Category Archives: Learning

Education choices Pt 1:- What would suit your child and family?

Beyond babyhood, Education, Learning, Parenting, , , , ,

Where and how to educate our children is one of the biggest decisions we make for them.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the law states that ‘The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable to: His age, ability and aptitude, and any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.’

Education, like every other aspect of our children’s lives, is our responsibility as parents. But it is an area where our options are often hidden and it is easy to make choices without fully exploring the possibilities. The three basic options are state school, independent school and home education.

What would suit your child and family?

What suits one child or family won’t necessarily suit another. Some people use a mix of educational settings depending on what works for each of their children at any particular time. And don’t forget it needs to work for your family as a whole too. And of course your choices are not set in stone, you can always change your mind and use another option later.

What would suit your child?

Think about your child’s personality, abilities, needs and interests. Are they academically inclined, or would a setting with greater emphasis on sports or music be a better choice? Is your child very active or sensitive and better suited to an informal education or a later start to formal education?
What environment would suit your child? Think about the number of children and age range in a class or group. Should activities be child-led or directed by an adult?

What would suit you and your family circumstances?

Do you want to be actively involved in your child’s education? Can you provide or arrange full time care for home education? If you would prefer an independent school do you have the ability to pay? Is a local state school a better option because of travel arrangements?

What are your family values and parenting style?

Any adult that spends a significant amount of time with your child is going to have a major impact on your child. It may be important to you to choose an education that supports your family values. This may mean a faith school, an academically selective school, or one with a strong environmental, spiritual or creative focus. Or do you prefer the personalized, learning through life experiences opportunities afforded by home education?

There are many different approaches to education. Which education options are available in your local state school? If you have a Free School locally you may find it has a different approach to other state schools. Do you need to consider independent schools or home education to meet your requirements?

What compromises are you able to make?

How and where your child is educated has immediate financial and social impacts, as well as the long term influence on your child.

Are you able to forgo a salary if you would prefer to home educate, or can you earn enough to pay school fees if you would prefer an independent school? Are you happy for your child to travel further or board to go to a school that fits your requirements better?

Pt 2: State school, independent school or home education? >>

Why I Hate School But Love Education||Spoken Word

Education

Came across this on Facebook today – and found it really moving and thought provoking.
Education and schooling are not the same. Think about what you want and assess what you need to do. Go to University because it has meaning for you, but not because it is assumed to be the only route or form of education.
And of course this applies at all levels – including for children and school.

Education Choices Pt 2a: State School

Beyond babyhood, Education, ,

Every child aged between five and 16 is entitled to a place at a state school and most parents choose this option. These are government funded and so are free to attend.

From September 2011 local authorities must accept children in to reception, the September after the child turns four, but you may choose full time or part time until age five. You can now defer entry until later in the year up until your child reaches five, and the place must be held for you until the term after the child’s fifth birthday, but not beyond the end of the academic year. If you want you can choose to use a state funded nursery or other setting place instead, until the term after you child turns five. (Schools Admission Code)

If you are choosing a state school start inquiring about primary schools well before your child reaches their fourth birthday.

Educational approaches:

Most state schools are mainstream state schools – which means that they receive funding via local authorities, follow the National Curriculum and are regularly inspected by Ofsted. These are based on a formal, single-age, class-based, and curriculum driven approach, where learning is primarily adult-led. It is focused on assessment and passing tests, through SATs and later on GCSEs, A-Levels and the recently approved IGCSEs.

Some specialise in particular subjects, or are governed in partnership with a faith or voluntary group. There are also state schools catering for children with special needs, boarding schools and Grammar schools which select on academic ability. For many parents the local nature and community setting of a state primary school is important.

Academies are a newer type of state-funded school. Free Schools are new Academy schools set up by parents, teachers, charities, community or faith groups or previously independent schools. They are essentially state-funded independent schools, which have greater freedom in how they run themselves and the educational approach they take. Your options are dependent on the approach taken by individual academy schools in your area. If you are interested in setting up a Free School the New Schools Network provides advice and guidance.

Finding a school:

You can search for state schools and find out more about them at schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk, or contact your local authority and ask for a list of schools.

Finding out more about schools:

Admissions:

Each year your local authority will produce a free booklet giving deadlines, the application process, and admission criteria, and the admissions criteria for how places are allocated. You should automatically receive information on getting your child into school.

The Local authority sets the admission criteria for some schools, whilst other state maintained schools have their own governing body which decides on admissions criteria. Make sure you read the admission criteria for your preferred schools.

