Project 32: Board games

This week's project was board games, an opportunity to explore the history and variety of board games that have existed.

We started the week by watching a few videos on the history of board games:

Most of the week, however, was spent playing games! It's amazing to find how many board games you accumulate over the years, and also how long some of the bigger games can take. We played twenty different games over the week, and there are still dozens in the house we didn't get around to!

The board games we played can be broadly categorised into five groups: traditional abstract games, strategic games, roll-and-move games, word games, and family novelty games.

Traditional Abstract Games

• Draughts: Capture all of your opponent's pieces.
• Chess: Check-mate your opponent's king. 
• Nine Men's Morris: Reduce your opponent down to 2 counters by making mills. 

Modern Strategic Games

• Risk: Get rid of your opponent's pieces and conquer the world. 
• Picture Tri-Ominoes: Be the first to get all of your tiles down. 
• Ticket to Ride - First journey: Be the first to complete 6 routes. 
• The London Board Game: Visit 6 destinations on the London Underground. 
• Junior Scotland Yard: If you're the criminal you have to escape from the police 9 times; if you're the police you have to capture the criminal 3 times. 

Roll-and-Move Games

• Bookchase: Collect 6 coloured books and return to the start. 
• Payday: Get to the end with the most money. 
• Despicable Me Monopoly: Bankrupt your opponent. 

Word Games

• Junior Scrabble: Get the red dots by completing the most words. 
• Upwords: Score as high as possible from making words. 

Novelty Family Game

• Downfall: Get all your pieces to the bottom first. 
• Guess Who: Be the first to guess who your opponent is. 
• Hungry Hungry Hippos: Eat the most marbles. 
• Connect 4 Flip: Get 4 counters in a row.
• Stay Alive: Get all your opponent's marbles down the holes.
• Pop-up Pirate: Put your swords in a barrel and not have the pirate pop up. 
• Splatter Face: Not have cream splattered in your face. 

The Best: Risk

Despite a single game lasting 2.5 hrs, Solomon declared this to be his favourite game of the week. In fact, he requested that we allow more time next time we play so that we can have two games. Unsurprisingly, as Solomon is only 5 and Risk is for ages 10 and above, we played this as a team.

The Worst: Splatter Face

Splatter Face was the only game of the week that was actually disliked. It was bought by his grandmother as a present, and after sitting at the back of the cupboard for a couple of months it seemed the ideal opportunity to bring it out. Solomon, however, is far too sensible and refused to play it, leaving it to me and his 3 year old sister for the first (and last) game. I'm not too sure what she expected, but she quickly lost the first game and screamed the house down as the whipped cream was splattered into her face. This, in turn, set the 2 year old screaming, and the game was quickly relegated to the charity shop. 

Why this game (and variations) is so popular is a total mystery. 

Special Mention: Nine Men's Morris

Nine Men's Morris was the surprise find of the week. A traditional 3-in-a-row game that has been around thousands of years, it's simple enough to be played anywhere but complex enough to be interesting beyond the noughts-and-cross (tic-tac-toe). We have plans to make our own cloth board to keep at the bottom of the bag when we're out and about. 

Solomon's Ranking

We got Solomon to order the games from best to worst - although beyond the best couple and the worst one, there's probably not much in it. For example, Ticket to Ride - First Journey was only ranked 10th, despite being Solomon's favourite game 3 months ago (this is probably mostly due to a combination of familiarity and his preference for the full version - which if we'd played he says would have been ranked 3rd).

1. Risk
2. Bookchase
3. Downfall
4. Payday
5. Guess Who
6. Draughts (Checkers)
7. Junior Scrabble
8. Hungry Hungry Hippos
9. Picture Tri-Ominoes
10. Ticket to Ride - First Journey
11. Connect 4 Flip
12. Chess
13. Stay Alive
14. Pop-Up Pirate
15. Upwords
16. Despicable Me Monopoly
17. Nine Men's Morris
18. The London Board Game
19. Junior Scotland Yard
20. Splatter Face

Undoubtedly it's a list that will see a lot of movement over the years as the novelty of some games wears off, and he learns to appreciate the subtlety of others. If he still prefers Hungry Hungry Hippos over Chess in 10 years then I think we can conclude home education has been a total failure!

Next week's project: Ancient Greece.

Project 31: Minecraft and Redstone

At Solomon's instigation we explored Minecraft and redstone (Minecraft's answer to electronics) a bit further this week.

