Developing empathy

 When Ferdy watches a film, he doesn't sit down and watch it; he has to stand in the characters' shoes and act out all the scenes as the film is happening. This can be a little tiring for the other audience members. When Ferdy finishes a book, he plans an elaborate game pretending to be lots of the protagonists (often the bad guys). Gil, of course, joins in all of these games (he plays the heroes).

Both Ferdy and Gil play a huge amount of make believe games and I wonder whether these games may be quite good lessons in developing empathy; they seem able to immerse themselves completely in the roles they are playing and feel what they imagine that the characters are feeling. It can sometimes be a little annoying when they won't come out of character ('Mummy, Justice is far too busy savin' Baby Boy and Floppy's lives to go to school') but such connection with other people's experiences, whether good or evil, can't be a bad way to understand empathy.

Our activity this Friday was to go to the National Trust's Peter Rabbit trail and meet (be) the characters. Ferdy has loved these books for a long time and Gil likes the stories now too. Ferdy read us Peter Rabbit in the morning, which I was pleased about as I don't enjoy reading the Beatrix Potter books at all! Despite their lovely illustrations, they are really awkward to read, although I'm sure many Beatrix Potter fans, including Ferdy, would disagree.

Our trail companions were Miss Tiggiwinkle, Squirrel Nutkin, Mr Jeremy Fisher, Mr McGregor and of course, the errant Peter Rabbit (Gil's favourite because he is cheeky), but much to Ferdy's disappointment, no Samual Whiskers who is vile and naughty and is Ferdy's favourite character. We learnt lots of good facts like that turnips were thrown at unpopular Romans, and that hedgehogs only breathe once or twice a minute whilst hibernating.

Back at home, Ferdy wrote a letter from Samual Whiskers to Tom Kitten. We have enjoyed the letter writing theme this term - also a great way to practise a bit of empathy. And Gil decided to write a card for Billy whose back is hurting and his fishing friend has died and Gil thought that he would be sad.

I sometimes worry that we aren't teaching our kids enough, or that we're focussing too much on work that they aren't that keen on doing, but if a capacity to empathise and having compassion for others, is something that my kids grow up with, it will feel like we maybe got something right! Even if it does mean that we have to cobble together Avengers costumes most Saturday mornings...

Justice from The Avengers

Too much time in the family tree

I'm a bit jealous of Stick Man. Yes, I know he gets chased by a dog, used as a mast for a silly old flag and nearly burnt in the fireplace. But he goes to the beach, sails out to sea and even rides on Santa's sleigh. We, on the other hand barely go anywhere at the moment and are spending all of our time in the family tree.

We based some of our learning around Stick Man today as Gil is reading it at school, and Ferdy still loves all the Julia Donaldson books.

Ferdy rewrote some of the phrases as fronted adverbials:

And Gil looked for words he can read using his new sounds this week, like hook and soot, and copied some out.

I'm not sure this is quite how you spell Stick Man, Gil.

Desperate to leave the family tree, we headed out to the Arboretum on the trail of the man himself.

It was icy cold as it's pretty exposed at the Arboretum but we wore trousers, waterproof trousers, three layers underneath our coats, gloves and hats, and we were fine and it only started raining as we reached the end. The trail took us through woodland, along the stream, past the lake, over bridges and ended in a mini assault course. Almost as exciting as Stick Man's adventure...

At the weekend we decorated our own family tree with Beano characters...

The Great Garden Grammar Game

On the way home from school on Thursday, Ferdy cried in the car because he said he didn't want a Ugandan penfriend.. (his school are twinning with a school in Uganda). Eventually I realised that this was because he already has a penfriend in Spain, and he thought this new penfriend would have to replace his Spanish penfriend. 

So on Friday, we talked a bit about schools in Africa, and how exciting it will be for them to have penfriends in the UK, and also how not all children can afford to go to school there and how that makes some of them sad. We read a lovely book called Beatrice's Goat about how a girl in Uganda gets a goat which enables her family to earn enough money for her to go to school.

Ferdy has also learnt a bit about commas this week, and Gil has started learning his vowel digraphs and trigraphs so we invented the Great Garden Grammar Game.

This involved the Sentencer (me), the Full Stop/Capital Letters Policeman and Chief Rubber Outer (Gil), and the Comma King and Exclamation/Question/Speech Marks Detective (Ferdy).

Stones were gathered as full-stops, dried leaves were commas and the rest was done in coloured chalk. There was a bit of grumpiness to start with, mainly about being outside when it was warm inside and slippers are more comfy than shoes.. But we all got quite into this, especially when I started taking sentences from Ferdy's book, Ratburger, and when Gil had his own phrases with his new sounds.