Applying:

Apply by filling in the Local Authority Common Application Form online or in paper in the autumn for entry the following September. You need to list one or more preferred schools for primary schools.

The dates vary so check with your local authority and send off your form or apply online in plenty of time.

References:

Schools Admissions Code

<< Back to: Pt 2: State school, independent school or home education?

On to: Pt 2b: Independent School >>

Education Choices Pt 2b: Independent School

Beyond babyhood, Education, ,

Independent Schools are privately owned and run. Since they are not state funded they are primarily funded by fees paid by parents.

Educational approaches:

The independent sector covers a range of different approaches, including some unavailable within the state sector. Each school will have different priorities, different values and use different methods.

Many Independent schools follow formal, single-age, class-based, and curriculum driven approach, where learning is primarily adult-led. It is focused on assessment and passing tests, as in State schools and may be based on the National Curriculum.

Prep schools are primary schools which prepare children for academically selective secondary schools, which have school entrance exams like the Common Entrance paper.

Other independent schools may follow very different philosophies.

Although more commonly found as nurseries for the under 5s, the Montessori approach is also used in schools for older children with multi-age groups, where children select their own activities www.montessori.org.uk. Steiner Waldorf schools focus on play-based Kindergarten until formal, theme-based education starts at 7, with a focus on practical, artistic and intellectual skills, and continuity of care with class teacher for eight years www.steinerwaldorf.org.uk.

Finding a school:

Independent schools are listed at the Independent Schools Council  www.isc.co.uk or the Independent Schools Directory www.indschools.co.uk, or on schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk.

Finding out more about schools:

  • read the schools’ most recent Ofsted www.ofsted.gov.uk or Independent Schools Inspectorate www.isi.net report.
  • School achievement and attainment tables include independent schools (performance tables) www.dcsf.gov.uk/performancetables/ and league tables
  • Read the schools’ prospectuses
  • Independent Schools Directories
  • Talk to other parents. ISC may have a Parental Satisfaction Report for some schools
  • Visit the schools

Admissions:

Each school will deal will set its own admissions criteria and applications. Contact schools direct for more information.

<< Back to: Pt 2a: State school

On to: Pt 2c: Home Education >>

Education Choices Pt 2c: Home Education

Beyond babyhood, Education, Home education, Parenting, ,

Some parents choose to educate their children themselves, outside school. This may be their their first choice, because they want to take responsibility for the education themselves and allow their child to learn in a flexible, individualized way within a family setting. For others it is a response to school not working for that child, sometimes due to bullying, special needs or educational issues.

Home educators are a diverse group with a range of reasons for choosing home education, and different backgrounds. You do not need to be a teacher to home educate.

Educational approaches:

Home education covers the widest range of approaches, from formal work, as used in schools, to informal learning. Some families use a structured adult-led curriculum and there are many different ones available, as well as lots of resources for the National Curriculum. Others are autonomous, with the child leading the education. Often this emphasises informal learning through play and conversation but may also include structured worksheets and courses. Many use elements of both approaches. The individualised nature of home education means that parents can tailor every child’s education by picking the approach that works for them at that time.

Home educated children can take formal qualifications, such as IGCSEs, GCSEs and A-Levels either through correspondence courses, as external candidates or at further education college.

Finding out more:

There are a number of national organisations for England that support home educators.

You local public library should also have books on explaining more about home education.

Getting started:

If your child is not at school yet, you do not have to inform anyone that you are home educating since education is a parental responsibility.

If you want to remove your child from school in England then you need to inform the school in writing, and they will inform your Local Authority. The Local Authority has a duty to act if it thinks that a suitable education isn’t taking place, and you should respond to any enquires. Local authorities often prefer visits, but you may instead provide written information to satisfy their enquiries. De-registration from a designated Special Needs school requires LA consent.

Many home educators start by joining one of the national organisations and using its local contact lists to meet other home educators. There are local support networks (try searching yahoo and google groups for one in your area) through which home educators pool resources and take part in a wide range of group activities and social events.  Talking to home educators is a great way to find out if home education is for your family and how others go about it.

References:

Elective Home Education Guidelines
Ed Yourself – Comprehensive look at legalities of home education

<< Back to Pt 2b: Independent School

Book notes and book lists – how to stop them getting out of control?

Books and Magazines, , ,

Do you love books? I know I do.

Do you find yourself making note of books, and creating book lists that get lost? How do you deal with keeping track of the books you are interested in?

And I am always collecting notes on new books to check out, and creating book lists for the girls and myself.

