from bowls, they all make great distortions. And we might even try and draw what we see.

Day 6: Can you spot?
We explore the pictures of Magritte; we get out the art for kids books; we get busy sticking and pasting collages, the more bizarre, the better.

Day 7: Eye health.
We think up all the jobs and activities where people wear goggles and glasses to protect their eyes: skiers, chemists, swimmers, fire personnel, machine operators. We wonder when is eye protection a good idea? And when is it a nuisance?

I have maybe three or more years of these weeks, all neatly stowed in folders, in boxes, around my feet. Plans, days, photos, resources, notes. Every week a project week. Things to do with birds, bats, water, fish, trees, soil, rock, clay, puppets, buildings, flowers, transport, the colour green, rivers, bridges, the planets...

If you are an autonomous home educator, your eyes will now be rolling around 360 degrees in despair at the early Grit. If you are a school-at-home type of home educator, you can probably map on for me the National Curriculum attainment targets I unwittingly aspired to.

I was the person who lay frozen with fear in bed at 5am and thought I do not want to rise from this bed and know that my heart beats through this day. But if I have a goal to help the driblets make three sets of paper glasses with coloured acetate lenses, I might just make it.

Step by step, the children, and these plans, led me through the early stages of our home education. At first I realised I was doing a better job than the local primary school, that my kids were happy and occupied; then I saw life was opening out with new possibilities that I had not thought about before; soon I was visiting places, wanting to go out, making connections and discoveries in the world, that I could not have done before.

And that's what this week, along with so many others, helped to bring about.

Is that useful?

Don't find it too useful though, because next you might be reading John Holt.