Midsummer Update

We had a lovely belated midsummer celebration on Wednesday. We baked little meat pies inspired by the ones I keep seeing on Marybeth's solstice celebration posts. We made them a bit smaller, in a (12) bun tin - they were very cute and delicious. We also made potato salad with some potatoes from the garden and had some lovely fresh fruit from the market with ice-cream.
Cameron's friend D and his Mum came over and we went to the park although it was too hot for a lot of running around. After we got back they cooled down by washing D's Mum's car - they'd made her a little token for a free car wash too!
We took the leftover pies and salad to the allotment the next day and had another little picnic celebration up there. There are no pics of any of it as we were having so much fun.
Unfortunately I've been overdoing things at the allotment and ended up in A&E on Saturday with tendonitis in my left wrist which is no fun at all. I'm at my wits end knowing what to do with myself - can't knit, bake bread, write, hold heavy books, basically can't do very much of anything I like to do. I've ranted a bit about how it's going to set things back over at the allotment blog.
Sunday was a pretty lazy day although Cameron did a bit of running around in the back street.
Today we did some curriculum work - Cameron has decided to drop the English work as he's getting cross with it. I don't blame him at all, the questions are very obvious and a lot of the activities are busy work (text book designed for classroom use). He's still enjoying everything else though. Briefly, he is covering 2 different sets of maths, mummies and pyramids, the human body, a different art activity/technique every week, a different song every week and a recipe each week. We aren't following the ICT work book but he's learning a lot by getting to grips with his laptop. I'm sure I've missed something out but I can't think what.



This afternoon we decided to go for a walk in the woods, not the cleverest idea when it's 24 degrees and very humid AND when you have to wear a hot sweaty splint on your arm! We didn't even make it all the way around, it was so hot! We came home flushed and sticky. I just looked up the weather report for our area and it's set to stay hot for the next few days so we'll have to find some cool ways to entertain ourselves, neither of us do well in hot humid weather.

New Laptop

Cameron's new laptop arrived last week and he's been having a great time exploring it. We got an ICT workbook with the curriculum box, which I thought might help him find his way around, but it's quite dull and so instead we've been working on skills that are relevant to what he wants to do with the new technology at his fingertips.



At first Cameron just wanted to search shopping sites for Ben 10 figures and tell me all about them. I set him up with Windows Live Messenger so that we could communicate online and improve his typing - we've had a lot of fun with that and Cameron has caught on really quickly to features like emoticons and winks as well as learning some netiquette. This quickly led to learning to copy and paste and me being bombarded with links to Ben 10 figures! He has plans to make an online list of things he thinks are cool, with links, for Christmas presents etc. Of course his tastes will change by then but it's all good practice at navigating his way around programmes and learning new skills.
He has found the UK and US Ben 10 websites and has been hooked by a game creator activity which he worked out himself and has made some pretty good ones. It gives you the option to send your game to Cartoon Network when you make one you're really pleased with which can be added to a gallery (I think other people can then play the game you've created), this required him to sign up as a member to the site which was a lot of fun because you have to pick yourself a silly name from a set of lists. I'd been resisting giving Cameron a lot of access to the internet and technology in general as I had thought it would stop him doing other things but actually it's been sparking his imagination and creativity. I came to realise over the last few months that technology and internet savvy-ness are pretty important skills for living in our modern world and I had to let go of some of my hang ups about it and let Cameron have a proper go. He has taken to it like a duck to water and I have no doubts that before too long he will know more than me.

Offline - Cameron has been continuing with his national curriculum work and progressing well. The weather has been extremely wet so we haven't had much chance for allotment work and when it was sunny we had some family trouble that meant we missed the opportunity to celebrate the solstice/midsummer in the way that we had wanted. We are planning to have a late celebration sometime this week and are looking forward to that.
Cameron spent his pocket money this week on some old Pokemon magazines, the first and second issues which explain the start of the whole story. He's becoming interested in manga and Pokemon seems like a good place to start. I had a flick through the magazine and it looks like something that would appeal to him, lots of numbers and categories and facts to remember.
The interest in money has continued and Cameron emptied our piggy bank to see how much we had and enjoyed counting the coins and putting them into piles etc. Inspired by the Gala we visited a few weeks ago, Cameron has been making fairground games for his own Camix theme park. Games such as knocking down a cut out of Evil Guy with tennis balls to win Camix prizes. He plans to charge people to enter the theme park (aka the living room!).



We have been to a few home ed groups recently which are still a bit hit and miss as to whether they are successful visits for Cameron. There seems to be an abundance of home educated boys around his age at the moment though which is great. Tomorrow we have another visit from his friend D and D's Mum who we meet up with regularly and Cameron does a little bit better on a one to one basis on his own turf.
Later on today we are going to make some changes to the nature table/plate/area to reflect the change of season which is always fun.

