Probably easiest to use my own categories and do a bit of a round up of where they are and where I would like them to be and how I intend to get us there. So;
luvvies – Davies is definitely on the theatrical side. If we could afford it (and perhaps if I’d been more impressed with the prospectus they sent when I enquired) we might have looked at something like Stagecoach for him. As it goes certainly the local one looks like a lot of money for not a lot of anything much. I did speak to the drama teacher we had come to WAG group about Davies and he reckoned 5 was the very earliest you wanted to start anything like drama lessons really. I am so not wanting to push him in that sort of direction as I cannot bear the thought of him being a stage school brat type (and fear he could well fit into such a mould if pushed that way) but similarly he does love to perform and I don’t want to do him a dis-service by not following up his passions. I think I will explore other avenues for him and see what else turns up (he loves magic tricks so perhaps a magic tricks compendium set for his birthday next month and he can do some magic shows for friends and family or something!). The big HE group we belong to (Activeo) has drama lessons once a month which we normally couldn’t get to as they clashed with TT2 but now we have changed the day of that we could get along to those sessions. I am thinking about various ‘after school’ activities for him come September anyway so will see which of those he is passionate about and whether any of those leads to something. For now he is covering it in learning all the words, songs and dance routines to all his favourite films and his daily imaginative role plays with his sister and his friends.
Arts and Crafts – his drawing is getting really good and I know he would be ready for paints and stuff in an artistic as opposed to mess making fashion. Sadly this is an area he probably does get held back on by having a younger sibling. He does get a weekly session of mixed crafty stuff at WAG group, we do playdough at least once most weeks and he is always doing drawings so his arty side is getting stroked :-). He does have a yearning for making more’stuff’ though so perhaps we should have a bash at some junk modelling type activities. Helen Haricot had a great idea of gathering stuff for various projects into a big box so as and when the need takes you you already have it ready. I think we’ll go through some of our craft project books and start such a box for those rainy days.
Beliefs and cultures – quite comfortable with where we are on this one. We talk ideas, beliefs and so on ever such a lot. He asks really quite profound questions and is starting to get the idea of independant belief and ideas from me or anyone else. He’s not mentioned finding Jesus again since he told me he believed in God a couple of weeks ago ;-). We do have lots of books on this subject, as we do on creation, death, religion and so on so this one is easy to carry on with on the answer any question he asks basis.
History and geography – he is far more into the abstract concepts of what people believe and chicken and egg type conversation than cold hard facts most of the time. But we have globes and atlases and stuff around and he is often keen to track where somewhere is if he hears it talked about. He is aware of things like seasons, different climates in different places, time differences, weather conditions, different animals and plants etc in different countries and so on. For now this is all covered very nicely in our general chit chat and his continual quest for general knowledge and interest in the world he lives in.
IT – I’m always slightly torn on this one. He has phases of wanting to play games on the computer for a few days but it never lasts long. He can operate the mouse, do stuff like click and drag, use some bits of the keyboard like space bar, arrow keys etc and could recognise enough letters to type if he felt so inclined. Tbh the computer is such a part of our daily life that I don’t feel much need to do any more than we do already on the basis that as and when he needs to know how to do stuff he will pick it up. I still veer away from any sort of games consule or anything like that – plenty of time eh! He knows how to operate technology like the tv, video and dvd player so I’ll not get any more techy than that until we need to.
let’s get physical – TT2 is his only organised physical activity and I often feel he could be doing more. It would probably help him get to sleep easier some nights if he was as physically tired as he always is mentally. We don’t have a great garden for letting him out into to run off energy, sitting in the local park is not something I am keen to do, but we do have HE group weekly where he does a fair amount of running around like a loon, we see C&J most weekends where he runs around for hours. I don’t think a competitive sport like football would be his thing and when I checked at the local pool for swimming lessons they are for over 5s only and run intensively during school holidays, so I might look at the one over Christmas for him and endeavour to make swimming a regular thing for us. Failing that I’ll get the rebounder trampoline set up in his room and send him up there for 100 bounces every time he does my head in – maths and PE all in one shot! 🙂
Musical stuff – I focused on this quite heavily earlier this year and we did lots of listening to classical stuff in the car and talking about how it made us feel, the qualities of the music, what instruments we could hear etc. We all enjoyed it and I probably need to start doing it again after a break where we have explored popular music for a while! He will be attending a Shakin Stevens concert later this year which I am sure will tick boxes 😉 He does have favourite songs, he learns the lyrics (and the twiddly musical bits too) very quickly and lots of his favourite films have soundtracks he is familiar with too. I would love him to learn an instrument but signing him up for lessons does not fit into our financial or other plans just yet.
Numbers – every time I start to fret that everyone else’s rising five is doing pages of Miquon or Singapore he comes out and surprises me by doing mental arithmatic like 9 minus 5 minus 2 minus 1 leaves 1. He is number aware, can write and recognise the digits and is learning mathematic ability and skills without knowing the names, theories or text booky stuff behind them and possibly that is the best way – who needs to know that the various ways of adding 2 numbers up to make ten is called number bonds – I didn’t until fairly recently! I am pretty good at maths and we have plenty of books around to back up the theories as and when we need them. For now he is learning practical maths as and when he needs it in his daily life, which to me seems to be the perfect way to learn anything.
