Education: Learning how to learn.

A couple of months ago I joined my husband in his start-up business and took over the office management and marketing side of things. Office management was no problem as I have many years of experience as a secretary, executive secretary and such.
However, marketing was a bit different as I only had a little bit of experience in that from a couple of temporary jobs that I recently had. None of it was very extensive.
So, I decided I should do some courses on marketing and learn more about it. This way I would be better capable of doing the job. I looked online and found some marketing courses on Coursera. After reading through them, I decided I'd like to see whether I would get on with the platform and such first, before actually taking the plunge into the real stuff. Therefore, I did a few courses on nutrition as that is something I'm familiar with and didn't have to put a lot of effort in. I enjoyed the two courses very much. I didn't really learn much from them, so doing the quizzes was easy and I had the maximum score each time.

After having decided that this platform was going to work well for me I signed up for the marketing course I had chosen. But then I noticed that as the material was quite new to me, it was actually a lot harder than the nutrition courses. And in all honesty, I hadn't really done any formal learning in new areas for about 30 years. I had kept up with my interests, but I had done nothing really new and this marketing stuff was quite new to me.
As I struggled a bit, I realised that the way I had been taught to learn in school wasn't really working well for this. and I got very frustrated.
Then I got an email from Coursera and there I read about the course "Learning how to learn" [1]. That sparked my interest as I figured that in the last 30 years the ideas on learning may have totally changed from what I was taught in school and how I was taught the material. I expected that I would get some good ideas from it and expected it would teach me better ways of learning than what I had been doing my whole life.
Well.... this proved to be fully true. I learned so much! I cannot recommend this course enough. The teacher Barbara Oakley is awesome. She speaks clear, calm and is overall very motivating.

There are 4 weeks lessons and there are quizzes at the end of each the lesson. In between the videos there are also practise quizzes. The videos are very clear and the practise quizzes really help to get to know the material well. 

Barbara Oakley also wrote a book, called "A mind for numbers". This book is the companion to this course and goes into the various bits in a bit more depth. It is absolutely fascinating [2]

Lessons 1 and 3 have an honours assignment, which is optional. The honours assignment of lesson 1 I enjoyed and therefore I did that one.
The honours assignment of lesson 3 was quite a different thing for me. but as I want to get the most out of this course, I feel that have to do the honours assignment for lesson 3 as well, however daunting.
Unfortunately it is something totally new to me, so I ended up getting very stressed about it. But because of all the things taught in the course I actually managed to write this blog post, as this is what I am doing for the honours project of lesson 3.
This post was written in half an hour chunks as I thought I couldn't do it, it was too much, it was, daunting and scary, it was more than I could ever do. But broken down in chunks of half an hour it did slowly start to take shape. For me this time, at least twice a day, worked out fine. I will keep using that strategy for anything difficult in the future as it helps me to calm down and do little bits that I can oversee. [3]
I have been using the learned techniques to get past my fear and getting through the writing of this post. I used techniques such as chunking, interleaving, using the focused and diffuse mode of thinking amongst others.

I would like to explain to you a few things of what I have learned in this course, so that you get a bit of an impression what this course is all about and what you could get out of it.

Chunking
During my learning process I have started using this system called chunking. It had never occured to me, but this is a totally natural way of learning. Babies and children learn everything this way. When they start learning to speak they initially learn to say a word, but don't really know all the connections or the meaning, they just copy and paste it into their brain and they will repeat it days on end, just to get a proper grip on it. And after a while it is totally natural to them, they know what it means, the connections and all there is to know about the word.
I'll try to explain what it is, as it is quite nifty. I actually had no idea that the brain worked in that way.
A chunk you can compare to a puzzle piece. So basically you learn the stuff that you need to learn in bits and pieces, like puzzle pieces. Initially that may not all make a load of sense, as it may take a bit for your brain to sort through all those pieces to connect them. But when you keep learning the bits in chunks, and of course you will have to repeat the important parts several times and over several days, as you need to strengthen your brain muscles. Just reading something once isn't going to make you retain it. So you divide what you need to learn over the time that you have to learn it in, and take regular breaks. The breaks are also really important. For my learning I use a system called pomodoro. This gives me 25 minutes of concentrated work time and a 5 minute break. Most of the time this works really well for. After a four of pomodoro sessions there is a longer break, which is 15 minutes. Of course you can change this, in case it works better for you to take a longer break after 2 sessions. This is just the way Francesco Cirillo came up with it in the late 1980s and it works for me [4]. Some people take different times, which is in most apps easy to change.

Pomodoro
This is how the technique works.

• Decide on what you need to do. 
• Set a timer for 25 minutes (or whatever else you feel is right for you) 
• Work until the timer goes. In case something pops up in your head, write it down quickly and continue concentrating on the task at hand.
• When the timer goes, mark where you were and take a short break, usually 5 minutes. After 4 pomodoros, you take a longer break, usually 15 mnutes.
• Repeat this process.