Solomon has quite an extensive library of Minecraft books, and we tried building a couple of items out of the Minecraft Guide to Redstone, adding them to his ongoing Minecraft castle.  Unfortunately, whilst the armour swapper we built at one end of the castle wall worked well, when we tried to build an elevator at the other end it kept shooting off into the sky! We think the problem was that to get an observer block facing in the right direction on the Switch we had to mine the redstone below it, and when the redstone was replaced it triggered the observer. We'll see if we can find a workaround, but it may be that the elevator is something we have to create on the PC instead.

Minecraft Armour Swapper

We bought the Minecraft Windows 10 edition specifically for this week's project so that Solomon could try programming with MakeCode for Minecraft. MakeCode for Minecraft is a drag and drop blocks programming language for interacting with Minecraft (specifically the Windows 10 or Education editions). It is easy to use, and Solomon loved it - undoubtedly his favourite form of programming so far. If you have a child who likes Minecraft, and you want to encourage programming, this is a great option. We stuck to the simple tutorials, but there are even lesson plans available for introducing more complex ideas such as artificial intelligence.

MakeCode for Minecraft

We didn't just want Solomon stuck in front of a computer screen all week, so we also got him and his sister to make some Minecraft mosaic masks.

'Alex' and 'Ender Dragon' Mosaic Masks

Next week's project: Board games!

Project 30: Electricity!

We bought a few science kits in the Maplin closing down sale, and Solomon chose to use the electricity kit for this week's project.

The Thames & Kosmos Electricity Master Lab (I think it cost about £70 in the shop) consists of 88 pieces that are used in 119 experiments. It starts with simple circuits with light bulbs and slowly builds up to introduce diodes, resisters, potentiometers, transformers, and a myriad of other components.

119 electricity experiments

The kit is designed for 10 years and up, but Solomon didn't have any trouble putting together the circuits. They don't clip together as easily as something like LittleBits, however, and his father managed to accidentally bend the connector on the meter. It bent back easily enough, but we're a bit wary of that particular connection point now, thinking it may break at some future point.

Unsurprisingly, with 119 experiments, we didn't work our way through all of them. We finished the first 3 sections (37 experiments): current flows in a circle; measuring the invisible; and mysterious magnetic forces. Solomon's favourite part was the magnets, so he's looking forward to the next section when we return to it, electric current and magnetism make a great team.

In an attempt to have a more craft-focused activity, we also made conductivity testing bugs from Usborne's 100 Science Experiments. It was a nice little project, although struggling to get clean connections served as a reminder of how much easier electronics kit can be!

Conductivity testing bugs

As well as the usual BBC videos on the topic, there was also a really good Royal Institute video which kept them engaged throughout: Zap, Crackle, and Pop - The story of electricity. 

Next week's project: Minecraft and Redstone (which Solomon insists builds upon his electricity work).

Project 29: Easter and Spring

This week's project ran Sunday-to-Sunday rather than the usual Monday-to-Sunday so that we could couple together Easter and Spring, and make use of some of the activities that have been organized locally for the school holidays. 

As may be expected, we started Easter Sunday with the usual chocolate eggs, an Easter egg hunt, and explained to all the children why Christians celebrate Easter with a couple of picture books The Story of Easter and The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross. The Story of Easter is better for the Easter story, The Garden... is better for the wider biblical context. We also made some chocolate nests and made and decorated our own Easter eggs.

Chocolate nests

Home-made and decorated chocolate eggs

Peterborough cathedral had a number of Easter craft activities going on this week, and Solomon made an Easter bonnet and wreath. It's the first time that we'd been to Becket's Tea Room, and as it's a really nice space we stayed for lunch. Unfortunately the service and food wasn't as good as the space.

Making Easter bonnets

Later in the week we went to the Green Backyard, a local community garden, where another home educator had organized an Easter egg hunt. This was followed by a 'family gardening' session, where the children did some weeding, planting, and made bird scarers to take home. It was the first time we'd been to the Green Backyard, but we will definitely be returning as everyone had a great time. We also finally got around to buying some seeds and planting our own veg patches, and made use of our new bird scarers.

Bird scarers over our veg patches

Next week's project: Electricity!

Project 28: Dinosaurs!

At last we've reached the topic everyone who is home educating young children will do eventually: Dinosaurs! It's a great topic as there are such a wide variety of resources suitable for children of Solomon's age: books, tv series, films, shows, and activities. We used a couple of books, watched Walking with Dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, visited a museum, watched a theatre show about dinosaurs, and Solomon dug a dinosaur out of a lump of  'rock'.