Reading – I readily confess that this is my single anal area. For all sorts of reasons. I am aware that it would a focus if he were at school, I know it is how people will judge early success or failure of HE, it will make my life easier in so many ways if I have a reading child! I love reading myself, I know Davies will get so much pleasure out of being able to read, he loves books and loves to be able to find out information for himself – I can imagine already the joy for him of choosing his own books from the library and sitting down to read them. But every single time I try and make progress with helping him to read we end up falling out and he gets put off it again. We’ve tried 100 EL and while I think it did do some good in giving him the basic idea and certainly gave him lots of the letter sounds committed to memory he simply cannot make that connection of joining those letter sounds up to make a word. I’m torn between completely leaving it alone and waiting for him to get there himself and hammering away with different ways to get there. The current one I’m debating is simply whole word recognition and we have this very morning dug out some red nose readers, the bob books, some Usborne easy words to read (pig in a wig, goose on the loose type stuff) with a view to giving that approach a bash. I’m also thinking about some sort of handwriting exercise type book where he copies my writing, perhaps illustrates it and then reads back what he has written himself, maybe to some one else (like Daddy). So semi planned but still waiting to see if anything actually works and feeling OK about giving it up as a bad idea if it doesn’t!
Science – another one which seems to get covered fairly comprehensively through day to day life, books which pull science in, conversations, his endless questions about how, why and what and the odd bicarb and vinegar explosion when we feel the need 😉 Another subject we have chemistry, biology and phsyics more than covered books, experiment and other resources wise which are better left on the shelf until they are relevant to conversation, question or general life rather than brought out in a contrived ‘now we’re going to do some science’ way. Things like the weather, the beach as we drive parallel to it at least twice a week, him asking whether chocolate is good for you, getting in the bath, scratching or bruising his skin all lead to enough of a scientific conversation for me to feel we are covering it sufficiently.
Socialising – When we moved home last May we decided once and for all we would be HEing and my priority became ensuring that we had enough of a social network around us that come September 2005 (which seemed a way away at the time!) when all his peers started school he would not feel odd or alone. I wanted to ensure I had HE friends, that Scarlett would grow up always having known other HE tots and that it would be a question I could deflect with ease when it was thrown at me as a negative. I almost think we have overdone it somehow 😉 Our weekends are fully booked up for weeks and weeks to come. We have three close families locally (puddlers and blog readers all of you!), a successful weekly HE group, cousins who are also HE’d and their little nationwide network of mates who we see at our various camps and gatherings. We drove home only yesterday marvelling at how little we had seen of the children over the weekend. If there were disagreements then the children largely sorted themselves out without adult intervention, all ages and genders mixed together and Davies counts Lije, Adam, Joe, Ben and Marcus (in no specific order) as ‘my best friends Mummy’ – an excellent little gang of boys for him to spend the next x years growing up with :-). So that would be a tick then!
Writing – Somehow reading and writing are not linked as activities here yet. Of course I do know they are on many levels but he hasn’t realised it yet! He does a lot of writing actually, either in his signs, when I get him to write cards and notes and when he names and labels his drawings and other creations. His letters are pretty good, certainly recognisable and getting smaller, tidier and neater all the time. His pen grip has improved and all without the aid of a single workbook 😉
So future wise? Well I have noticed a real difference in him since he has been Tumble Totting. I think it has been a great way of giving him a bit of independance, letting him be whoever he chooses to be without me around to dictate his behaviour, it has brought him on physically and increased his confidence and allowed him to make friends who I would certainly not have chosen for him! I have been thinking that he is probably ready for at least one other such weekly thing to complement it come September. Turning five also makes him eligable for various things. So far on my list I have Badgers (St Johns Ambulance type thing), some sort of sport or team game (but no idea what!), swimming if I can find something semi-organised, cub scouts (although I would be wary of this for various reasons, but would like to look into it further), dance or drama or other performing art type activities, something art or craft based and perhaps something musical. Sounds like loads but my intention would be to only choose one actual extra thing based on cost, timings and what he is most attracted to. It would be nice to have something else that he gets to do on his own without me or Tarly hanging around, or it might be nice to have something he does with one or other parent to get a bit of one to one time with one of us which would mean it needed to be an evening or weekend activity… will ponder further and look into what is available.
I think in writing this I have clarified once again to myself the approach that works for us. I have been sitting here doing this for about two hours during which time Davies has been constructing a massive brio train track while watching Willy Wonka. He has been singing along to the songs, drawing my attention to his favourite bits of the film and occasionally giving it his full attention. He has asked me about where lies in each direction and learnt north, south, east and west. We have talked about places he knows (Portsmouth, London and Brighton) as destinations in each direction and how we live on the South coast of England so the only thing south of us is the sea. He has brought me all the road signs from his train set and we’ve sort of read them together and talked about capital and lower case letters. He has a small station which has London, York, Edinburgh and Cardiff as choices for the station so we have looked at those. We have talked about where he was born and where Tarly was born (Worthing and in hospital, Manchester and at home) and debated the differences and how where you are born and where you live can determine what people call you (Southerner, Mancunian etc). We have talked about this weekend, his favourite bits of it, who he liked playing with, when we will see certain people again and so on. He talked to Ady on the phone for about 15 minutes about all sorts of things such as the weather, where Ady was etc and he has just got some yoghurts out of the fridge to share with everyone. We have probably ticked pretty much every box just in that short time together and for me that sums up how we HE. It is simply an extension of our daily life. I forsee it changing as he grows and gets older and his needs, interests and passions change and develop but for now despite the fact in a different life we would quite likely be out today buying school uniform, sewing name tags into things and debating which cartoon character to have on his new lunchbox ready for him to start school in about five weeks time I am very very happy with the way our journey is panning out :-).
