Archive Posts Selection

This is a selection of archive posts from around 2005-2008, originally posted on my Multiply blog, and my Svengleska Hemskolan on UK Blogger. The original dates are lost due to the way that the data was saved.

Barbary Pirates

Our read-aloud for the younger children at the moment is “Doctor Dolittle” by Hugh Lofting. It’s absurdly politically incorrect, so I’m having to edit a lot as I go along, but lots of fun! The bizarre adventures seem to just appeal to young children’s sense of the ridiculous! On Friday we found our living room full of car-seats as Daddy was using the car as a van for the day… Mummy was horrified, but the children quickly took stock of the situation and saw that it made a great pirate ship/ bus/ islands in the pacific etc. Hours of fun!

Motor-Biker Becomes Spider-Man-Boy

We have a ton of birthdays occurring over the festive season! My Dad’s before Hanukkah, my nephew’s on 25th December, Motor-biker’s on 2nd, my best friend’s on the 5th January and then our uncle’s on the 13th.

It’s always a little difficult to manage to get what they want in time, because I always forget that the shops will be closed! But this year Motor-biker only wanted one thing: to be Spiderman!

This time, it was quite easy, and my does he look cute!

* Edit: we have scoured through our photo archives to find a pic of Motor-Biker as Spider-Man, but no joy. I can’t believe there never was any photo evidence, but it seems to be doing a very good job of hiding itself now.

Languages, Shmanguages!

We were invited to join one of our homeschool groups’ German classes last week, which really pleased me because I had planned to start looking at German this term.

My intention with languages has always been to give the children a ‘taste’ so that they can get a feel for a language and then maybe choose to take it up later. We’ve tried Swedish (sadly much less successfully than I had hoped), Spanish and German previously with no real interest shown. On the other hand, we’ve picked up Latin and Hebrew which have both proven to be very popular with all the children (and Dragon-tamer showed some initial interest in Greek, but we haven’t pursued it).

Dragon-tamer has asked at various times to try Japanese and Icelandic, but I have had to put him off for the time being. Icelandic I know from trying to teach myself, as well as a year in Old Norse during my Scandinavian studies degree course at UCL, and let me tell you that Icelandic is comparable to Latin in its complexity. We might give it a go one of these days, but there is a real scarcity of good materials available in the UK for learning Icelandic.

So anyway, now that we’ve signed up for German and said we’ll definitely be going again, I got phone call telling me that the Hebrew classes have started up again.

(((sigh)))

We have tried several different Hebrew classes, but none of them have been quite ideal – the German class was so wonderfully geared to children (and mixed age range children at that), whereas the Hebrew was aimed at adults and the children were getting nothing out of it, plus the fact that the last one we tried was held at someone’s house meant firstly that the room wasn’t big enough to sit in a way which would encourage learning, and secondly there was more time spent chatting than learning. Perhaps I sound miserable and unfriendly, but honestly I just don’t have time for it with homeschooling.

So as it stands, we’re going for German and we’ll have to make do with my amateur teach-as-you-learn method of Hebrew classes at home. I like it better that way really. That way we can concentrate on Dragon-tamer’s Bar Mitzvah* portion at the same time as teaching the little ones their alef-bet, and everyone’s happy (we hope).

* Edit: Dragon-Tamer decided not to pursue a Bar Mitzvah. (Although I do have some Jewish heritage, let’s just say it’s complicated, and although Dragon-Tamer still identifies as ‘Jewish-ish’, they are not religious).

Sonlight Curriculum Users in the UK

I took part, as a former Sonlight user and emeritus creator of the group, in a lovely Zoom conversation yesterday with some of the ladies from the New Sonlight Curriculum Users UK group on facebook.

The first home educator I ever met in person recommended Sonlight to me, and we ordered our first curriculum package (K for Kindergarten, as it was then) in 1999/ 2000.

