A LIFE WORTH LIVING....: Blog awards(finally)

Saturday, 8 March 2008

Blog awards(finally)

I was very kindly awarded these awards quite some time ago by Colleen at the new unschooler and Stacie at Learning as we go.Due to my complete technical incompetence I was unable to get the awards onto here!! But finally after attempting various things and then forgetting about them for some time, I did it :-) The only problem is I can't quite remember exactly what I did, I think I right clicked on the image and saved as....
I have to pass each award on to ten other blogs and would like to pass them both on together to the following ten blogs.I originally found all these blogs through links on other blogs and have continued to visit regularly and have been helped immensely reading their stories.

Michelle at To the Manor Born
I started to read this blog when we took Emily out of school and was hooked.I saw so many similarities between our two children,the most obvious one was that her daughter is an only child and it was so important for me to see how it could work with an only child.She writes honestly ,with humour and great detail.She has been incredibly supportive and gave me my first comment to welcome me when I started off.I hope one day to meet outside of blogland!!

Grit at Grits Day
I laugh so much at grits day,I absolutely love her humour and style.
She has serious moments,she writes so well.I am intrigued and want to know so much more about her.I go back each day to follow the life of a home edding mum of triplets.

Dani and Allie at Green House by the sea.
This is another blog I started reading in the early days.I got so many tips on great books to read and have discovered the wonderful Roman mysteries series from them,Emily got so much from those books in our early days at home.It was so good to read in such detail what an autonomous education could look like.

Gill at sometimes it's peaceful.
A blog with subsections!!each one of them interesting.I have followed this blog since my early days at home as well.Autonomous education of teens at one end of the scale and tots at the other and how that works had me hooked.I have learnt a lot from reading over the year about trust and acceptance.

Heather at Embracing the strange.
Heather has two small children and I found her by a link from another blog.We are going through a similar journey and I am enjoying reading about her efforts to parent peacefully and unschool.

Merry at Patch of Puddles.
I think this could have been one of the first blogs I read.Home educating 4 children, running a business and all the info on her site for me to go through.As with all the other families I have met through their Blogs I became attached and love to follow them.

Lucy at By other means
As I have done with most of these Blogs I started reading and then went back through archive material.Got loads of ideas and loved the pictures of their gorgeous place and also the yummy food and although I am not a vegetarian or vegan they could tempt me!!

Arun at The parenting pit.
He has provided me with so much material to mull over.He writes with great humour and gave me a great article for Alan to read from a male perspective.

Nikki at Happily home edding.
Lot's of great links and ideas of things to do.Another only child so again a blog I was very interested in to calm my irrational fear about Home edding an only child.

Emily at Golden Daemons.
She has enjoyed doing her blog and although it has tailed off a little at present, I am sure there is more to come.

Others I would have given would have been Laura at wistful wanderlust and Sally at Happy at home, but they have already been awarded and I wanted to spread the love around a little:))

To save me time there are already links to all of these on my sidebar if anyone fancies a read.

6 comments:

Lucy said...: Thank you so much - your blog looks very interesting too... will enjoy following you on your journey :); 9 March 2008 at 20:41
Lynn said...: Hi lucy,
feel free to pass on the award or not as you see fit.Thanks for being there you helped a lot.xx; 9 March 2008 at 20:49
Michelle said...: Oh my. Gosh. What a lovely end to a pretty grotty weekend.

Thank you.

:-); 9 March 2008 at 22:09
Lynn said...: Hoped it would cheer you up:-)
You really have been a great on- line friend and your comments have helped and also made me laugh.
This Home ed lark is not all plain sailing.Before we took Emily out of school,people used the way we parented as the reason she was so sensitive, now home ed just gives them another reason to put her clinyness down to.People will have thier opinions no matter what.
You know what is best for C listen to your heart and Don't let the buggers get you down;-)))xxxx; 9 March 2008 at 22:20
Gill said...: That's very kind of you Lynn, thank you xx A lovely compliment!; 10 March 2008 at 09:57
Lynn said...: You are more than welcome Gill,I have enjoyed reading for so many reasons,you really are an inspiration and I love your ability to just get on and give things a go!!
I thought hard about passing on these awards they don't seem to be something that happens so much here although I see them a lot on American blogs,but I like the idea of spreading the love there is not enough of that in the world;-)); 10 March 2008 at 11:27

This is me.....