The main book we used was findout! Dinosaurs, part of a series of non-fiction introductory books by Dorling Kindersley. This is a nice quality series with plenty of information, quality illustrations, and an accompanying online web site. The book provides a nice overview of the dinosaur world, types of dinosaur, and the science behind finding out about dinosaurs. As we wanted more information on specific types of dinosaur we came across, we supplemented this with another Dorling Kindersley book: Knowledge Encyclopedia Dinosaur! With so many dinosaurs (as well as pterosaurs and marine reptiles), you inevitably come across ones which aren't in either book, but there's usually one of the same family. 

Walking with Dinosaurs (currently available on Netflix) is almost 20 years old, yet it still managed to keep Solomon glued to his seat throughout. After watching the third episode on marine reptiles we visited Peterborough Museum which has an exhibit of Jurassic marine reptiles:

Jurassic marine reptiles at Peterborough Museum

It was nice to put the local exhibition in context, and we decided against a big trip to the National History Museum as we also had a trip to the theatre planned: Dinosaur World Live. 

Dinosaur World Live T-Rex

Dinosaur World Live being on at the local theatre is the reason we decided on dinosaurs for this week's project. It's a fantasy puppet show narrated by a girl who was shipwrecked on an island inhabited by dinosaurs, and has brought some of them back. The T-Rex was impressive, and it was nice to be able to go up and touch the dinosaurs at the end, but otherwise we didn't find it to be a particularly exciting show. Hopefully we'll get the opportunity to see Walking with Dinosaurs - the arena spectacular later in the year.  

After the theatre trip we watched Jurassic Park on DVD with all three kids (aged 2, 3, and 5). It's always a bit hit or miss with age ratings from 25 years ago, and we weren't sure whether a PG would still be suitable. They all loved it however, and whilst there was the odd unsuitable word, it was a good sort of scary, probably because a dinosaur park is not the sort of place they usually find themselves in!

Solomon also dug out an Archeofun T-Rex he'd been bought for Christmas, and we'd judiciously put to one side. 

We were surprised at how long the pieces took to dig out, but also how much pleasure Solomon got from it. He probably spent 4 hrs digging the pieces out altogether, and never showed any sign of boredom - even at the end of a mammoth 2 hour session!

Next week's project: Easter and Spring. 

How We Home Educate

Following on from yesterday's post on Why We Home Educate, I decided to write a post on how we home educate, or at least how we home educate at the moment.

We started home education with few preconceived notions about the best way to home educate our children. We broadly adhered to the idea of a child-centred approach to learning, and a fundamental belief in the potential of the vast majority of children to excel academically in the right learning environment, but we had no idea how that would be put into practice on a daily basis. We read Understanding & Using Educational Theories which gave us an overview of all the major theorists, and like many home educators, picked and chose the bits that we thought would best fit in with our children, our circumstances, and our values.

Unlike most home educators, who will tell you "there's no typical day" and "every day is different", we have a broad structure within which the children work. We are a long way from the anarchic unschoolers beloved by the media, we like to give the kids room to express what they want to do, but within boundaries that will help them thrive. All children need plenty of sleep, exercise, and a balanced diet; left to his own devices our eldest would undoubtedly sit on the sofa, day and night, playing computer games.

There are three typical parts of the day, each of which can be moved or dropped according to other commitments such as trips out, home education groups, or other social engagements.

Jobs
'Jobs' is the regular maths and writing Solomon has to do every day, and which he usually starts after breakfast. This consists of writing in his diary what he did the day before, and a couple of pages from his maths workbook. We use the Schofield & Sims workbooks, and Solomon is currently halfway through Times Tables Practice 2. Because we don't enforce a Monday to Friday, 9 to 3 schedule there is an expectation that maths and writing are done every day, and if he doesn't write in his diary one day he has to write two entries the next. On a good day his jobs are done in 40 minutes, on a bad day it stretches out to an hour and a half.

Project
Most days we also try to do something on the week's project, which we describe each week in this blog. Sometimes Solomon will suggest a project, sometimes we will, and sometimes it is prompted by external events (e.g., Christmas, a visit, or a local event). Once a theme has been agreed we come up with a variety of resources and pieces of work to help us explore the topic more fully, this may include trips out, watching a film, a science experiment, or creating a piece of artwork. As Solomon is only five most of the resources and trips are suggested by his parents, but as Solomon gets bigger, and is more aware of the opportunities that are available, we will expect him to suggest more of the activities himself. The main problem we have with the project/theme approach is that there is so much we want to explore that the list of potential projects is always growing faster than we can do them!