Sonlight is an American Christian programme and, as such, I might not have picked it for my first choice, had I been non-religious as I am now. Having said that, I am so very glad that I did. With the exception of a very few titles that are written from a very conservative and/ or evangelical perspective, we enjoyed every one. In fact, we laughed, cried and passionately loved our Sonlight books. The highlight of our home education years was ‘Unboxing Day’, when the package from Sonlight Curriculum arrived.

When I took a turn towards Judaism, however, some of the books did begin to present as problematically skewed to Christianity, for obvious reasons.

Having wrestled over many years with my dual heritage, I would have liked to include more specifically Jewish titles, but I do not in any way regret the years of wonderful Sonlight books.

One of the things we learned along the way was that, as a literature-based curriculum, it was possible to read and discuss each title from our own perspective and frame of reference. Unlike many other American, Christian curriculum options, Sonlight is not scripted, although it does offer suggestions for questions and discussion.

Would I still recommend Sonlight to new home educators? Yes, I think I would, although I might steer secular home educators, or those home educating from another religious perspective, toward Sonlight’s secular programme Bookshark, which from what I can see, is the same selection of books, minus the specifically religious ones and, although I haven’t seen the Teacher’s Guides (or are they called Instructors’ Guides these days?) I would imagine that the questions, notes and suggested discussion prompts are more neutral than Sonlight’s (although again, I would emphasise that Sonlight is really quite impressively intelligently worded and constructed considering it is a religious curriculum).

Last night’s group Zoom will hopefully be repeated, perhaps on a regular basis for the benefit of new home educators as well as us ‘oldies’, so if you are interested in using Sonlight please do join the fb group!

Archive Post: Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze

We mentioned this book in our archive post yesterday, and so I thought I would share this short archive diary post about reading it. It’s not quite a book review, as it was part of a larger project, but I remember enjoying it.

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We are in the middle of a project on China at the moment. We are loosely following Sonlight curriculum’s 5th grade programme “Eastern Hemisphere” (previously called “Non-Western Cultures”) which is literature-based, and we are using a ‘read-aloud’ called “Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze” by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. We are just over half-way through it, and the older children (nearly 11 and 6 1/2) are enjoying it. The two younger ones tend to either play with brio trains or run about in the garden if they don’t feel like listening. We also made a giant map of China which the younger children also got involved with colouring.

(We did take a photo of this when we borrowed the PDA from Schome, but I’m still working on loading it properly).

Motor-biker started writing in the cutest workbook I’ve even seen (it’s almost too good to use!) “Alfie Gets Ready to Write” by Shirley Hughes. It doesn’t seem to be on Amazon, and it’s bizarre that I couldn’t find it listed on the internet at all, and… it doesn’t have an isbn number. I bought it from Books for Children club, so I’m guessing it was specially created and printed as a club exclusive.

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Editor’s notes:

This post was originally published on my Svengelska Hemskolan and Multiply blogs in around 2008.

I seem to remember that our China project was the last unit study we did with Sonlight before I got ill and we moved from Milton Keynes to Cornwall. I’m not entirely sure whether or not we even finished it. We loved our Sonlight years and, although now I am not religious we probably would choose a more secular curriculum, one of the beauties of Sonlight and indeed any literature based curriculum is that you can discuss it from your own perspective, unlike a lot of American curriculum which tends to tell you exactly what to say and what to think.

I did look for ‘Books for Children Club’ to link to it, but that doesn’t seem to exist now either, although there seem to be several children’s book clubs that have replaced it. If you use one and recommend it, please comment and let me know!

Archive Post: Jip, the Cleverest Dog in the World!

Some of the children experimented with painting this morning (mostly finger painting with white paint on black paper), and making pop-up cards based on ideas on Robert Sabuda’s website (author of “Prehistorica: Dinosaurs” and “Prehistorica: Sharks & Sea Monsters” with Matthew Reinhart).

We finished reading Dr. Dolittle today which was bitter-sweet: the children enjoyed the book and the ending was good, but sad because it had come to an end. Pony-rider drew a picture of Jip being presented a golden collar by the Mayor of the small town, which read “Jip, the Cleverest Dog in the World” from the story in chapter 20. We have a pile of new books to choose from next, but I may not start another until we’ve finished “Young Fu”.