We played this game for much longer than anticipated and I was pleasantly surprised to see Ferdy adding in speech marks and even realising that a comma sometimes goes in a place to make a pause, leading to a more fluent reading of a phrase.

Ferdy's decided he will actually write a letter to his Ugandan class, so, you never know, it might actually include a few commas.

Serendipitous Stories

In The Animals of Farthing Wood, the main protagonist, Fox, is parted from all his friends and nearly drowns when he gets trapped in some debris floating down the river. Despite drifting far away from his pals, he meets Vixen, and muses to himself that out of something bad, good has arisen, thus transforming his view on how bad the bad thing actually was.

We talked quite a bit about this today; how every cloud has a silver lining, and how serendipity can occur, especially as our day entailed acting out scenes from the Animals of Farthing Wood and trying to put ourselves in the shoes/paws of the animals..

Ferdy made a list of all the perilous things that the group of animals have had to encounter in the story so far, and we went to Calke Abbey to search for them. 

Cautiously crossing the trunk road, we found the treacherous swimming pool, the army land where the woodland creatures had to flee from the fire, the barn in which they took shelter and then had to tunnel their way out of, the thorns upon which some the of new baby animals were impaled by the Butcher Bird (yes, The Animals of Farthing Wood does not shy away from the gory details of the animal kingdom, and yes, one of our new words today was impale) and Vixen's den. Luckily, we did not have to experience the horrors of the fox hunt, chapter 22 which we read whilst we were there; if I were not already against fox hunting, I would be after reading this chapter.

We also managed some Animals of Farthing Wood column addition and subtraction, (eg Farthing Wood used to have 987 trees growing in it. The bulldozers have cut down 768 trees and taken them away. How many trees are there left growing in Farthing Wood?) and Gil was also happy because I'd made him some worksheets.

On the way to and from Calke, we started listening to the Ikabog, and when we got home we watched the wonderful Amantha Edmead's rendition of the Wolf and the Seven Kids, which we get sent weekly by the Story Museum in Oxford (where we were supposed to be going for Ferdy's birthday next week). Ferdy and Gil then wrote ten minutes of facts that they could remember from the story, although Ferdy doesn't know it's ten minutes as he hates being timed! This was a good idea from his teacher and a great way to get them both to consider the most pertinent bits of a story and learn to summarise. Ferdy has a tendency to tell the whole story almost word for word when asked to explain what it's about, stubbornly insisting on reaching the end..

It was a rainy, cold and grey day and I hadn't been expecting much but according to Gil, this was his best flexi days ever. I'm inclined to agree that it was definitely one of our better ones; thanks to that little injection of serendipity we finished the day with rosy cheeks, stories in our heads and a renewed spring in our paws. 

Lockdown letters

 We did a lot of work this Friday, and not much else.

I don't really know why this is happening but we do seem to be spending a lot of time at the kitchen table, either doing worksheets or doing our learning, and I'm not sure how happy this is making any of us.

It may partly be due to having spent six months at home with the kitchen becoming our classroom. Or maybe because Gil seems to really like writing and drawing so we are a little influenced by his enthusiasm. Or also because we aren't able to go to a lot of the exciting and enriching places we usually have access to; we can't even go to the library!

But we also need to remember why we flexischool in the first place. We started because for a long time, Ferdy was very unhappy at school. But we also started because we feel quite strongly that learning through outdoor play, enrichment and study, through experience and through real life lessons, is really vital. And, despite our love of them, we seem to have strayed away a little from learning through stories. Stories are the still the most important thing in Ferdy's life (he loves books more than he loves his parents); our most successful flexi days have revolved around a story like learning about rainforests and chocolate with Michael Morpurgo's 'Running Wild', following Fred the Frog's adventures at Biddulph Grange Gardens, experiencing Victorian England through A Christmas Carol and even addressing climate change though Dr Seuss's The Lorax. 

This Friday, both boys elected to write letters; Ferdy to his Granny in Dorset, and Gil to his cousin Ade in Essex.

They also wrote the envelopes, stamped and posted them, which was kind of fun, Gil also wants us to learn about stamps so there might well be a part 2 to letter writing. Ferdy is not really enjoying writing at the moment though, so, whilst Gil was completing worksheet #124, Ferdy did some column addition.

    

In lockdown (when I had time), we did quite a few of these. Ferdy really likes combining maths with other things and rewarding his result with a letter that answers his question is a really good incentive to get his sums right. He sometimes just wants to get things done quickly (so he can read his Beano) and doesn't really mind if they are right or wrong, but because he gets a letter for his correct sum, he is motivated to go back over his results to check when he can't find the corresponding number. I'd do lots more of these if they didn't take me over an hour to do! 

