Since our daughter, J started school this week, Friday was officially our first day of educating her “off-site,” to use the official term (more about the law re. flexischooling here.)
Although we felt a bit giddy, and perhaps a little pressure to make sure our first day was as productive as possible, we didn’t want to make a strict, rigorous plan. The whole appeal of flexischooling is the potential for activities to be child-led/initiated and open ended. We had already bought tickets to a family concert that we thought sounded appealing Brahms with Puppets, and since that was the middle of the day, we simply brainstormed activities for the morning and later afternoon.
As our daughter loves baking, we thought that would be a good start to the day, and its hard to argue with the educational value. My husband found a recipe for Apple and Raspberry breakfast muffins and copied out the ingredients list pictorially so that her first
task was to interpret the list and gather the ingredients. She and my husband had fun measuring dry ingredients, butter and yoghurt with a digital scale, cups and spoons, grating the apples, cracking the eggs and stirring everything together . She then helped spoon the mixture into the moulds, placing a ‘surprise’ raspberry in the middle, spooned on more batter, sprinkled oats and sugar on top, set the oven timer and my husband popped them in the oven. Our daughter is learning to recognise digits, and to understand numbers over ten (ie that 5 and 0 together make 50.) Baking is not only fun and involves lots of physical skills (pouring, stirring, spooning, whisking, scraping, sprinkling) but great ‘maths’ practice; from setting the oven temperature, to counting out tablespoons of sugar, to recognising digits on the scales, to counting how many muffins are left, to dividing the last treasured muffin into halves to share with Daddy.
After baking and sampling, we headed to the Kings Places for Brahms with Puppets. We had been attracted to the concert as our daughter had shown an interest in classical music, and she had a long standing love of puppets. The Kings Place is a huge, beautiful venue in the rapidly developing area of Kings Cross, central London. When I lived in student halls on Pentonville Road as a student less than a decade ago, it was still a bit grotty in places and the risk of being heckled by curb crawlers was quite high. Now though, as well the station itself, the area is smarter and surprisingly funky.The window display at the London Graphics Centre, using mannequins made us all stop and laugh, and inspired some ideas for a some future arty fun.
We arrived at the impressive venue and ate some lunch on the terrace by the canal, where we admired the barges. Our daughter was very interested when I told her that those boats were people’s homes. The idea of living on the water, rather than in a house or flat clearly sparked something in her and she launched into one of her long narrative fantasies. Not only would SHE like to live on a barge, and travel all over the world (we gently informed her that these weren’t seafaring vessels), but the cousin of her (imaginary) friend Journey, did live on a canal boat and had all sorts of adventures, and actually had a COOKER inside her barge. I think a lot of great discussions/ stories/ projects could spark from this. When we lived closer to Little Venice, I often used to take her to admire the boats, walk along the tow path and look at the wildfowl. One special evening we even saw an interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood on the puppet barge. I think a trip back there, and some other places, maybe due.
Brahms with Puppets was also inspiring. Following the success of a previous endeavour (a concert called ‘Mozart with Puppets’) this was the second collaboration between the Aurora orchestra and Little Angel Puppet Theatre. In the programme blurb, Aurora conductor Nicholas Collon, a lover of Brahms from an early age says that he is “thrilled that we’ll be showing children a wonderful path into the astonishing world of Brahm’s music.” He met his brief. The concert was perfectly pitched (excuse pun) ; the room was just the right size and set out with bean bags at the front which was welcoming, encouraging the children to sit right at the front and feel at ease. Everyone, from the Kings Place front of house staff, to the performer’s themselves, were friendly and relaxed. There were two musicians, first a pianist who played the first piece (Intermezzo No 3 op 76 according to a very helpful, accessible handout) and then a clarinettist who joined in with two further pieces (Sonata in Eb Major and Hungarian Dance No 5.) Meanwhile, the puppeteers and three beautiful, specially crafted puppets, a bird, a magician and a monkey, danced onto the stage, telling a simple, wordless story with movements, gestures and the simplest of props. They really did compliment the music. I liked that there was no spoken narrative, and the musicians didn’t really introduce themselves or talk about their pieces. It was all about the music and the interactions between the puppets. The final piece was a piano solo of Brahms Lullaby, recognisable to the whole audience, rounding off the concert beautifully and sending the monkey and the clarinettist into slumber.
Following the performance, the children were able to meet two of the puppets, and ask questions to the puppeteer, Roger Lade, who had made them. The children were very interested in the way that different parts of the monkey felt, one boy professing that the monkey’s head felt ‘sticky’. Roger explained that the head was made from paper mache, the body from a material like dish cloth and the hands and feet (which many of the children including our daughter stroked tenderly) were carved from wood and lined with felt. Following on from this, I see either a paper-mache or a general puppet making session at home must be organised! Our daughter was very keen to get home and make up a puppet show with her little collection of finger puppets.
However by the time we had got back home there wasn’t a lot of time for play or other planned activities, especially as we were due at Jasmine’s school in the evening for a meeting. We had thought doing some tie dying or making a book, but those activities can wait. We simply practised writing numbers and counting with some colourful flashcards and a wipe pen. We didn’t spend long doing this, practising numbers up to 8, and then when I saw she was at the end of her attention span I wound the activity down, coming up with a another way to revise number recognition and get some fresh air and exercise, hop scotch!
I drew out the board on the patio with chalk. I filled in some of the numbers, left some squares blank, and formed some of the numbers with dots for her to draw over. Then we 
had lots of fun giggling, throwing the little pebble, shouting out the number nearest to its landing spot, hopping, scotching and wobbling. I was holding my baby in my arms who chuckled throughout at what her sister and I were doing, and that made everyone feel great as the first ‘flexischooling day’ wound down. We then got ready to head off to the school meeting. I will blog about this in a later post, but that very evening we were discovered that two other children from J’s reception year will also be flexischooling, a fact which surprised and delighted me in equal measure.
flexischooling 