In the afternoon, we listened to CDs, and Pony-rider & Tipper-trucker danced (…became trucks… then a pushme-pullyou…) to the music, while Dragon-Tamer experimented with the scanner/ photocopier… and when it wouldn’t do what he wanted, went on to reading (mostly “The Art Book” published by Phaedon which introduces a wide range of artistic styles.

Motor-biker is still poorly and subdued so the walk I had planned is postponed. Dragon-Tamer decided to read to the younger children, and “Ursula Bear” by Shiela Lavelle was selected. They’ve been having a fair amount of trouble getting on recently, so it was a real joy to see them all huddled up together happily on the sofa. 🙂

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Editor’s note: This post was originally published on my ‘Svengelska Hemskolan’ blog (and my blog on ‘Multiply’) in around 2006/7 when the children would have been around 4, 6, 8 and 12. I had forgotten that Baba Zonee briefly chose to call himself ‘Tipper-trucker’. That didn’t last! This excerpt of a random day so long ago is a reminder of how joyful home education could be, how it’s possible to seemlessly include a range of subjects informally and how much I would still recommend home education now that my children have moved on to school, college, university and the world, with their love of learning and thirst for knowledge still intact.

Archive Post: Sommarstängt

This is a summer post, I thought you might enjoy during these long, dark days of winter.

I’d have to date this post, from my old blog Svengelska Hemskolan, to around 2006 when for a year or so we joined the local Swedish cultural and language school (in Milton Keynes) for bilingual kids on a Saturday morning.

Svenska skolan has finished up for the summer now, and by all accounts, it seems that most of our Swedish friends have somehow wangled enough holiday to spend the whole summer in Sverige!

When we lived in Stockholm we were amazed by the amount of shops which closed up completely for the summer, content to lose any potential tourist business, while their owners spent the summer in their sommarstugor in the Skärgården, or abroad. That would be completely unheard of in the UK! Of course there is no direct translation of sommarstängt in English because we don’t do it (close for the summer), as far as I know!

The most disappointing implication of the sommarstängt culture was that, when we spent the summer on Lidingö, we found that our local library was sommarstängt the whole summer, which meant we had to take long bus trips to the main library in Lidingö town. No great hardship, I grant you, but irritating nonetheless!

Perhaps it all boils down to jealousy? I rather fancy taking a couple of months off myself. I’d probably have to take the children along though. Hmm. Not much point really, might as well stay put.

Vocabulary:

Svenska – Swedish

Skola – School, definitive (the) school = skolan

Sverige – Sweden

Sommarstugor (plural of sommarstuga) – holiday cabins

Skärgåden – the Swedish Archipelago

Lidingö – a beautiful island just outside Stockholm, where we lived the second summer of our year and a bit in Sweden

Sommarstängt- Closed for the Summer

p.s. This edited archive post is part of my commitment to write 50,000 words in November for NaNoWriMo (normally reserved for novel writing)!

Home Educating with Chronic Illness

As you will know, if you have seen this blog/ website before, or indeed my old ‘Little Bears’ website or the ‘Svengelska Hemskolan’ before it, that I home educated my 4 children from 1999 to 2018.

In the case of my eldest, who went to nursery (‘Dagis’, short for Daghem which translates as ‘Day Home’) when we lived in Stockholm, that was home education from age 4 to age 16 when they went into Sixth Form at the local High School, and in the case of my 2 youngest, from birth to age 14 when they went into school for their GCSEs, and in the case of my middle kid from birth to 18 when they went to Art College for Sixth Form (the two eldest who went straight into Sixth Form had to do catch-up GCSE Maths and English). We had hoped to manage some GCSEs or iGCSEs from home but for various reasons we didn’t do that.