Gil's learning about the lovely Owl Babies story at school this week so, after finding out a bit about Tawny Owls, we did eventually manage to get out to search for owls.

We found a bird to play in, a Barn Owl with a mouse, and a Tawny Owl sound to listen to. But perhaps the real highlight of the day was watching up close a family of squirrels stashing nuts and racing nimbly up and down trees. 

We may not have museums or theatres or libraries but we still have stories and nature, so my note to self is let's embrace what we do have a bit more.

Gil's letter to Ade

Child-led learning

It was a Gil only day this Friday as Ferdy went in to school.

'Ahh, I'm looking forward to a nice and play-oriented day', I thought to myself on Thursday evening.. 'What we doin' tomorrow', demanded Gil whilst I was planning the drawing I might start the next day. 'What do you want to do, poppet?', I asked. 'First, pleeeease can I 'ave some worksheets', he replied, 'I want to do letters a, b, c, t and k'. He then pointed out the ones he'd like on Twinkl which looked far too tricky to me.

After breakfast on Friday, I made myself a cup of tea and got ready to help him with his worksheets. 'All done', he declared. 'Now what we doin'?' I had a look and yes, he'd somehow managed to complete them all before breakfast. Realising the pace of the day had slightly changed, I gulped down my cup of tea and we moved on to some number work learning about adding up to 6, 7 and 8 please..

I'd been thinking we'd do this outside but it was raining so Gil suggested doing it with Lego. We got two bowls and Gil had to work out the different number sentences adding up to 6 and 7. It worked really well and he thoroughly enjoyed it, even pointing out that adding 0 was a number sentence too (I had forgotten that one).

Next he suggested we learn about autumn so we watched a lovely video about the changing seasons, read a few books about migration and then headed out for an autumn walk to search for different autumn colours.

Then it was time for a nice chilled out lunch. But alas, Gil doesn't have chilled out lunches. It was actually time for Gil to beat Mum at a memory game and proudly boast to the cafe owners about what a loser his Mum is.

At home later, I suggested that he had worked so hard today so might like to play some Lego or play for a little bit (and give Mum a rest). No thanks, he decided that we needed to play the Shopping List game (which he won), followed by a drawing from Art for Kids, and had Mummy forgotten that she'd promised to do some leaf rubbings?

I'm a fan of child-led learning, I think it instills confidence in a child and am often surprised how, when left to their own devices, my children come up with their own brilliant and creative ways to learn about the world around them. 

But as I collapsed on the sofa at 4pm, I wondered whether child-dictated learning may be a more suitable term for our experience today..

Once upon a pyramid - invertebrate cats and hibernating hedgehogs

 For our Mum-reads-aloud book we are reading the Animals of Farthing Wood at the moment. It was written in 1979 but its theme, about animals who have to leave their homes because their wood is being bulldozed down for more homes to be made, is strangely pertinent.

The vocabulary in the book is quite sophisticated (for all of us) and a lot of words need explanation. So we decided to get out the dictionary this week and look up some of our new words. Ferdy then wrote them out on some new paper which we are trying in order to help his letter formation.

We like animals to be the theme of the day; Ferdy is learning about vertebrates and invertebrates at school, and Gil is learning about autumn and hibernation, so where is the best local place to go to see animals? No, sadly not the woods, but Derby Museum..

Derby Museum is a place we often use as our Friday classroom. Ferdy is also studying the Egyptians so we started with the Egyptian mummies.

We got a lecture from our impromptu tour guide (Ferdy) about how people were put in bandages before being placed in the coffin, about how the head was a jackal head and how kings were buried in pyramids. To our great astonishment we even found a mummified cat.

In the nature gallery we discovered vertebrates and invertebrates, and Gil looked for animals that hibernate.

We even spotted a hibernating butterfly (a red admiral), and we also talked about the migrating butterfly, the Monarch.

Later on, Gil drew a hedgehog with the legendary Art for Kids, and Ferdy taught him to add up to ten on his fingers and wrote and dictated a story about an Invertebrate Cat. Thanks to Derby Museum, we could bring together English, History, Science and Art, not to mention the Maths we used to work out how much crisps cost in the cafe, and the Music we listened to in-between times tables at home.

A gloriumptiously good day

 In our household, we love a literary pilgrimage. We have done a fair few in our flexischooling career, be it transporting ourselves off to the land of fairytales, looking for the Lorax, meeting some of our literary heroes at Hay on Wye, celebrating Christmas with Michael Rosen and Charles Dickens, and we've even been known to travel all the way to Denmark to find Hans Christian Andersen..

