autonomously learning to read...

This is prompted by another blog: Home Education Heretic - Real Books- learning to read autonomously

See what I did with the title? I think that I've just said what he meant to say. Or maybe not, it's hard to tell. I guess I could go and ask him but, well, as an autonomous educator I am clearly far too sloppy in my thinking to go "Hang on a minute, what did you actually mean here?" If Mr Webb means to discuss the process of an autodidactic child learning to read, that's one thing. If he means to discuss how a child learns to read and then uses the skills autonomously, that's something else. Isn't it? Let's be precise about this now.

Anywho. If I can rise above the snarkiness that such uneducated polemic produces, I'll try to get my words out straight...

Here's my problem with your supposition, Mr Webb, that learning to read by 'osmosis' is the preserve of the supposedly very special conditions that are described in that blog. The conditions required for such learning are supportive, interested caregivers and a written-language-rich environment that the child can explore more-or-less at will. Visible examples of the use of reading, for pleasure or for the benefit of the reader in some other way, will contribute to the child's interest and desire. These conditions are not, or at least should not, be that special in our culture, and they are not related to the education level or wealth of the parent(s.) I was one such child who does not remember learning to read, could certainly read before the age of 5, my parents are very averagely educated. I left school at 16, have a little bit of further ed under my belt, not what I would think Mr Webb would consider 'well educated' and my self-taught readers are doing just fine, thanks.

The real problem with 'Real Books' in the classroom setting that Mr Webb appears to have overlooked is that the conditions are so different to the individualised learning of home-ed, whether intended or otherwise, that there is no starting point for the osmosis of reading to spread from. The group setting is too large for the random 'what does this mean?' and the passive learning from watching someone read instructions or labels or directions because they need to understand something cannot occur. The teacher-pupil relationship and the scale of the setting is the problem, not the method.

Having got that out of the way, now I'm left wondering what prompted the blog in question. Because I can't imagine any autonomously home-educating parent suggesting that leaving a child completely to their own devices will automatically result in their learning to read. So who, exactly, is promoting this without the understanding/assumption that autonomous ed. is about facilitating when required? And what parent would deliberately say 'I'm not going to tell you what that word says, you'll have to learn it by yourself'?? It makes no sense. Perhaps I'm expecting too much clarity of thinking.

another week...

So Gloucester have crashed and burned in the past few weeks, gods know what they're thinking. If they're thinking. Ugh.

And yesterday was yet another focusless Saturday morning, but I'll let dh off a bit this time as he has hayfever pretty bad and I didn't want to wake him. But being woken up almost an hour before the time my alarm was set to go off by dd3 shouting, "Pye! Pye! Pye! Pye! *whistle* *whistle* Pye! Pye!" and this was about 40 mins after I'd already woken up for some other random reason, meant that I wasn't in much of a fit state to do anything anyway. *sigh* Our wedding anniversary is next Saturday, we're planning to go out for a meal, seems a bit unfair to hijack that for a 'meaningful discussion' but it's probably the only way, and fairly fitting really.

I haven't even looked at my fanfic this week. Maybe that means I'm in a better mood overall, it's pretty dark stuff and I need to be in the right frame of mind for it to flow. Makes one wonder how crime novelists and scriptwriters do it all the time.

I got round to getting my bass from my mum's but I can't find the lead now, doh. I don't often get into town or go anywhere near a music shop, though actually there is one quite near an alterations shop that I didn't know about until I was dropping dd1 off at St John's Ambulance Cadets last week. I could go and see if they might have the right sized press-stud machine for my faulty jackets, and go get a new lead and a tuning fork or something, and talk to them about the piano too. It's a shame the excellent fishmonger round the corner from there is long gone.

Speaking of fish, must dash, going to Sainsburys to see if they still do tuna fishcakes, if not I'm getting salmon for tea. And this afternoon I'm going for a walk.

a bit more on watching the Twilight DVD...