What you may not know is that, from 2003 and again from 2012, we were battling with living with Chronic Illness. In my case, it took over ten years to get a diagnosis so for a very long time I didn’t really know what I was dealing with (I was eventually diagnosed with ME, Fibromyalgia and Histamine Intolerance, along with a long list of co-morbidities that come along under the ME and Fibro umbrellas. And then in the case of my son (Motor-biker, aka Tigger), the diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes which was diagnosed as an emergency. Thankfully we caught it just in time as he was in severe Diabetic Keto-acidosis and had to spend 8 days in hospital. His younger brother (Baba Zonee) was also diagnosed this year, also in DKA, but very much less severe and, since he was already 18, only had to spend a single night in hospital. Again, we are supremely grateful for the NHS at every stage of diagnosis and care.

November is Diabetes Awareness Month and so I thought I would take this opportunity to raise awareness of the symptoms and warning signs of Type 1 (Autoimmune) Diabetes.

Essentially, you need to remember all the T’s: Tired, Toilet, Thinner and Thirsty. Another ‘T’ that is often left off these lists is ‘Tummy-ache’ which in the case of Motor-Biker, was his prominent symptom and which disappeared as soon as Insulin was administered.

The reality of home educating with Chronic Illness is of course that it is not easy. But it’s a kind of double-edged sword. From conversations I have had with other T1D parents and indeed with other parents with ME and/ or Fibromyalgia, I certainly get the impression that the struggle to get the children to school, and then the worry of the school mis-managing the condition in the case of T1D seems to be far more taxing that home educating was, even with those conditions.

Some advantages of Home Educating with Chronic Illness include:

1. You’re at home!
   It sounds obvious, but home is where all your kit is, and it’s likely to be a much more relaxed atmosphere which is automatically more conducive to learning.
   
2. Freedom to make your own Timetable
   Instead of forcing your illnesses to accommodate the school’s timetable, you can create a flexible timetable that accommodates the reality of the illness (some specifics relevant to Type 1 Diabetes include being able to eat, drink, go to the toilet and inject/ treat hypos wherever and whenever you need to. I can’t tell you how many stories of teachers and staff inappropriate restricting these activities because they don’t understand how T1D works!)
   
3. Less Pressure to Dress
   I wouldn’t want to give the impression that we were always sitting around in our pyjamas, but it did happen. If I was particularly unwell in the mornings, things like washing and getting dressed could be delayed without affecting educational activities (you’d be amazed how much you can achieve in pyjamas!)
   
4. Miss Less School
   Even though my illness completely debilitated me at times, we rarely if ever missed a day of ‘school’. Even when I couldn’t read aloud there was always something educational we could do.
   
5. Appointments in Term Time
   A related point is that, due to the freedom of home education, you are free to schedule appointments in term time, and even travelling time need not mean missed lessons, if you take advantage of ideas such as ‘Carschooling’ (more on that in another post, perhaps) but you can also make the education most of every opportunity – there’s no reason to prevent the children from learning and asking about their (or your) condition to expand their scientific knowledge, for example.

There are many, many more advantages to home education, and no doubt many that are specific to home educating with chronic illness that I haven’t included here. Suffice to say though that I am so glad that I didn’t accept the advice of those who suggested I should give up home educating when I got ill. It was a precious time together that I will always cherish.

So if you are teetering on the edge of the decision about whether or not to home educate while dealing with a chronic (or even acute and temporary) illness, I hope you’ll be encouraged to try home education.

Ending our Journey

As you may know, our home education journey which began in 1999 officially ended when my youngest child went into school in 2018.

It was a huge chunk of my life, and I have found it quite a challenge to adjust. I thought I might be able to go back out into work, but my chronic illness had other ideas and I have so far been very much stuck at home. For a year and a half I found myself quite lonely with only the dog for company, until Covid restrictions were implemented and everybody came back home for Lockdown.

Now everything is beginning to get back to normal (we hope), I am starting to wonder what I should do with my vast library of homeschool, education and teaching books.

There are a great number of books that I am so attached to, I won’t be ready to release them yet. Others though, I know I will never use again.