Arguably though, one of the constants in Ferdy's long life of loving books has been Roald Dahl. He has been listening to the audiobooks since he was 4; he started reading with the Magic Finger and now reads them all and our latest, which we listened to this Friday, is Boy.

So when I found out that the museum had reopened, I decided we should take a trip there. We have no idea how much longer these amazing and vital places are going to stay open or survive.

Having travelled there the night before, our early morning countryside trail entailed tramping through the woods which inspired stories like Danny the Champion of the World, Fantastic Mr Fox and Billy and the Minpins. We encountered Wangdoodles, Snozwanglers, Hornswogglers, Vermicious Knids, had to run away from the blood suckling, tooth pluckling, stone chuckling Spittler (Gruncher for short), and even found the orchard and farm belonging to one of Ferdy's favourite baddies, Mr Bean (the lean one who only drinks cider in FMF).

Gil enjoyed leading the way on this walk by following instructions on our map and not getting too biffsquiggled. It culminated in us tracing the BFGs footsteps to Roald Dahl's grave where we had a little chat with the great man himself..

After some scrumdiddlyumptious food in the cafe, we went to the museum. Many things are a bit miserable at the moment; places seem like ghost towns and no one seems to be having much fun. But it is rather nice to have your own personal tour guide (a splendiferous lady named Helen who reminded us a little of Miss Honey) and a whole museum to yourselves.

Both boys churgled to see the mouse in the sweet jar from Boy and delighted in seeing Roald Dahl's actual writing room and to work out what character they were according to their height (Ferdy was George, Gil was an Oompa Loompa to his annoyance, I was Willy Wonka). We learnt loads of new stuff about Roald Dahl, (although Ferdy seemed to know rather a lot, occasionally taking over as museum guide) like how he had loved the Beatrix Potter books, how Charlie from the Chocolate Factory had originally been made of chocolate, how Oompa Loompas were very nearly called Whipple Scrumpets and how the BFG was based on Roald Dahl's very good friend with big ear lobes who had made his writing shed.

Gil particularly loved the ball of tin foil Dahl made from every chocolate wrapper he had eaten, and Ferdy very much enjoyed showing off all his knowledge of the characters in the stories (he was able to answer every question correctly) and stomping, flying and oompa loompering around the museum between the rooms.

On the way home, we listened to the rest of Boy and later we watched the whizzpoppingly excellent Fantastic Mr Fox and spotted Roald Dahl's chair and ball of tinfoil in Mr Fox's office in the film.

The day was made of zozimus for all involved.

Ferdy's trick taken from Matilda's book of genius

What's in the news today?

 In the olden days, when I was young and cool and hip and before I became a world weary mother, I worked in the newspaper industry. So when Ferdy asked if we could make a newspaper this Friday, I became a little (over) excited. The chance to be an editor again had arisen...

After school worship online, we were just in time for the 10:30 news meeting where news story ideas were proposed to the Editor. Our research consisted of reading a few daily papers and choosing our favourite stories, watching Newsround and finding out about how best to approach putting together our paper.

Chief reporter writes a list of all the important stories of the day

We decided we needed an exclusive story so contacted one of our sources about some tree felling happening nearby, and then out we went for some on the ground reporting.

Here's The Adventure Paper, all articles written and dictated by Ferdy and/or Gil and all pictures drawn and taken by Ferdy and Gil apart from the final illustration.

Our interview with retired local resident, Granddad, took place at 3pm so we only just made our 4pm press deadline. Ferdy and Gil found it hilarious that this was called 'putting the paper to bed'.

Ferdy's Law of Emotion

 Some Fridays work well, and some less well. This was a less well kind of a Friday.. We've all had colds this week and I'm still recovering, plus Ferdy's been getting upset about work and unable to concentrate for very long. And also, we often fill our Fridays with an exciting and enriching day out (this was part of the reason for flexischooling in the first place!) but it feels difficult to arrange anything at the moment, especially anything further afield.

However, many places are still open so Mum just needs to do a bit more creative thinking and stop feeling negative.

We are doing quite a bit of maths at the moment, which often works well through games, so we started with a game called Happy Maths Families. This involved me giving Ferdy a number sentence and him finding the other members (facts) of the number sentence family.

After Gil had done all the worksheets he had asked for (he is doing the letters g, o, c and k this week), he ordered numbers 1-10 and did some sums adding up to 5.

Ferdy really enjoyed his work at school this week on emotions so we then decided to look at some famous paintings and think about what they made us feel (we couldn't look at Munch's The Scream as both boys are scared of it).