Rest time
We've also been lucky in that as our children have grown bigger we have managed to keep the afternoon nap time they had as small children, although over time this has transformed into a rest time. Each afternoon they'll go up to their rooms and (mostly) read quietly for an hour. We've found that on those days they don't have this rest period there is a tendency for them to get a bit overtired, and it raises the chance of there being tears before bedtime. Teach a child to read as early as possible and the parent can have peace and quiet every day!

In addition we ensure there is a trip out for some fresh air each day (we are lucky to have numerous local parks and a nature reserve within 5 minutes walk), there's no computer games until after lunch (and no more than one hour a day!), and TV is generally restricted to a short programme before bed unless it is associated with a particular project. The key with all these things is routine: because computer games are never allowed before lunch and the TV is never 'just on', we are spared the screen time requests that can plague some households.

As the children get bigger we will inevitably have to revisit how we home educate: GCSEs will require greater structure if we are to get through set curricula, and when all three require compulsory full time education we will need to find a balance for the children's different interests. For now, however, we've found a rhythm that works for us, and can't imagine doing it any other way.

Why We Home Educate

Inspired by a post on The World is Their Classroom, I (Solomon's dad)  thought I would write a post about why we home educate. After all, deciding to home educate is not an easy decision, it is a huge commitment, and whilst it is on the rise, society still expects that your child goes to school. Luckily my wife and I were both in a position to question society's norm and lucky enough to be able to do something about it.

4 is too young!
We did not decide straight away that we would like to home educate our children, rather we have inched towards that position. We started from the position that 4 (the age that most children start school in the UK) is far too young for formal education.

Around the time we had our first child, some Finnish friends of ours also had a child, and the news was continually telling us Finland was an education superpower and British children had to work harder to keep up in the global workplace. But whilst the government promoted increased testing and taking the children away from the bad influence of parents at an ever younger age, this is the exact opposite of our (and Finland's) thinking:

"[no] formal schooling until the age of seven, have short school days, long holidays, relatively little homework and no exams"

It is undoubtedly in the interests of a country's GDP to have parents back to work ASAP and for as long as possible (at least in the short term), but for kids to reach their potential they need emotionally secure foundations, and putting them in overcrowded classrooms for increasingly long hours at such an emotionally vulnerable age is undoubtedly storing up problems for the future.

Once we decided we were interested in home educating, we were pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it is in this country. Literally just do nothing (unless your children are already in school or have special educational needs).

There is no going back (probably)
Once the first step has been taken, and you accept the idea of home education until they are 7 or 8, it is hard to then imagine ever putting them into a school situation. With one-to-one interaction, they can leap ahead with the reading, writing, and arithmetic, freeing up time for them to explore other subjects that they are interested in. School no longer seems to be a place of education opportunities, but a place that restricts a child's education opportunities, where you are praised for conformity and being average.

As our eldest pointed out when we read Matilda, "she's like us": we are a bookish family, shelves filled with books, reading at every opportunity, and it was inevitable that our kids would be interested in books at an early age and we would teach them to read. But if you arrive at reception having read all of Roald Dahl's books, whilst most others are learning their phonics, you will either be bored or be labelled as 'different' - different in a good way by teachers, different in a bad way by fellow pupils. Now, six months of home education later, we find Solomon is leaping ahead with his maths, and unlike reading and writing, those differences are likely to continue to be discernible throughout his education. 

We have the opportunity to home educate
For all our dislike of the schooling system in this country, we nonetheless recognise that most people have little choice, and we are extremely lucky in being able to home educate. Increasingly society (and house prices!) are geared towards two wage families, and people are uneasy about those who don't conform to expected social norms. We are privileged in both being able to afford to home educate, and having little negative reaction to our decision.

We both work from home, and are sufficiently well paid that we both only have to work part time. This means that most of the time both of us are around, and even though there are three children when one-to-one help is required it is available. It also means that there is support and a sharing of project ideas; no single parent is stuck wondering whether we're doing enough with the kids or what we should do next.

We've also been lucky in support from family and friends, or at least they've not been overtly unsupportive. Most home educators have some tale of falling out with family or friends over their decision to home educate, but with the exception of one acquaintance who fell by the wayside this has passed us by. Although our family and friends have little experience of home education they trust us to do what we think is best for our children, even if they wouldn't do it (or have done it) themselves, and with those who have kids in school we don't preach that our way is better. Like most home educators we are asked questions about the socialising side of things, but luckily as we've both got PhDs no one has been brave enough to question our ability on the education side.

In conclusion...six months in...
We've never had cause to question whether we're doing the right thing: The children are thriving, we love it, and our only problem is there's so much to explore and so little time. How anyone has time for school is an absolute mystery to us.