Basically I want to be able to note down books, add comments, add them to lists, and have those lists easily available on this blog, with a link to the book on Amazon. And be able to access them from anywhere on my phone, so I can add books on the move, look them up in the bookshop and share booklists with friends.

So far I have been muddling along using Amazon Listmania.
This is a way of creating your own lists on Amazon, so others can see your recommendations. And if you run a blog there are  ways of adding the books to your blog with links back to Amazon – or you can create your own Amazon store. This sort of works, but has its problems.

  • Listmania is  hidden on Amazon. It doesn’t appear in the main search, so I find myself searching for listmania, and then searching the listmania box on the left. I even end up doing this for my own lists because although Wish Lists are easy to get to your Amazon profile and Listmania lists are buried rather deep in the site.
  • There isn’t an app that you can use to add books from your phone – which means I still need to note down books to add to Listmania later.  Amazon mobile makes it had to find the ISBN/ASIN needed to add a book. So I’ve been doing this using Evernote.
  • Also once you get past a small number of lists it becomes really hard to organise and look through your own lists.

I now have over 50 listmania lists and it is getting difficult to navigate through the pages of lists.
So my next job looks like it should be adding a list of lists to this blog!

How do you manage your book lists?

Finding out about animals

Home education, Learning, Nature Books, ,

My youngest and I are both very interested in animals, so I have started spending more time finding books and other resources that should interest her.

Our approach is fairly informal. But I do have a need to create a framework, in order to satisfy my sense of order and it makes it easier for me to research good resources and books, which as you can tell from my blog is something I love to do! Then if and when my daughter is interested we share them.

For the animal kingdom the obvious approach seemed to be to reflect the evolutionary relationships of animals, and the starting point for this has been the poster that takes pride of place on our living room wall. Produced a couple of years ago for the Open University, the Tree of Life poster is a beautiful representation of evolutionary relationships between living things. We have laminated it so that it will last. A variation on the poster is available on Amazon. My daughter is endlessly fascinated by pictures on this poster and the relationships between the animals. And this prompted me to find more resources for her.

A second essential resource is a good animal encyclopedia. As a child I spent hours reading my one and became extraordinarily proud of knowing about really obscure animals such as the South American Yapok (an otter like marsupial or pouched animal). So I spent a while roaming shops and Amazon looking for a really good up to date book to replace my rather out of date and tattered volume. My criteria were that the illustrations or photographs had to be beautiful to look at, that it be an adult one so that it has enough detail and coverage to satisfy an interested child’s thirst for the unusual, and that it include distribution maps so that we can easily see where a species comes from. The favourite we settled on it was the then current edition of The Encyclopedia of Animals: A Complete Visual Guide. Though we do also like the Natural History Book from DK – which includes rocks, plants and a larger number of species, but lacks the distribution maps.

We also have a copy of the very wonderful Zoo-ology, which I have blogged about before and is a great pictorial starting point for even the youngest child.

We don’t tend to use online resources but a one that appeals to me and I’m keeping in mind for my daughter as she gets older is the very comprehensive and visually appealing Arkive, a multimedia guide to animals, plants and fungi. There are teachers resources, games as well as comprehensive information on each species.

We also have a giant world map that we use to blue tac on things of interest. It has taken me a long time to find the ideal map website for our home education needs but have finally found the solution. These MegaMaps allow you to print out maps on A4 paper and stick them together to create really large maps. We print out pictures of animals of particular interest and stick them on to show where they come from.

For each group of animals I search Amazon and the local library for books to share. Then we reserve and borrow library books and see which ones we like. If there are books from particular series or that come highly recommended and my daughter likes the look of them then we might even buy one! I will post our favourites as we go along.

Coming next – Our favourite resources on the Great Apes

 

The animals of Eric Carle

Children's books, Children's fiction, Nature Books, , , , , ,

One our favourite author’s for younger children who love animals is Eric Carle.

He has a way of combining a quick, colourful story with a good first look at a group of animals. Although most famous for the Very Hungry Caterpillar, with its less than realistic diet of a caterpillar, some of his other book introduce new animals in a very accessible way.

Three of our favourites are:

See on Amazon

See on Amazon

See on Amazon

Mister Seahorse – A pregnant Mr Seahorse meets lots of other different fish, including other Dads looking after their eggs and babies in their own way. Interesting look at male parental care in fish.

The Very Quiet Cricket – The Very Quiet cricket meets a range of other insects, including a spittle bug and a lunar moth

Slowly slowly slowly said the sloth – The sloth introduces us very slowly to some of the animals of South America including a tapir and some leaf cutter ants

Kings and Queens of England

Children's books, History, History Books, ,

To celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee we have been thinking about our favourite children’s books and a few other resources on the Kings and Queens of England.