Apologies

I'm sorry to everyone who tried to access this blog over the weekend. I wont go into too many details, but someone very close to home, who I am not on good terms with, found my blog and I felt the need to reassess what it is that I'm doing and whether what I write would be hurtful to people who read. After they spent over 105 minutes on the blog and viewed 62 pages, I felt the need to make it private until I'd done this.
When I started this blog it was so that I could keep a personal record of our journey, something to look back on and gain knowledge from. As I progressed, I joined the home ed blog rings and enjoyed sharing and being part of the community. Over time, I've attracted readers from many different circles - and that's great. I've really enjoyed comments and messages, on the blog and privately, and have had the opportunity to help people considering home education as well as receiving advice and support for myself.
I purposely didn't invite family to read this blog because it isn't a full record of what we do, I don't include every nugget of information about our lives, and I didn't want it to become like a school report that those close to me could visit and pick at.
Over the whole time I've been writing, naively, it never occurred to me that family might stumble (intentionally or not) over this blog and what they might make of it and so perhaps I haven't taken as great care over their feelings as I might have if I'd thought it through. It is my place, to rant, share the good days and the bad and I don't want to lose it. I gain a lot from being part of the blogging community.
Over the weekend I have been through every post on this blog, at first to edit - in case I'd said something offensive about family during a bad time that now, out of context, could be seen differently. I have edited a very small amount of things but my overwhelming reaction was that actually this is a nice blog, I'm very confident in the choices we have made about how to live our lives, we have recorded some really special moments here and I have nothing to be worried, embarrassed or ashamed about. Therefore I am opening the blog back up to all readers. The only change being that comments will now be moderated.
I hope new and regular visitors will continue to enjoy visiting here and reading our adventures and that those who visit in order to judge us will be surprised to be proven wrong.

How it's going

Cameron's curriculum arrived yesterday and he had a bit of a tizz about it as it wasn't exactly as he had expected and the pages on some of the text books are made from a kind of paper he hates because it squeaks. We chatted about what he wants to get from it and what I can do to help and decided to try out the first days work and see how it went. He finished the full set work for the day in less than an hour and decided to do some extra sums as well as he was enjoying them. He even sang along with the music CD (and me) to English Country Garden, as the schedule told us, which is a massive thing as he has been very self conscious about learning songs in the past, especially when someone else can hear him.
Today Cameron followed the scheduled work again, some maths, english and science. He raced through it in less than an hour again, some was easier than yesterday, some was more challenging. I did some of the scribing for him at one point as he wanted to concentrate on his answers rather than writing them down.
Some of it is pretty boring compared to following your own interests and Cameron gets frustrated by having to follow the rules and being told what to do by a book (all still motivated by him though, I'm not enforcing anything) but something I've really noticed is that he's getting a kick out of getting things right and is gaining confidence from it. Not just confidence about being right, but it's lifting this fear that he's had hanging over him since his old school peers have been teasing him about not knowing "stuff". It didn't matter how many times I explained that he was learning lots of other "stuff" that was relevant to him, he needed proof that he could do their stuff too - and he can. He's also absolutely fine following the level he would be doing in school, despite not following the national curriculum for over 2 years, so the "stuff" that is considered oh so important is obviously achieved naturally anyway. Cameron is keen to continue and has worked out for himself that if he carried on, even at 1 hour a day, he could well end up ahead of his school peers in no time at all and still have plenty of time left to do all the other things he loves to do.

Today we dug up some potatoes from a bucket in the garden - the Rocket potatoes from the British Potato Council freebies - just enough for tea tonight!



We also picked the first pod of peas.



I'm really glad we have things growing in the back yard that we can enjoy while we wait for the allotment to produce something edible.
Cameron really enjoyed digging and searching through the bucket for potatoes and afterwards he made a game with a cardboard box where he filled it full of soil and asked me to hide treasure for him to dig up!

Gala Day

We went to the local gala today. We set off early to find a good spot to watch the precession but we got bored waiting and had a bit of fun making scary faces - it was hilarious!













We had fun watching the different floats go by, it was a bit like an exhibition of extra curricular activities, Cameron's favourite was the boys football float because they were being rowdy and shouting football chants.
We wandered along the canal to the park where the funfair was. It was really noisy and overwhelming but Cameron coped really well. He went on the tea cups first



then hooked a duck and won a goldfish (who has been named Super Fisher and will be shortly appearing in a Camix comic)



Next was a spaceship ride which had a handle for him to decide when to go up and down



After that we wandered around a bit looking for Grandma and cousins but couldn't find them so Cameron chose to go in the fun house (now known as the NOT fun house). Cameron doesn't do escalators or anything like that so the fun house was a big challenge. There were several points where I thought I was going to have to go in and rescue him as he was screaming but he managed to get out OK in the end! No pics of that as it was too traumatic.
Lastly he ummed and ahhed over whether to choose ice cream or candy floss for a treat. Ice cream won out and it was a fancy whippy machine that swirls the sauce into the ice cream.