Among them is a serious of teacher guides for the Christian curriculum, Heart of Dakota. I know I won’t use them again, even if by some miracle home education became a possibility for me again, simply because I am no longer religious.

It isn’t a widely known curriculum in the UK, but it is based on Charlotte Mason principles with which many British home educators will be familiar.

I used most of the guides for the younger years, especially making use of the poetry selections, spelling and dictation passages. I bought all the guides from Pre-school to High School, but I didn’t manage to make use of the High School guides as my children gradually elected to go into school for their GCSE years.

I haven’t known where to sell them, since they are really rather niche and specialised. I have tried Facebook and ebay to no avail. Would anybody reading this blog be interested, or have any ideas on where I can offer them?

Each guide cost around $90 plus shipping to the UK from the US, and I would like to try and re-coup £50 on each guide (I can’t afford not to really, since our income is so low).

I’m so sorry about the terrible picture. This is just an example of some of the books I have to offer. Let me know i you’re interested and I will post in more details, with better pictures!

Home Ed Geography Topic – Israel/ Palestine continued.

Art

Visual arts in Israel is art created in the Land of Israel/Palestine region, from the later part of the 19th century until today, or art created by Israeli artists. Visual art in Israel encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques, styles and themes reflecting a dialogue with Jewish art throughout the ages and attempts to formulate a national identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_arts_in_Israel

Film/ TV

Cinema of Israel (Hebrew: קולנוע ישראלי‎ Kolnoa Yisraeli) refers to film production in Israel since its founding in 1948. Most Israeli films are produced in Hebrew, but there are productions in other languages such as Arabic and English. Israel has been nominated for more Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film than any other country in the Middle East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Israel

Cinema of Palestine is relatively young in comparison to Arab cinema as a whole. Palestinian films are not exclusively produced in Arabic and some are even produced in English, French and Hebrew.^[3] The films of Palestinian director Elia Suleiman are made with support from Europe and Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Palestine

Culture

Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish culture and its culture encompasses the foundations of many Jewish cultural characteristics, including philosophy, literature etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Israel

The Culture of Palestine is closely related to those of its nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The major aspects of Palestinian Society and Culture include customs, religion, language, literature, art, costume and music of the land and its inhabitants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Palestine

Dance

Israeli folk dancing (Hebrew: ריקודי עם‎, rikudei ‘am, lit. “Folk dances”) is a form of dance usually performed to songs in Hebrew, or to other songs which have been popular in Israel, with dances choreographed for specific songs. Israeli dances include circle, partner and line dances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_folk_dancing

Debke is an Arabic folk dance which is performed throughout the Levantine region. In Palestine, local dance troupes including El-Funoun, are reinventing it as a means of preserving traditional culture and reflecting contemporary life in the Palestinian Territories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabke

Food/ Recipes

Israeli cuisine (Hebrew: המטבח הישראלי‎ ha-mitbaḥ ha-yisra’eli) comprises both local dishes and dishes brought to Israel by Jews from the Diaspora. Since before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and particularly since the late 1970s, an Israeli Jewish fusion cuisine has developed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_cuisine

Palestinian cuisine is a diffusion of the cultures of civilizations that settled in the region of Palestine, particularly during and after the Islamic era beginning with the Arab Ummayad conquest, then the eventual Persian-influenced Abbasids and ending with the strong influences of Turkish cuisine, resulting from the coming of the Ottoman Turks.

It is similar to other Levantine cuisines, including Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_cuisine

Please join our Geography group on Facebook for Maps & Flags, (#MondayMapping), Transport and Travel (#TuesdayTravels), Weather, Climate and Wildlife (#WednesdayWonders) People Groups and Culture (#ThursdayAnthropology),and virtual field trips to museums, art galleries etc. (#FridayFieldTrips)

Home Ed Geography Topic: Israel/Palestine

This is the fourth post in a series for a topic we’re currently studying in my facebook Geography group. I’m posting this here because for some reason I had trouble saving the post to Facebook. Probably because it got too long. If you’re interested I will post the others here, please just ask.