Our favourite:

Tony Robinson’s Kings and Queens

(or The Hutchinson Book Of Kings & Queens)

This is one of my eight year old’s absolute favourite books in the whole world. It has done much to turn an general interest in people into a passion for history. It covers Kings and Queens of England, and unlike many books goes back to Anglo-Saxons rather than just starting with Normans.

Read our full review of Tony Robinson’s Kings and Queens …

Other recommended books:

See on Amazon

Cruel Kings and Mean Queens (Horrible Histories)

Horrible Histories books always go down well in this house. This is a chatty, humorous and highly irreverent book. Starting at William the Conqueror it covers the monarchs of England in bite size pieces. The cartoon strips and bullet points make it very approachable for inexperienced or reluctant readers.

See on Amazon

King and Queens, A Very Peculiar History

This mini book is absolutely jam packed with concise facts, lists and quirky stories. It includes Saxon and Scottish Kings and provides good context for the monarchy. Although maybe slightly less approachable than the Horrible Histories it will appeal to those with a love of small books, and who want to move on from the gruesome, all kings and queens are cruel and mean approach of Horrible Histories.

Other books:

A couple of other books on Kings and Queens that we haven’t got around to investigating properly:

Sticker books

Sticker books provide a fun way to approach a subject.

  • Sticker Dressing: Kings & Queens – A sticker dolly dressing up book with kings and queens from all over world. This is a firm favourite. Bold, beautiful pictures, with luxurious stick-on outfits and a simple summary of each ruler with details of their clothing. This book has a nice balance of male and female figures. Ranges from Ancient Egypt to modern day, and an interesting mix of the usual suspects (Henry VIII) and less often covered rulers that we found sparked further investigations (Theodora and Justinian).
  • Kings and Queens Sticker Book (Usborne sticker book)
    More complex sticker book on the monarchs of England and Scotland. Packed with information on each ruler, with stickers to add through out.
  • Kings & Queens Ultimate Sticker Book (DK)

Cards, games and posters

Kings and Queens of England Playing CardsHeritage Cards does some lovely playing cards with very interesting pictures. My daughter loves the Kings and Queen of England ones (they also do Kings and Queens of Scotland). These are beautifully illustrated, and simple with just the name and dates of their rule. These get hours of play in our house – both as playing cards and for laying out family trees.

Whilst researching this post I found a card game called Monarchy, which we hadn’t seen before and looks like it might be interesting. Also just wondering if anyone knows of good top trumps game with English monarchs on them?

Usborne do a set of Kings and Queens Cards (History Cards) – a picture card with a large picture on one side and facts on the back. Plus cards listing the royal dynasties and kings and queens of England and Scotland. These are a larger size than the Heritage playing cards.

Music Videos

History Teachers and Horrible Histories both cover various monarchs, including some English and Scottish ones. These are firm favourites here, and we find that an enormous amount can be learnt from a good music video.

Our recommended starting place for English Kings and Queens of England is the Horrible Histories English Kings and Queens Song – a fun way to become familiar with them and maybe learn their order! There are also songs and sketches about lots of the English Kings and Queens from the TV series. (the easiest way to find these is to search Youtube for a ‘horrible histories’ and the monarch in question).

Another favourite source of history music videos ours is the History Teachers – more grown up, less ‘horrible’ and often quite poignant. I’ve blogged a rough chronological list but here are the English and Scottish ones.

Videos

Timelines and Posters

Finding out more:

And finally a few websites for finding out more. Suitable for older children or adults.

——–

Do you have any favourite books on Kings and Queens of England?
Can you recommend any that cover Wales, Scotland and Ireland too?

Tony Robinson’s Kings and Queens

Children's books, History, History Books, Uncategorized, ,

Buy on Amazon

This is one of my eight year old’s absolute favourite books in the whole world. It has done much to turn an general interest in people into a passion for history. It covers Kings and Queens of England, and unlike many books goes back to Anglo-Saxons rather than just starting with Normans.
Written with the humour you would expect from Tony Robinson. With big, bold, funny illustrations to match. It is funny, and full of personal details that bring historical characters to life.
Text is divided into manageable, well thought out chunks so it is easy to dip into.
We have found the odd historical inaccuracy. My daughter was rather perturbed to see George I and George II described in a round about way as grandfather and father of George III. But actually it generally seems accurate and it has resulted in a good understanding of the limits of history, and history books!
All in all a great place to start.