Dh sat at the table while dd1, dd2 and I watched the film. He was internetting, watching baseball on his laptop (big ups for MLB's updated online tv service, btw, it's awesomely smooth and clear even over wifi and though we haven't tried streaming it to the tv yet I'm pretty sure it won't be pixelly at all) and I didn't know if he was really watching the film or not. He's had to live with my obsession for the past few months, dd2 and I sharing quips and quotes and laughing at in-jokes, and I suspect he thinks a bit of my recent weirdness is down to a Rob Pattinson/Edward Cullen crush (he's not entirely wrong but I think that's more about things being thrown into sharp relief, as the saying goes, by immersing myself in romance-driven fiction, than me actually fantasising about being with another person. And even if I were, Edward's not my favourite Cullen, lol.)

So I had a feeling he was prejudging it, sneering at it. Of course with him not sitting where I could see his face or hear him I couldn't be sure. And really I shouldn't make assumptions about what he's thinking because that old saw about assuming making an ass out of u and me is quite often true when I think I know what he's thinking. And more so when I think he knows what I'm thinking. But it did add to my unease while watching it and may have stopped me getting sucked in like I would have liked to. I think I was right though, when it finished he said the action sequences were poor...

...and that the love story was just like Buffy and Angel. The three of us on the sofa turned round and exclaimed 'What?!' at him. I'm not sure why it feels so different though. His argument was the group of geeky friends and he's a vampire and she's a human. Except that Bella has no supernatural powers and their relationship doesn't have any massive repercussions in the supernatural world, they're not on a hellmouth, there aren't any demons... The language and settings, beyond the high school part, is much different. Their motivations are also different, though Buffy and Bella are newcomers to their towns when their stories begin.

But if anyone is actually reading this who is familiar with both , I'd love to hear what you think on this point.

The commentary on the DVD is fun, by the way.

Very very belated holiday blog...

So the last saved draft of this was at the end of July. I am such a slack blogger that I've only just got round to finishing this! Oh well. I'm trying to get more of a pattern to my life so hopefully I'll be able to slot in a regular bit of blogging...

So, picking up as of 20somethingth of July...

We've been away, and back a couple of weeks now, but due to complications which I will most likely go into later, I've only just got round to blogging. We went up to Scotland, house sitting for Lucy while they went to France. So here's a bit of travelogue and pics...

I'll start with a bit of a rant (rant? moi? never...) about online train ticket booking. I'd thought about dh and I travelling separately, like we've done before to Filey, one of us driving and the other on the train with the children. SO... I looked up ticket prices on a couple of sites and discovered that there was an 'advance' ticket available. But it wasn't showing me the advance price when I selected more than 1 traveller at a time. Being Yorkshire born and bred ;-) I didn't want to have to pay 4 booking fees, also I didn't want to have to faff around with getting the seat reservations and being the proud owner of the Family Railcard from the special offer in the Daily Mail (must get the follow-up offer sorted out actually) I looked up the conditions on Advance tickets and Family and Friends Railcard discounts are applied. So I think 'right, I'll ring up and see what I can do' and of course by the time I ring up the advance tickets are all gone.

All because the online systems don't work in accordance with the ticketing rules. Twonks.

Anyway... so we drove up together on the Saturday (because £90 was too much extra) and actually it was really nice, even though we were late setting off due to the usual faffery with laundry and packing. Stopped at the services outside Durham as we'd checked it out and there was a Costa, lol. Ooo'd at the Angel of the North, waved at Ikea, drove into Alnwick seeking somewhere reasonable and family-friendly-looking to have tea and drove out again. Wandered off the A1 into Belford where we found The Belford which despite being a golf club (sorry, dh's prejudice is seeping through) was family-friendly without being patronising and reasonably priced. We were forewarned that they were busy and we might be waiting a while, and we were, but when the food came it was top quality and very well cooked (as in they'd done a good job, not a euphemism for burnt, lol.) Definitely recommended.

Got to Lucy's to find out that her 3 bedroom house woud fit at least 1 and a half of my 3-bed house in it. It's just as full of stuff though, lol.

