As threatened here I am again 🙂
Finished my cvs and emailed them across, so that’s my internet supply paid for the month in an hours work 🙂 (tip from one of the frugal sites is to work out how many hours work it takes to pay for stuff and then decide if it’s worth it – sadly although there is potential to earn a high hourly rate there is not the work available to earn it with). My two remaining tasks are printing off directions and a route finder and packing – off to do them shortly as well as packing some food for the children for the journey.
Granny came over and quite shockingly and impressively for a woman in her late 70s totally grasped the idea of autonomy and child led education. She even said she could see exactly how it would work as she spent some of her school years in a mass class of 8-14 year olds, mixed gender being taught by the headmaster of the nearby boys school drafted in to run the school where lots of London children were evacuated to during the war. She has mentioned this teacher before as inspirational and able to draw the best out of each and every child depsite the mix of ages, abilities, backgrounds and everything else going on around them. She sat looking at the pictures of the Halloween party remarking on how happy all the children looked and how well they all appeared to be mixing. D & S sat talking to her about various recent adventures such as Legoland, The Eden Project, trips to Reading and Sheffield and all their various friends around the country which obviously helped!
We then had an hour or so of autonomy in action while we sat chatting. The children got out the geomags and built all sorts of weird and wonderful things, chattering as they went about magnets and shapes and how many sides and corners they had, Scarlett counted up to 7 for Granny (which is actually not the top of her range but Granny was impressed, she then decided to build a square and a triangle, told us she was going to and then did it. Then she got totally absorbed in a pattern of two rods, two balls, a panel (threaded onto a rod) and repeated in a big long line – which as I said to Granny would have easily been a pattern you would be asked questions on in a maths GCSE test. Davies meanwhile was building people, robots and fireworks with some more rods.
Then we heard a sound outside so Davies went to investigate by standing up at the window watching. It was a mini roadwork repair which two men stood either end of with STOP GO signs so the traffic could go past, so Davies stood and gave a running comentary and read the STOP and the GO (ok he was probably guessing based on colour and the fact that it was a road sign but he did it without hesitation!) signs as they were revolved. I also realised that Davies is able to ‘read’ the difference between Annie and Clarabell on his Thomas carriages – I’m sure he couldn’t read the words out of context but he knows which is which between the two when looking at the words on them.
So that was all good 🙂 I love it when people ‘get’ what it’s all about and don’t leave the conversation blatantly disagreeing with you but not having the balls to say so. Granny left quite evangelical about the idea herself. Go Granny 😉
Right, Ady has just arrived home super early so I really do need to go and pack now so we can set off while it’s still daylight – see you in a few hours Beans 🙂
Bravo Granny!