We usually avoid this kind of thing but we had a good day in the end. A short and sweet visit seems to be the solution.

A Dark Day for Home Educators

I've been struggling to find the words to write here all week, anticipating the report from the review on elective home education in England. Details here for those from other countries. I still haven't found the words to express my anger at the way this whole thing has/is being handled so am not going to talk much about it here, many others on the blog rings are far better at the political stuff than me.
This week Cameron made a request I thought I'd never hear - he asked that we do "school work", specifically he said that he'd like to follow and keep up with the work his peers are doing in school. It's all part of a desire he has at the moment to be a "normal kid" although he said he absolutely doesn't want to go to school. So we went curriculum hunting and found something that appealed to us both. It cost a small fortune but was adapted to Cameron's needs at no extra cost. We are just waiting for it to arrive now. Cameron has decided that he would like to do 3 hours of formal work in the mornings and then follow his own interests for the rest of the time. I think 3 hours may turn out to be too much but I am following his lead.
I feel a bit sheepish about telling people we are going to be following a curriculum at the exact time the review has come out and want to make it clear that we are not rolling over and pandering to the authorities. Whatever path we choose to take in Cameron's education we will always fight for the right for choice and freedom in education - just needed to get that off my chest!
Cameron's computer died a death this week so, much to his delight, we have ordered a spanky new laptop for him so that he will have more freedom about where he uses it. It has been an expensive week!
Cameron is spending most of his time reading at the moment, devouring everything he can get his hands on. He is very money motivated at the moment and enjoying doing jobs for money and counting his savings regularly. He likes to work out how much he's got, how much he will have in X amount of weeks, what he could buy, what he could do to earn more money. He drives a very hard bargain with prices and I'm being royally fleeced for everything I've got! At one point he tried to charge me 10p for every time I did something embarrassing (which is everything your Mum does when you're 9 apparently!).
And just because I hate to post without adding a picture - here's one of him painting in the garden this afternoon.

A New Obsession

I only got one recommendation for my lunch query but my goodness was it a great one! Thank you so much to Jax for suggesting Bentos. I searched flickr for "bento" and got over 100,000 results, most of which as pictures of people's lunch boxes with the most amazing inspiration - lunch will never be dull again!
I have purchased some proper bento boxes and stuff from eBay but in the meantime I had a go at a bento inspired lunch to take up to the allotment today. Here it is:



Pesto pasta with sweetcorn, carrot stars, cucumber stars, and parmesan cheese, yum! When I gave Cameron his lunch at the allotment today he said "why do you make such delicious lunches?!", I think that means he liked it!

I've set up a seperate blog for allotment news so that I don't clog this space with gardening stuff. We would love it if you would like to follow our allotment journey, we have called the blog Home Grown Education.

Monday & Picnic Advice

Today we finally got our own lock on the gate/door at our allotment. We spent a while there cleaning out the shed this morning but couldn't do much else without all our tools and things up there.



We came home and spent some time reading in the sun after lunch, Cameron is getting stuck into a fictional story set in WW2 that he ordered from the school library service. Then he did some bubble blowing. We watched a very sad episode of Little House on the Prairie and generally pottered for the rest of the afternoon.



This evening my Dad gave us a lift up to the allotment with all our stuff which was a huge help. Cameron enjoyed showing off our new space and was particularly proud of his stamped out path, of which we were treated to a guided tour.
I spent some (read: most) of my day thinking about the time we will be spending at the allotment and ways to make it fun for Cameron after the novelty wears off. My thoughts turned to picnic/pack-up lunches and I'm having a total mental block about ideas.



For tomorrow I've made homemade veggie pizza and some disappointing pretzels for snacks (a recipe I won't be trying again) but they can be spruced up with a dip of some kind, fruit and drinks.



I want to be able to pull out the stops and bring spectacular, show stopping lunches, particularly as I'm not sure how much energy I'll have for making big meals for tea after days of hard digging for the foreseeable. There is a lovely chapter in Festivals Family & Food about picnics but a lot of it is egg based - flans, quiches, mayonnaise etc. and we have quite sensitive, aspie tummies for what I call "high risk" foods, particularly when they are more high risk by hanging around in the shed all morning (and there are no toilets at the allotments!). So... I'm hoping you guys will help out with ideas for pack-ups and picnic lunches, preferably sans egg or yoghurt or anything else that is "high risk".
No idea too simple or extravagant, we'd love to hear your ideas and favourites - do comment!