So on to the pics :-) They're all taken on dh's or my phone because I hadn't, and still haven't, got round to getting my camera sorted out.

Taken at some point by someone who had been given my phone to take pictures with to keep them occupied in the car. It worked, for the most part. That and playing Worms on it...


The Forth Bridges. Thanks so much to Jayne (mummybuttons) for hunting online for a postcode for a Pizza Hut so that we could find a relatively child-friendly and reliable place for a very late tea after our trip into Edinburgh. We didn't take many photos as really we were there shopping. And bizarre (and saddening really) as it is that there are so many mobile phone shops, and 3 branches of Boots, on the same road, we didn't really feel the need to record it.



Hermit crabs at North Berwick



North Berwick is a lovely place and would be fab for a seaside holiday, nice little town centre, nice sandy beach...



with fab rockpools...

Oh phooey I thought I'd taken more photos of the rockpools. Oh well, this one gives you an idea...



and this nifty man-made lagoon thingummy...



The rockpools were well populated with hermit crabs, fish and shrimps, which was cool. We picked a really nice day to go and the two ice-cream vans by the beach were doing well, the bigger, flasher 'whippy' van got more trade than the small, old, less ornate local icecream van (M Luca of Musselbrough) so I figured I'd give the local dairy some trade, it was really nice. Not quite a Dixon's Milk Ice but still good. The one thing I was surprised I didn't find was the kind of beach tat shop that Filey has several of, with flipflops and buckets and spades and hats and kites and cheap, naff sunglasses and bats and balls and all that, I ended up buying buckets and spades from the RNLI shop, which is fine of course, it's a very good cause and I'm happy to support them, but there wasn't much choice and it's not the same. But then we were there on a beautiful day in the middle of the first week of Scottish schools' Summer holidays and it was surprisingly not-busy so maybe there just isn't the trade to sustain it. But then where do people go? Were they all abroad? Or just not gone to the beach that day?

East Link Family Park was fun (and sunny, am glad all mine are old enough now to say 'you stay here' to one and 'you watch these' to another, lol, while I dash back to the car for hats and suncream...) Lots and lots of photos on flickr of this so I'll just post a couple here:





What else did we do while we were away? We mooched round the local shops in Dunbar, which apparently has the most sunshine hours in the UK. It lived up to it that week, we did get rained on but not as much as the rest of the country I think! There's a PYO strawberries place (with the strawbs in growbags on stilts, very odd but much easier on the back!) and a smokehouse just off the A1 outside Dunbar so we went there, oh and we had locally-caught langoustines bought in Dunbar for tea one day. When Lucy's cooker decided to cook them for us. On the Saturday, before coming home on Sunday, we drove to Bamburgh to look at the castle (and found a nice little deli, impressive range for such a tiny shop!) then to Lindisfarne for the fun of driving over the causeway and back, though it was too early to watch the tide rise over it. And then to Berwick-upon-Tweed where we got totally soaked and didn't find a replacement for dd2's worn-out-at-the-sleeve-cuffs zip-up hoodie but still felt like we'd had a good day.

Home the next day via Alnwick to look at the castle, where, in case there was anyone who wasn't aware, some scenes in the early Harry Potter films were filmed.




From there we went straight home apart from calling at Durham services again, for Costa and a 'win every time' £1 teddypicker machine that dd3 had been promised a go on if we didn't find another while we were away. Which we didn't.

Never did get round to sorting out that half price railcard offer.

adverts like that really p*** me off!!

I just uttered these words, at the end of a short rant. Dh said 'noooooo really?' :-|

The advert in question was the MiracleGro Organic ad, nauseating enough with its 'now we're starting a family...' schtick, I mean for goodness sake why wait?? If you've any inclination to go organic, just bloody do it! And you don't need something in a cardboard box, do you? Get yourself a composter or digester or wormery or do the no-dig thing and chuck your veg waste straight on the garden. What really got my goat, or gripped my sh*t as someone on a yahoogroup once said, was the 'it's 100% chemical free' line. Look honey, everything is made up of chemicals. Atoms, elements, compounds, molecules, suspensions, gas, liquid, solid... it's all chemicals dude. That's the whole big-thing point. Some chemicals are more useful to us than others, some more harmful. Chemistry is knowledge, understanding is obviously somewhat more difficult.

