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Yes!! We did it!! We got out and met some new friendly faces and it turns out it was easier than we thought. 

One of the things that living life on the Spectrum does for us is make new places and people more challenging. I have to say though, that sometimes it is my son who is the one leading from the front and today was no exception. 

After a morning in the garden and reading together (still on the Geeky Chef Cook Book) we headed into Hereford together as there was a local meet up of other Mums and kids at a local park. The plan was to go via the library so that we could pick up some new books for him and me. Just as we were arriving, the heavens opened and showed no sign of relenting on the sudden downpour. Not being scared of that “wet-water-stuff” we headed to the park anyway hoping that some folk would still join us, but it was not to be. 

A few minutes later I got a message to say that everyone was meeting at a play centre that we had never been to and was a long, but doable, walk away. I turn to MasterF and enquire on his thoughts given that we were now cold and wet. In months and years gone by, the expected response would have been upset, meltdown and a return home. No one was prouder than me to hear our young man say, “No Mum, we have come this far, I am not giving up now!”.  

“Proud-Mother” does not even begin to cover it ?

We started the day by planting carrots and lettuce in the greenhouse. This is to give us some winter vegetables and we have more seeds on their way to be sown in the next couple of days. 

This is our first planting in the greenhouse over winter to try and see what vegetables we can grow. Then we planted a small amount of carrots outside in the kitchen garden to see how they compare to the ones grown under glass. 

In the evening we did some star gazing in the back garden. We are really lucky to be up high and have very little light pollution near the house. We saw two major constellations and one planet. 

Mars was looking bright and rather red for a planet so far away. The sunlight takes 13 minutes to reach Mars. So if Mars was destroyed we would see it 13 minutes too late. Mars is one of five planets easily visible to the naked eye, the others are Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. We also found that there are 24.7 hours in a Mars day. This means that Mars’ year is 255.5 hours or 10.7 days longer than earth. So we could have an extra long Christmas, birthday or taking a longer holiday. What’s not to like?

Evening Primrose Harvest. We are in the middle of harvesting the flowers from the Evening Primrose crop in the garden. This is because we know it has many uses including as a help for aches and pains. So we are trying a method of making an oil that we can use to rub sore shoulders and feet with. There are other uses that we have planned and will write a blog especially about this. 

Geeky Cookery – Lon Lon Milk. MasterKAF has chosen to cook and make some of the recipes from the Geeky Chef Cookbook and today he chose Lon Lon Milk. 

We are lucky enough to have our own apple tree, so could make applesauce from scratch. MasterKAF helped to peel the apples and did a fab job of reading the instructions to MrsDTB.

We then made our own caramel sauce from sugar, water, butter and cream an blended this and the applesauce with vanilla yoghurt and milk. 

The result was so good that we had to label our own jars just to keep them safe!

Later we learned about Mesquite when reading through the rest of Geeky Cookery book. Even Mrs DTB learned something new today as she had never heard of this leguminous plant.

Tomorrow we are heading into garden as we have cleaned the old greenhouse ready for planting winter veg.

 

This was the interesting lunchtime discussion point which led us to do some research. We thought that City status was based on population and if there was a cathedral. Turns out that this is outdated and just plain wrong!

Most people think they know what a city is – a large, densely-populated, distinct urban area. And a lovely old cathedral is a must.

But when it comes to the UK’s official city status, the cathedral requirement is long defunct, ending in the 19th Century. And size does not matter.

The bounds of city status throw up a plethora of quirks.

There aren’t too many people who would deny that London was a city but in the UK it is not an official one, although it contains two of them – the City of London and City of Westminster.

A place can also stop being a city overnight. Rochester lost its city status in 1998 due to a technical oversight when the local government structure was reorganised. It took four years for them to realise they had lost it.

The definition of a city in the UK is a place which has been granted city status by the monarch. There are 66 cities in the UK – 50 in England, five in Wales, six in Scotland and five in Northern Ireland.

