And the paper-based evidence

Yes, education of your recognisable variety goes on.

Thus be assured, ye maiden chained to the Local Council Drone Desk. We home educating clans do stuff other than lolling about, reading books, complaining about schools today, swotting up on Latin because we're all terrified of the fortnightly Latin teacher, and going squishy-eyed at cute baby seals. We have Geography sessions!

Admittedly, they involve cake, somehow, but they also necessitate maps and tribal warfare team games.

See, sorted. Now don't look to count them as neets, thanks.

Geography at the shopping centre

Dear Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre, I would just like you to know that Squirrel is outraged by your sales and security staff.

Here we are, all fired up with Chapter 4 of a Geography IGCSE - in which we must find out how raw materials are processed then sold, what LICS are, and how Monsoon pull that slippery branding trick on a frock stitched in a Chinese Special Economic Zone - and we don't even get thrown out of your shoe shops. It simply isn't good enough.

I set our lovely home ed Geography group the activity of finding out where goods have come from. For this one, Squirrel and Shark decide to take themselves off to a shoe shop. Shark sat down with a clipboard while Squirrel picked up every boot on sale yelling out the country of manufacture. Shark solemnly wrote it all down. (Brazil, mostly.) After ten minutes, no-one had challenged them. No-one at all. Shark began flapping her clipboard about and Squirrel began sticking her head under the display racks, shouting out random nation names in the hope of being arrested. Mexico! Spain! India! Burkina Faso! Nobody paid them a blind bit of notice. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Now this could be the ordinary range of behaviour any ordinary teenager can exhibit in a shoe shop in Central Milton Keynes on a Monday morning, when we are all supposed to be under threat by terrorists and extremists, and they are supposed to be in school.

If so, I am delighted. Squirrel, as I said, was not. She felt it was the duty of all shoe shop uniform holders to come out their holes and provide a free lecture on third-sector economy. Failing that, to kick them out. I suggested next time, they could ask for a floor manager and pump him with questions until he covertly bribed them with chocolate to go away. After all, it was a strategy that worked in Tesco.

Catching up with a gentle economics questionnaire in CMK's Winter Wonderland.

Titchwell marsh to Hunstanton cliff

Example of managed retreat and old rocks. Perfect. Especially for budding geologists, beach explorers, and the 1960s educated hippie mama who thinks that seeing, touching, feeling, smelling (and eating the gravel if necessary) is all a fitter education for the juniors than staring forlornly at page 32 of a secondhand geography text book.

(Plus, big plus, while the two boilers at home are still not working, there is a hot shower to be had at the King's Lynn Premier Inn.)

A load of seals and some spit

Take a boat trip round Blakeney, north Norfolk. We are not here to watch 500 cwt of seal blubber flop about on beaches with white fluffy seal pups, oh no we're not. We're here to observe the development of a sand and shingle coastal feature aka a spit.

Cute huh?

Go during the school term, that's my strong advice.

The erosion continues

We have to walk this bit of the south coast path quickly, before it too falls into the sea. 

Here then, our intrepid iGCSE Geography group walking Lulworth Cove to Durdle Door. I make everyone chant five rocks from Portland Cement to Softy Chalk then we prove how we can put one foot in front of the other and stop to squint an eye through a hill-measuring thingy I bought off the internet for a tenner. Squirrel spends hours in her favourite rock-staring posture and I write elegiac poetry on pebbles, thankful in my heart for England's beautiful coast and another educational excuse to get here.

There was indeed a visitor centre

Return to Chesil Beach, this time with focus (study tombolo formation and waves), but mostly (for me at least) thankful for the visitor centre, which I don't recall from last time, but I am sure is much improved. I make a fuss about everything in an attention-seeking manner, mostly for the benefit of superly handsome man serving me coffee. It is a tactic which doesn't get me anywhere, of course not, it just makes me sound like a proper annoying old bat, from which you'd think I'd learn. But I never do. Anyway, apart from old woman behaviour a la Dick Emery, there is, at Chesil Beach, a warm and welcoming visitor centre, a billion pebbles sorted by size, and a right fierce wind where we can spend all our time playing.

A combination which I find strangely satisfying.

Coastal engineering

Let's call it that, yes, let's call this day A Study of Coastal Engineering (hard or soft) for a Geography IGCSE curriculum.

Otherwise, the day might look suspiciously like enjoying a walk along part of England's south coast path, exploring mud, playing in Lyme Regis, adding to Shark's seaweed collection, and picking apart the beach at Charmouth to find pyritised ammonites. And that doesn't sound like a Geography syllabus at all, at all.

Makes six coastlines

Recipe for edible clay:

1 1/2 cup sugar
1 1/3 cup shortening
1 cup cocoa powder
4 eggs

4 cups flour 

Mix ingredients in order. If the dough is sticky, add more flour. 

Go on, throw it about a bit; it's not fatal. In my experience it doesn't matter what quantities you fuss over; you simply need a dough the kids can work by hand and with tools. 

Divide into balls and have your geography lesson shape their lumps into a coastline. Or a map of South America. Or Africa. Or mountains and valleys. Or anything.

Bake at 375 F for 10-12 minutes or until done. Any fule no how icing sugar makes great rivers. Seas. Estuaries. Ports. Reservoirs...

Off to the coast!

Yes, geography is ongoing, as always. But in home ed land, geography must be very practical, and experience-based, otherwise we aren't doing it.

Oh dear. Chapter 2 is coastal features.

We haven't got a coast. And it's an awful long drive to one.

Instead! We have a local river! We can make the coast come to us!

(Be prepared to use your imagination. A LOT.)

Task: Imagine you are very, very tiny. Create a river from source to mouth. 

You have 45 minutes to do that because it's going to rain. 

The Grit parent will meanwhile come along and give you challenges, like a national policy to build a power station, 

or a local demand that soft engineering is installed, or a controversial decision to give all the coast to the RSPB. 

Stuff like that. 

Then you must tell the complete story of your river and coastline features to all the group.

(p.s. water may flow uphill for the purposes of this activity.)

Shark immediately sets about making a delta and a salt marsh.

 Squirrel makes a volcanic island barely able to stay above the water

Monster digs a limestone cave

And Tiger builds all of Cambridgeshire, complete with drainage ditches that look like claw marks.

Industry wants to colonise Shark's salt marsh (the plastic cone), which she negotiates very well by examining water flows, run-off, industrial waste, and installs a person who comes round and takes water readings to ensure the eco system (the green foam) is able to maintain its SSSI status. Well done, Shark!

Squirrel spends most of her time defending her island against the sea. 

She doesn't move from this defensive position for quite some time. I can, so I am told, go away with my power station 

and plans for national development for her island because it is not up for grabs. It is a private island, now clear off.

 Monster incorporates agricultural land, an industrial complex, a beach, settlement, roads and everything.

As I said, we have to use our imagination. A lot.

 Tiger creates an impressive deep-water harbour with heavy-duty coastline engineering, plus industrial units, power plants, high-rise settlements and road infrastructure but says no to off-shore wind power and I am not arguing. She has become threatening with Cambridgeshire and is ordering everyone off her county or else.

This is Lincoln and don't you forget it.

There! Off we go home happy from our morning's study, before it tips down. And I think I shall count this as another triumph for an active interpretation of a Geography IGCSE syllabus, coastal features.