education (also posted on my TCC blog)

So.... today I feel inspired. I need to write about education.
What is education and how does it happen.
Obviously not necessarily in a school setting or just on paper.
I find that a school education is inferior to a home education, the reason is that one on one education brings much more than education in a group setting where there is the same stuff educated by one person to a group of on average about 30 children. I do think that that will not bring the best of results.
We educate a group of 4ish children. Our youngest is 1 and is learning on her own, she does not need any help. Which is the way the majority of people let a 1 year old learn. Nothing wrong with that right? So why does it all of a sudden become wrong when they become 4, I find that amazing as a child learns more the first 4 years of their life, than ever after.
Now how does learning work you might wonder.
With having 4 children and the oldest being 14 I have seen from upclose how learning works.
Nor really on paper. Doing things makes it a lot more clear to kids.
Maths for instance is learned much quicker and faster in the real world. This involves shopping and cooking.
Biology, outside looking at the plants, going to the zoo, brings so much more than just pictures in a book.
Chemistry, love that, experiments, that really gives a clear picture :)
And then geography. There I have a wish, traveling the world, okay, not reasonable for us, so we just learn a lot from films and going outside checking out how the land has been used and what uses are for what, that is really working out superb, for lack of traveling the world :)
So what else do we have for things to do.
There are great projects to do with the kids once they express a certain interest in for instance a certain country. That is just totally cool.
What we love doing is picking a country and then working through it in various ways.
We go for the history and the present and th future, we discuss it and read about it, watch DVD's about it etc.
Then we go for the food from that country, make it, and eat it, not just the present food, but also the old stuff. F.i. the Roman food was really really good.
And then we check out the plants and animals from that particular country, that can be amazingly interesting, also the past if we can find it,as in some countries there have been animals going extinct. When possible we go look at those in a museum, or check out the alive ones in the zoo. A botanical garden is great for looking at the plants actually originating from that particular country.
What else is there, there is music of old and new from the country, the language, the perfumes, the scents of flowers, the religious of old and new, etc.
I am sure this gives a good picture of how I feel education works.

So what did we do with the Italy:
Latin (and we have continued as its a great language) and compare it to Italian and other langauges.
the food of then and now and ate it.
the animals of then and now
the religion of then and now including the etruscan
how the romans conquered europe, where they went.
the culture of then and now, including the etruscans
the contacts with the greeks and egyptians
we went to musea to see things

This is a similar way that young children learn, touch, feel and try, so why all of a sudden work only on boring paper, and take the fun out of learning.
Learning needs to be fun, as it needs to last a life time. When I look at kids in school its amazing how bored they are with learning. Most will not touch anything that has something to do with learning as soon as they are done with it. I find that sad and do not want that for my children.
I also do not want them to think that I have the ultimate wisdom, or a teacher has the ultimate wisdom. I want them to question me and things, so they learn. There are so many things that I learned in school as a child that really are not a given fact, but it was presented that way.
Even history, you'd expect that to be factual, but unfortunately with new research and different researchers with different thoughts and opinions plenty is really not a given fact.
Take for example the dark ages, those are taught in school as a given fact, but then there are researchers who have w written books with very good arguments that the dark ages have not happened, as in the dark ages there was no progress, this is not the way humans live. They argue that the dark ages were an invention by an emperor who wanted to base his right to the crown on ancestry, which wasn't there.
That kind of questioning is very important for children to learn to do, it keeps them inquisitive and curious.
I also do not believe in grades or rewards or so.
This does not bring a child an interest in the topic, but only in getting the reward or the grade, so they will not look into the topic in dept, just in fixing the score and then forgetting the lot again. Counterproductive I'd say.

Well folks, this is all for now, I take it you enjoyed the read :)

Been busy

Lately we have been quite busy meeting up with other HE groups here in Switzerland.
There is a group that is located in the Romandie where there are a lot of English speakers in there. That group is meeting in the canton of Vaud quite regularly, 3x in June on a Friday.
The other left over Friday we met up with a German speaking group of Swiss homeschoolers about a educational coop. That part looks really promising. The homeschoolers are quite a tight knit group, as far as I can see and they are all very friendly and helpful.

Paul Klee

Short before going to the Neat Baustelle we went to the Paul Klee Center.
Paul Klee was an artist in the Bern area and in this center you see a lot of his work, but you can also take an art workshop.
We did both, we went to look to some of his work in the exhibition area, this was very interesting as he has used a lot of techniques. He also had to make do with the supplies he could get his hands on and had to make a lot of things himself, as he lives in war times when there was very little available. The tour of the exhibition are was during our work in the workshop, as things had to dry a bit.

The workshop was also very interesting as we learned a lot about techniques than can be used. All attending made interesting pieces of art :-)
I will see if I can make a pic of it and put it on here :-)

Neat Baustelle

Recently we have been to the construction site of NEAT, this is the construction site of the new tunnel through the Gotthard mountain. The site is massive, the work they are doing that is really really impressive. The trip was really educational. A lot was explained on how it all works and why.
Here you can see it: http://www.alptransit.ch/de/besuchen-sie-uns/infozentren/erstfeld/

We had a presentation about the building and we had a tour through the area of the construction site. Unfortunately we couldn't go into the tunnel as our group of homeschoolers had too many children under 14 years of age in there, which was a pity.

