What Home Education Looks Like - 30th November 2012

Table top sale at our local home ed group. Papaya and friend spent as much as they earned!

Povey was distracted by the Minecraft posse the other side of the room!

What Home Education Looks Like - 23rd November 2012

They really are monkeys!

What Home Education Looks Like - 16th November 2012

That just looks like a hedge right...... look again, I think you'll find it's actually an exercise centre! ;)

Multiple Intelligences

Back when I was doing my degree I studied Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences, and I instantly felt it made perfect sense when I thought of the people I knew, all talented in different ways!
For some reason it slipped my mind over the past 10 years and I never thought of considering it in relation to my own children.

It popped back into my head the other day and I searched around and found this online test you can apply to your children to get a broad idea of where their talents lie and which learning styles would suit them.

Here are the results for my two, as I suspected their results look very different from each other!

Papaya's results....
Linguistic - 2
Logical - 1 
Spatial - 9 
Bodily - 8 
Musical - 2 
Interpersonal - 4 
Intrapersonal - 2 
Naturalistic - 5 

 I wasn't surprised at the high scores for Spatial and Bodily for my artistic, observant, physical girl.... I was surprised at how high the score was for Naturalistic though and it's made me resolve to get them to the woods even more.

Povey's results.....
Linguistic - 7 
Logical - 4 
Spatial - 3 
Bodily - 2 
Musical - 5 
Interpersonal - 6 
Intrapersonal - 1 
Naturalistic - 1 

 Again I wasn't surprised at high scores for Linguistic and Interpersonal for my chatty, social boy... in his case though I was surprised at how high his musical score was.... but again maybe I shouldn't have been as he is always singing away to himself :)

 Interesting to know, and useful information to store away for future reference.

Portal to a change of mindset

We're still "deschooling" but I've already been surprised by how much the children are learning. The more we do and the more I read we seem to be being led towards "unschooling".... although I think I prefer the term "interest-led learning" :)

Permanently in my browser right now I have a tab with the Randomiser page from Sandra Dodd's website. Sandra Dodd is an unschooling advocate who has published articles and a book on the subject. She has three children who were always unschooled and all her writing is full of the most wonderful calm, common sense advice. The randomiser page is lovely, it has an image (by the talented Bo King) of what could be seen as an elevator, portal or doorway.

By having this page permanently in my browser I can click each day to be taken to advice and wise words which somehow always seem to be pertinent to my current thoughts. When I was wondering what to do about how much freedom to give the children it took me here.... when I was worrying about how much time Povey spends on the iPad it took me here... and when it seemed all the children had done all day was argue it took me here. It doesn't have all the answers, but it's definitely been a great springboard for my own thought processes. That little portal is helping me deschool ;)

What Home Education Looks Like - 9th November 2012

Scarily tech-savvy kids!

What Home Education Looks Like - 2nd November 2012

Trying to find ways to motivate and inspire the boy. These Lego minifigure crayons got him colouring and writing enthusiastically!

They were super easy to make, just using an ice cube mould from the Lego store with bits of crayon broken  into them and then melted in the oven. He need never use a boring normal crayon again ;)