We found that the current population of Reading is an estimated 318,011 but is not a city. Hereford, where we are moving to, has 55,800 and is a city.

After much discussion, we could decide what if any benefit there is to being a city. MasterF believes it is just adult-ish bragging rights!

This morning saw us have a nostalgia filled play sesh with MasterF’s old Transformer collection. This gave us chance to talk about memories of play time in our last house. This is helpful as we are just about to move again and change can sometimes be challenging for us. It helped to realise that even if where we live changes, the memories we hold still remain.

This afternoon we worked on Nessy Spelling and our lad was pleased to find that he had gone up a level again and is over halfway through the course. He commented that he is beginning to make progress, which is a huge step forward in itself, what with self confidence being a challenge for much of the time.

Doodlemaths also went well with today’s new topic being graded at 100% when MasterF was questioned.

Finally we chipped into a new topic on JAM. Our lad has chosen to start the Lego course and is pleased to find that he is at least as good as his peers. He almost posted up one of his own designs today. So confidence is slowly building there too.

So I will take today’s little triumphs and shout them loudly, as they are not just learning milestones, but the beginning of the confidence boost our lad needs after leaving behind the bullies and regime of his last school setting.

MrsDTB is a very happy mummy-tutor right now!

One thing I realise I love about home educating our son is that we can go where the mood and focus takes us. When MasterF gets really interested in something, he finds it hard to come away, as do I funnily enough. Equally when something is challenging, it makes us want to run and hide. Today was a classic example of this.

The morning was focused on Creative writing using a game called Unknown to give us our framework. It’s a way of setting out a story, or in this case, an episode for a TV series.

We created characters, the setting for the episode, devised five scenes and plotted the actions, outcomes and reactions along with some speech too.

MasterF was having so much fun that we spent three solid hours working on this with me mainly writing and reading out the instructions to help move through the game. I was in awe of the creativity, humour and eloquence of our lad. It was a joy to behold. The result is here if you want to have a read.

The afternoon went well in that his session on Nessy which focuses on spelling and grammar went well but Doodlemaths did not. MasterF quickly became frustrated and anxious to the point that I knew no learning would stick, so we stopped and focused on his emotions.

To be able to do this, to focus on what’s most important in that moment, change tack when I need to and not be bogged down with targets and pressure, means I hope, that he is learning and more importantly, is enjoying doing so.

So a good start to our Tuesday. We covered off our usual numeracy and literacy sessions and found that MasterF is almost half way through his Nessy Spelling course after only 6 weeks. Not only that but his Doodlemaths grade has increased to 9.9 years from 9.3 last month.

To top it off though, the bee we rescued earlier yesterday had flown this morning having had a good night’s sleep.

On we go then this afternoon with our first session of Physics/Astronomy followed up with some free play this afternoon as the deck will be in the shade.

“One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.” 
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

I found this quote today as I was setting up the website; a place where we can store all the wonderful things we encounter on our journey. It rings true. Funnily enough it came up in conversation today as my boy and me went about rescuing a bumble bee from the path outside our garden. It was flagging in the heat, just needing a cool place to rest and a drink which we gave it. The process of rescue and recovery prompted a discussion about different types of bees and how they live in hives, or not as is the case with a bumble! 

I am a big believer in going your own way, which is just as well because that is the preferred learning style of our wonderful son. Being able to turn on a sixpence and learn about the world all around us and how we can impact it for the good is a joy and I worry that its something he would not be able to access in the rigidity of a school setting. As Ken said “The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.” 

Welcome and thanks for stopping by!

After a while to give us time to adjust from a very structured school setting, we wanted to create a place where we can store our learning journey, achievements, project work and fun stuff. Primarily the idea is to log the journey for our son, but its possible that the parents may decide to crash the party and post some tales of their own journeys too. Either way we hope it will be interesting and useful to anyone who decides to drop by and spend some time having a look around.