What was hard for us in particular was that this site is in the canton Uri, there they speak very different Swiss German from our local area, which is already not easy, so we had trouble understanding initially, but we weren't the only ones, therefore they asked if the presenter could please speak school german, so everybody could understand :-)

Switzerland

Recently we moved to the Canton Bern in Switzerland.
As we are a homeschooling family I found that this seems to be much more problematic than it was in the UK.
We need to find us a teacher who is willing to supervise us, as neither of us has a teaching degree - like that makes any difference.
Furthermore, it seems that we will have to resort to school-at-home now, which is not something I am looking forward to.
I started with school-at-home when we had just taken the children out of school as I had no clue how else to do it and this was a disaster. The kids weren't happy and neither was I. It was way way way too stressful.
We continued with unschooling and that proved to be very successful and didn't cause any stress. The result is that the kids are way way way "ahead" in some area's and "behind" in other area's.
In the past here in this canton children who were homeschooled had to be tested yearly based on the cantonal curriculum and they weren't allowed to to fail or they had to go back to school. They also had to show their worked, again needing to follow the work required bythe cantonal curriculum.
No wonder there are few homeschoolers around here.
They changed this law in August 2008, but did put the requirement of having a teacher supervise when you do not have a teachers degree (a full-time study of 4 years, not possible to do with distance learning - have thought about getting it), though nobody knows what this teacher will have to do.
Somehow it sounds more free depending on the teacher you choose, but it did get me pretty jumpy.
One of my kids is severely dyslexic and has a load of trouble with reading and writing, though she speaks 3 languages fluently. This could be used against us. She is also on the autistic spectrum, no clue how they feel about that.

In total where we live, our apartment and all its really nice, but this part has gotten me stressed for the moment. And it has resulted in me thinking about this school-at-home more and more unfortunately.

Well..... if all else fails we can always move to Aargau, which seems to be the most free canton of all.

Conversation with a school child.

Last year one of my children had a conversation with Clara who lives in our neighbourhood.
Clara and her brother Mike were trampling mushrooms to pieces, which my children didn't like, so my oldest went up to them and asked them to stop wrecking nature for no good reason.
The Clara stated that it was important to trample mushrooms because mushrooms are a hazard to nature.
My child replies: "Mushrooms are nature you dope, the crisp bag and plastic bottle you just threw down are a hazard to nature." and left it at that.

CBBC educational?

This afternoon there is a feature on CBBC about the nutrition of the caveman on tv. I figured that would be massively interesting. And its sure food for conversation as we found out there are several things mentioned in there which are simply not true.
One of them is that the caveman in the UK valued the rabbit meat. This surprising as the rabbit is not native to the UK, so how can the caveman in the UK have eaten rabbits then, when the vikings brought them over, or were the vikings historically before the caveman in the timeline??
So this is simply not true.
Just like hares weren't in the UK until the Romans, which means that hares were there before rabbits even. And in the time of the Romans there were no caveman anymore.
Besides the rabbits wouldn't have been valued that much as the meat is way way way too lean for the caveman to stay healthy on. They needed the fat from other animal sources and they made sure they got it, as the caveman was healthier than the majority of humans in the western world today.
The other thing that was mentioned is that the caveman first ate its food raw. Sure, very healthy. Then the comment came that by the time the caveman discovered fire there was a boost in healthy. I doubt that very much.
Of course there were more different types of food that became to the caveman, but those were not necessarily boosting its health. Its not for nothing that these days people are going back to the caveman diet to become more healthy, as simply their food was very very healthy.
There was also a fear mongering bit in there about eating meat raw, even my kids know there is nothing wrong with that and they started complaining to the tv :-)
So much for educational tv. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It became clear to me again that I have to be with them when they watch something "educational" to make sure they also get the other side of the politically correct story.
I keep being surprised about all the inconsistencies.

Good that they didn't go on about the caveman only becoming about 30 and then mentioning in the same phrase that girls didn't get their periods until 16, 17 or 18 and that is the reason why women get more cancer these days in the reproductive system as they get their periods earlier and earlier and are therefore exposed to the hormones much longers.

UGH??? How can that be, mom dies at 30, but you weren't born until she was like 17, so you are 13 when she dies, how can mankind have survived then?
As you are with yr 13 the oldest, the rest must be much younger.
Its soooo stupid those comments.

There is research that shows that stone age people didn't go through puberty like humans today and reached adulthood by about the age of 12 to 13, but then the periods must have come sooner to women and not like around 16, 17. Because that doesn't make any sense then at all.

In a way I am convinced that its all still quite a lot of guess work in stead of real factual stuff, as its very difficult to find real information, as nobody wrote anything down.

I am, however, convinced that the paleolithic diet was a healthy one and that it was not the diet which made people die very young, there must have been more that had to do with it. And maybe it was just more genetically and that we grew older with the centuries.

Whatever was the real truth, its definitely great conversation material with the kids and they keep digging and digging to find out what scientists have come up with :-)

Fixed it

In the meantime I managed to fix it that way that the document that I have made is open for viewing for all. This means I will stop updating the blog post on the topic, as the document can be accessed through the link on the right side bar.
I have added the link from Germany and would love it if people would send me more links and information to expand this list. I would like to make quite a comprehensive list out of this and hope that with that other parents will have easy access to information, which most of the people who are home educating now have probably not had.