Slightly frustratingly (this was one of our emotions hehe), Ferdy has denoted a colour to each emotion (perhaps from a book at school?), a law from which he won't budge. So when we looked at Dr Seuss's beautiful My Many Coloured Days, he was adamant that Dr Seuss had it wrong. He also repeated the same mantra for looking at paintings; when asked why a painting made him feel calm he stated, 'because it's green of course'.

I tried to counter Ferdy's Law of Emotion by introducing a few black and white pictures but was promptly told that black is 'scared', so that was slightly unsuccessful.

We then decided to move on and watched a video about the difference between emotions and feelings, listened to some songs and Ferdy wrote some sentences about when he feels sad, angry, calm, scared and brave. He then insisted on drawing colourful monsters to accompany these sentences (blue, red, green, black and orange). I tried to remain green and embrace rather than reject Ferdy's law.

On our way to the woods, Gil made up a beautiful song about what we feel and that 'our emotions are always there, we can't run away from them'.

The song ended with the fact that we are going to the woods to 'run away from our emotions'.

Later on, we all did some paintings and felt yellow. I surrender.

The Swap Shop

Today, Ferdy and I made up a game called The Swap Shop. This entailed me giving Ferdy a number, he then had to halve that number using dienes and two bowls and write the number sentence. Sounds a bit boring? Not when you have to visit The Swap Shop, run by Mrs Swap Shop who spoke a bit funny and had a weird sounding doorbell, to exchange your 10 block, 100 block or 1000 block for 1s, 10s or 100s.

Mrs Swap Shop was also a bit wayward and often tried to cheat Ferdy out of a few blocks so he had to be very alert. A simple game, but thoroughly enjoyable..

In the meantime, Gil worked on a few worksheets. He likes to do these on his own with the occasional interjection by Ferdy (practise saying 'd', Gil by saying 'a dog dug a dragon's dung') and definitely no help from Mrs Swap Shop.

We've never really done a lot of work on worksheets on a Friday but Gil seems to love them so who am I to argue? Ferdy then also did some of his own, as well as some important work writing about a day in the life of Bananaman.

Ferdy then decided it was time for Gil to learn about ordering and recognising numbers 1-10 so taught him a numbers game.

Gil won, much to my and Ferdy's annoyance..

With Akimbo and the Lion (Gil had requested that we listen to something about Africa as he really enjoyed learning about Africa in school this week) as our soundtrack, we then had time to head out to do some afternoon activities.

We had loads of fun doing the Activity Trail which we fortuitously had all to ourselves. Both boys, who are generally cautious, were fearless on the rather too high rope bridges and found it hilarious that I had shaky legs at the end. Gil also wanted to do the Sensory Trail (it's much easier to guess what things are if you look inside the boxes and it's still using one of your senses actually Mummy), and it was apparently amusing seeing Mum get lost in the labyrinth.

Later on everyone flagged a bit. Two weeks back at school seems to be taking its toll and we've had to wipe off six month's worth of dust from the calpol bottle this weekend, so when Gil selected a pile of books for Mrs Swap Shop please to read, no one complained.

Signs of the times

 Phew, we managed to get through the first week back with only a few tears, a sprinkling of nighttime worries and just one nervous tummy ache. The boys were fine though...

When questioned about what they wanted to do this Friday, Gil asked for a playground and the woods, and Ferdy suggested going on an aeroplane. We settled on Gil's request and decided to go to Hicks Lodge.

But first some maths: Ferdy did lots of work with number sentences and times tables using dienes, numicons and even money. Gil did some adding up to 10 with the numicons; he was pretty excited that he recognised them from school.

Gil has learnt the letters s a t p this week and is thrilled to actually have his own work on flexischooling Friday (how long will this last? ponders Mum cynically..) so completed about half a dozen letter formation worksheets, whilst Ferdy and I looked at sentence types in his books and with some videos.

Ferdy is probably the slowest breakfast eater I have ever met; he even pointed out to me that during breakfast I had covered all the four sentence types we were learning:

Is Ferdy eating his breakfast? (question)

Ferdy, eat your breakfast! (command)

Ferdy is eating his breakfast. (statement)

What a lot of breakfast Ferdy has eaten! (exclamation)

So after an hour of eating breakfast, he was pretty much able to collate different sentence types from the book he's currently reading aloud, The Haunted Ark.

At Hicks Lodge we ticked both the playground and woods boxes, we also scooted around the lake, saw buzzards, horses, geese migrating, and lots of dogs, played hide and seek in the woods, climbed trees and ate ice creams.

There were signs everywhere. So when we got home, Ferdy colour coded the sentence types, and Gil circled the letters he had learnt.

We noted that a lot of the newer signs were commands; a clear indication of the world we live in right now.