There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout: This is me damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me... or leave me. Accept me - or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person, just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision.When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad - you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you.” Stacey Charter.

Why we Home educate

( Slightly edited from a blog post I did when we started out) In the end the actual decision to take Emily out only took a matter of days but before that it had been around a year and a half of talking about ti and reading books, Free range education by Terri Dowty, Educating your child at home by Jane Lowe and Alan Thomas were two that had a real impact for different reasons. Free range education has lots of examples of real life home educators and I think I can say that it was this one that convinced me the most that we could do it. We are two very average people ,neither of us left school with many qualifications, we went on to do quite well in our chosen professions and had no need to think about the education system at all until Emily came along.

I knew about home education and when Emily was born considered it as an optionbut always felt my lack of education would be a problem and that I wouldn't be capable of providing her with what she would need.Looking back with hindsight it is easy to see how wrong I was!!

School never really suited Emily......After the nursery year at a very highly rated, high achieving school we knew that particular School wasn't for us and took her out. We enrolled her in a lovely village school with only 70 children in the whole school .The ethos of the school was totally different, the children didn't wear uniforms and there was much more emphasis on the children being individuals.The head was a sensitive and principled man who wanted the best for the children. We thought we had struck gold.Over the reception and year 1 Emily gained confidence and really started to bloom. It was at this time she was diagnosed with dyspraxia( we had had to go down the diagnosis route as our observations of Emily's difficulties were not enough to enable the teachers to tailor things so she was helped and given less work in class) but she managed quite well in the more relaxed play orientated early years.Year 2 with more emphasis on academic activities got progressively harder for her. She is very sensitive and it wasn't just the academic side it was the embarassment of having to put her hand up for the toilet,seeing others being told off and worrying in case she did something wrong and got the same treatment, panicking because she couldn't do the work and the teacher never had time to sit with her (alot of this did not come out until she had left school) her behaviour at home became worse and worse she was so angry and obviously stressed . At this time we began to seriously consider taking her out but held back because of my lack of confidence in my ability to provide her with an adequate education ,my health being so poor was also a major stumbling block.

Then in year three it became blatantly obvious that something needed to change .She was struggling on all levels and we couldn't allow the school system to damage our daughter anymore.She became ill with a bug that was doing the rounds and she was off for two weeks , during that time I had a conversation with a friend who home educates her two children and I was so upset I couldn't make a decision and she said just go with whats in your heart and that really helped me to shift my thinking and stop worrying about what I couldn't give her and focus on what I could give her.

We never sent her back.I still get emotional when I think of that time , the look on Emily's face when we told her she would never have to go back to school was priceless,the immense sense of relief that we were off the treadmill of school life and the excitement of the time ahead and to be honest the fear of the unknown......

So here we are four years on and a lot of reading and researching later I feel comfortable with what we are doing . The changes that have happened so far have been helped along the way by the many wonderful blogs out there.They are so varied and there are so many different approaches , I have found ones that I can identify with and have read a lot of archive material that has been written in each and found answers to so many of the questions I have had that they have helped me to sort out what will work best for us .As much as I wish we had done this earlier and saved Emily from the distress that she went through I do believe things happen for a reason and that the time was right for us to take her out and that looking on the bright side one of the benefits is that at least she has had a taste of school and now we all know without a doubt that it is not for us !!!!

It is very liberating to be making decisions based on what works best for us as a family and not what society expects.

Let your child be a child.

No child was ever spoiled by too much love.

Be authentic with your child.

Listen openly to your child’s needs.

Believe in your child’s good intentions.

Find the humour.

Look past the behaviour… what is your child feeling?

Have fun with your child today!

“There is no reason why we cannot say ‘No’ to children in just as kind a way as we say ‘Yes’.” - John Holt

“Play is really the work of childhood.” - Fred Rogers

“The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” - Oscar Wilde

Children thrive in a peaceful and loving environment.

A child needs love most when things go wrong.

Children reflect the treatment they receive.

A few qoutes I like....

Life shouldn't be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in, broadside, thouroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly shouting, 'WOW'.... Beth Moore

The perpetual testing of public school children is like a gardener constantly pulling his plants up by the roots to see if they are growing....(unknown)

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instuction...Helen Kellers teacher

I hear and I forget I see and I remember I do and I understand...Confusious