Oh and while we're on the subject of adverts, the one for Hofmann automatic garage doors, one might hope the automation includes switching the light on!!

adventures in motoring...

What is it with cars? Getting to a certain age and then loads of stuff conking out at once. Ours has cost us a good bit of money this year already, but Lucy the Multipla really took the biscuit coming home from the Harrogate Nursery Fair that I've blogged on my business blog already. She'd been doing odd things for a few days but nothing that our local mechanic could suss out, so we set off as usual. The draggy-whooshy noise was there on the way but wasn't really giving me any problems as such. We got there, we trawled round, we chatted... I missed my Costa coffee! Was going to get one to drive home with but we stayed so long they closed the catering stands!

Got out, went 'oh crap look at the time!' Kirsty (of FrontBackandSides) rang up to say that we were just setting off and got a 'what??!!' type response... think we all thought we wouldn't be still there at 6.15! Paid for parking, ugh, set off home. Got to Pool and the dratted car wouldn't go into gear. On a mini-roundabout. Hmmm....

Cue more phonecalling, what's the number for the breakdown co, not sure how long we'll be, all that. But the clutch pedal released, and it seemed to be working fine, so we set off again. And all was well. Until we got to a traffic lights halfway up a long long hill... And then we had smoke! I have never seen Kirsty move as fast, grabbing her bags, my bag and her blagged DreamGenii pillow (seriously, jammy bugger!) and jumping out of the car. I was less worried as it smelled of something stuck rather than actual fire, iykwim. But I did put the hazard lights on, grab my phone and jump out. Much to the disgust of my fellow drivers! As if I'd chosen to break down! Am I not deserving more of sympathy than revulsion?? Whatever...

So after getting the location of the car through to the breakdown service operator (I'm at the junction of 2 A roads, I gave the numbers, how much more flaming specific do they want?? And no, the A660 doesn't run through Staffordshire as far as I know!) I said 'we're going to push the car into the pub carpark and wait inside.' And so, we went in the pub, found some helpful men, got the car smoothly into the car park and went and bought ourselves drinks. Offered drinks to said men but they demurred, bless them. And then talked about us as if we couldn't hear them. The Dyneley Arms does a very nice Sam Smiths Old Brewery Bitter though, and the two half-pints I had were well pulled too. But they stop serving food at 5pm on Sundays so Kirsty couldn't get herself a pudding.

The breakdown bloke turned up, eventually. We couldn't see the car park from where we were in the pub, and I didn't have any signal on my phone. So he was there for 10 minutes before actually coming in the pub to find us, apparently they're not allowed to go in pubs to find people! How ridiculous is that? And how come the control centre bloke didn't tell us? Grr!

So after a bumpy trip home, with a pregnant K and a me who forgot to go to the loo before setting off from the pub, we got back home. K had to get a taxi home from here because Jobsworth couldn't do the extra drop-off. A good day, with a lump at the end, I think!

So what's up with the car?? Well the local garage that we take it to for tyres and exhausts and stuff don't do gearbox-y stuff so it's gone to the people they take MOTs to, who think it was the clutch release bearing. £250 worth of parts and labour. Oh joy. Could have been much much worse I guess!

more from the hopeless blogger...

I just posted over on BabyArmadillo News that I got reminded last night what a hopeless blogger I am. Well, yeah, hands up, fair cop, I'll go quietly... (yeah right!!)

So what's going on in the land of Trog? Hmmm... same ol' same ol' mostly. House is the same crap'ole that hasn't had owt done at it for ages, the neighbours are trying to sell and one of their viewers has said something about our garden being too scruffy *rolls eyes* Dh restrained himself from pointing out that we didn't want anyone that up-themselves for neighbours...

The kids are still growing like weeds (dd1 is a good 3in taller than me now I'm sure and dd4 is shaping up nicely as a prop...)