Israel and Palestine

People groups

Jews constitute about three-fourths of the total population of Israel. Almost all the rest are Palestinian Arabs, of whom most (roughly three-fourths) are Muslim; the remaining Arabs are Christians and Druze, who each make up only a small fraction of the total population. Arabs are the overwhelming majority in the Gaza Strip and the occupied territory of the West Bank.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Israel/People

Languages

The Israeli population is linguistically and culturally diverse. Hebrew is the country’s official language, and almost the entire population speaks it either as native speakers or proficiently as a second language. Its standard form, known as Modern Hebrew, is the main medium of life in Israel. Arabic is used mainly by Israel’s Arab minority which comprises about one-fifth of the population. Arabic has a special status under Israeli law.Russian is spoken by about 20% of the Israeli population, mainly by the large immigrant population from the former Soviet Union, and English is a known foreign language by a significant proportion of the Israeli population as English is used widely in official logos and road signs alongside Hebrew and Arabic. In addition, the 19th edition of Ethnologue lists 36 languages and dialects spoken through Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Israel

Music

The music of Israel is a combination of Jewish and non-Jewish music traditions that have come together over the course of a century to create a distinctive musical culture. For almost 150 years, musicians have sought original stylistic elements that would define the emerging national spirit.[1] In addition to creating an Israeli style and sound, Israel’s musicians have made significant contributions to classical, jazz, pop rock and other international music genres. Since the 1970s, there has been a flowering of musical diversity, with Israeli rock, folk and jazz musicians creating and performing extensively, both locally and abroad. Many of the world’s top classical musicians are Israelis or Israeli expatriates. The works of Israeli classical composers have been performed by leading orchestras worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Israel

The music of Palestine (Arabic: الموسيقى الفلسطينية‎) is one of many regional subgenres of Arabic music. While it shares much in common with Arabic music, both structurally and instrumentally, there are musical forms and subject matter that are distinctively Palestinian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Palestine

Playlists

Israel Putamayo https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0SzXzrdNK0YOTW9EqhznDD

Rough Guide to Palestine https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0wiKezyxlpnQmdd36GV3i0 (for some reason this one is refusing to allow a hyperlink, please copy and past the link, or search for the title in Spotify.)

Literature

Most works classed as Israeli literature are written in the Hebrew language, although some Israeli authors write in Yiddish, English, Arabic and Russian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_literature

Palestinian literature refers to the Arabic language novels, short stories and poems produced by Palestinians. Forming part of the broader genre of Arabic literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_literature

Again I’m having trouble adding clicklable links for some reason, apologies about that. Please either copy and paste the links into your browser or search for the topics.

2019 Planner Giveaway!

To celebrate our new UK planner group gaining 100 members so quickly, I would like to organise a giveaway from my stash of undated Home Ed Planners!

 

I’m just about to visit my mum and I’ll be back on Monday 12th so we can call that our deadline.

 

To enter:

 

1) Like this post and/ or

2) Like Ohana Home Education on Facebook

3) Reblog this post (or share the same post on Facebook or Twitter),

4) Connect with me on Twitter @Ohana_HE

5) Follow or subscribe to this blog

And let me know which/ how many of these you have done. You obviously have more chance of winning the more of these you do.

 

The winner then will be picked as close to Monday 12th September I can manage.

 

The winner can choose between:

1) an American style weekly planner,

2) a UK style daily planner for Primary (A4 or A5)

3) a UK style daily planner for Secondary (A4 or A5).

 

You can also nominate a brand new home educator/ planner to receive the planner you win (which is what happened the last time I organised a giveaway).

 

I’ll post pics of the available planners when I have a moment.

p.s. I forgot to say that this ought to be limited to the UK. The main winner will need to be in the UK. If there is a non-UK winner, we’ll need to talk about shipping/ postage costs, and you may get a booby prize if the shipping is too high.