Am just grr-ing at a garage for being numpties. Car has a recall, we book in for recall (for Monday) rang today to ask how long it would take and it turns out they need to look at it to order the part in. Fine, no problem... except that the nearest Fiat dealerships to us aren't in our nearest town any more, oh no, one's in a village a couple of miles outside Wakefield and the other is in Cleckheaton. So it's not a case of popping down, it's a good 1&1/2hr round trip. For them to decide on the parts for something that's a standard recall. And if the woman on the phone said 'I'm not a technician' one more time...

Maybe Lucy can prod me to blog more regularly and you might get me commenting on other blogs too. I still prefer the flow of forums better though. And of course I can often (though, slacky! not atm) on one of the various IM networks that Trillian lets me connect to ;-)

white coat idolisation...

What is it that leads otherwise educated and sensible people to believe everything that someone says simply because they're wearing a white coat or a nametag that says 'qualified medical professional' on it? I can't wrap my head round it. I've been told in the past couple of days that reminding a pregnant person that she does not have to go to hospital appointments is irresponsible. Really? It's a simple statement of fact. And is it any more irresponsible than telling someone to go when you don't know whether the person they'll see will know their arse from their elbow?

Gosh, couldn't possibly suggest that a mother relies on her instincts over what some white-coated protocol peddler...

ugh, gurus...

Morag's blog

Not much more to say really. *sigh*

the only sane woman in the country

Am I really the only sane woman left in Great Britain? Or can someone tell me where I can find two-piece swimwear that doesn't mean that I have to make special dispensation for the fact that *shock horror* I have breasts?

Seriously, I have spent my afternoon trawling my local town with my two older daughters looking for swimwear for all of us. There's some lovely stuff out there, funky patterns, fun details, all that. But we couldn't find a single adult-sized two-piece that didn't have either triangle tops (oh there are plenty of those in the girls' sizes too, and really don't get me started on that little piece of social engineering) or formed cups or halter necks or those really annoying support shelf things, have you tried to take one of those off when it's wet, and you're dealing with a small child? Ridiculous.

A few years ago the shops were filled with tankinis, I had one from River Island that was perfect, plain black long-length top and shorts, little silvery sewn-on badges, no fuss, no stupid 'look at my tits!' malarky. Easy to pull up or down for feeding babies, enough coverage for my ample backside, perfect. But trends change, don't they? Even long-length tops were in short supply today.

All I want is something comfortable, maybe a fun fabric, that doesn't shout 'look, I have breasts!!' and covers my arse. That's all. Oh except that I want something similar for my daughters that doesn't scream soft porn when they're only 10 and 11! Surely it's not too much to ask? Surely I can't be the only mother of pre-teen girls who don't fit the children's sizes any more? Answers on a postcard...

Please sign this petition

Independent Midwives Petition

Edited to clean up ramblings... I was a bit ill and rambly when I wrote what was here before!

We have all this public/private partnership stuff going on. Now fair enough this is all so much pocket-lining for cronies, but I think it's less pocket-lining than the old system of the public sector deciding to build something and some big company building it... there's more opportunity for profit with PPP but the companies have to get more involved... but that's entirely by the by.

Really the issue is this: what does this govt have against choice? And in particular, it seems, choice for parents. Home-ed, indy schools, indy midwives, anything else? Oh yes, childminding regulations mean that I would have to register if I was to do a child-swap with a friend on a regular basis, which would mean a whole load of unnecesary-to-us safety provision, so it's a non-starter. The people at the top are parents themselves, don't they see it?

Must get that shrug smiley sorted...

rude? moi?

Apparently the following statement is rude:

"I personally believe school is, in itself, coercive and damaging and only of benefit to children who would be more damaged at home, of which there are thankfully very few."

What do you think? Does it say 'I think parents who send their children to school have problems at home' as I've been told today, at length? Or do you think that perhaps the assumption that that is what I meant also assumes that I'm a judgemental person?

IOW is it me or is it them??