I don't always end up making 4 pomodoros due to time constraints, but even when I just do 2 per day, it changes things for the better for me. I get to concentrate on my work, using my focused mode of thinking and during the breaks I just let go, letting my diffuse mode of thinking take over. Sometimes after those breaks I actually start seeing things in a better way, or connect things, which wouldn't have happened had I kept on focussing. I just love doing this. 

Interleaving
This is jumping back to revisit and deepen my understanding of a topic that I have already covered. A palaeolithic flint-napper didn't learn how to do it in 1 go. He/she would sit and train for years and years to perfect his/her skill. Present day flint-nappers haven't been able to get to that level of skill yet. The smooth repetition creates muscle memory, so the body knows what to do from a single thought. These days we do the same with driving a car or riding a bicycle. This happens as we recall one chunk, which ties all the other chunks of the complex steps involved together to perform the job at hand, be it flint-napping, driving or riding a bicycle.

Procrastination
With procrastination you want to make sure that you do not have to use all your willpower to conquer it. That would take a lot from a person. It is better to just use a little willpower to get over it. This you can achieve by first dividing the job at hand in little jobs that you can oversee, that won't get you too stressed and worried. You wouldn't climb the mount everest in one blow either. 
Then you make sure that after every bit that you do, you reward yourself for a job well done. It doesn't have to be much, a bit of gaming, a cookie or whatever you like really. What can be another good idea is to make appointments with yourself to do the job at hand once or twice a day in, say, half an hour sessions, or 25 minute pomodoro sessions. You can time that for yourself and then reward yourself afterwards. When you plan to do it that way it will all get done bit by bit and it will not be so exhausting and stressful. Writing this post I have done that way, as it seemed like a huge mountain to me. I was convinced I couldn't do it. And yet here we are.

Sleep
During sleep the cells in your brain shrink a little so that all the toxins built up during the day can pass through easily and be disposed of. This is very beneficial to learning and test taking. A clean brain does its work so much the better than a brain which hasn't been able to do this. That is why sleep is very important to learning and to test taking. So from now on get enough sleep before you do a heavy bit of learning or you need to take a test. Staying up late and trying to cram it all in isn't going to do you any favours.

Imposter syndrome
The most important thing I got out of this course is that anyone can learn anything and at high levels. I have always suffered from the Imposter syndrome, where I think that I am not in the right place and am really not cut out for what I am learning. But in this course I learned that many people feel that way, even many real academics. Many people think that they did well for this test, or during this class, but next time it will all go wrong and then everyone will know that they are an imposter. It was fascinating hearing very skilled academics talk about this in the optional video interviews. 
One of the academics interviewed was talking about how he addresses it in a lecture at some point and then while doing his talk he sees people's faces change in recognition and then start looking around and then most people in the room have the same change in their faces that they recognise this feeling. 

References:
[1] All of the above information comes from the Coursera Learning how to learn course
[2] A mind for numbers - Barbara Oakley
[3] Interview with Dr. Richard Felder & Dr. Rebecca Brent video 3 of lesson 4 & effective teaching
[4] Pomodoro - wikipedia

Education: learning to read, the story of C

So in school they teach you to read, but what if the method they use in school to teach reading, doesn't work for the brain of your child?

Well.... that's what happened to us. My child (C) could read simple books by the age of 4, C would read them to my mother and myself, nothing complicated, simple 3 to 4 letter words were in them. Then we started school. As we didn't want to have a standard government school, as wanted more arts and crafts for C, we choose a Waldorf school as they do a lot more than just the academics, which I found very important as I'm of the opinion there is more to life than just academics, especially to tease the brain into doing its work.

The years (age 4-5-6) before the academics started (around 7 years of age) were really good. C loved the teacher, who was one of the most wonderful people I have ever met. Juffie Hanneke was just amazing. She was very knowledgeable on the age group and really could "hold the space" wonderfully. It was very nice to watch the children play outside from a distance, which I sometimes could. There was rarely anything such as bullying going on in her class. Fantastic. I cannot say enough good about her. I have unfortunately not spoken with her in many years.

But then C moved from the kindergarten class to the first grade class and had a change of teacher. That is when the misery started. I was scolded by C's class teacher and the remedial teacher for having "taught" C to read the wrong way. I had not taught C to read. C had done this all without help. 
This is actually normal and within the Waldorf community is quite known. In a Waldorf school that works according to the principles of Rudolf Steiner, there is no method taught on how to read. Children are left to crack the code themselves, which they can, which results in them doing it the way that works best for their brain, which has the end result or rarely problems occurring with reading and writing.
C was unfortunately also relatively bored during lessons, this was seen as "not interested", which wasn't the case. C actually could usually tell me exactly what the lessons had been about as C has a very good memory. C ended up having difficulty with the way things were taught and the way the interaction with the various children was going. C was bullied. This didn't help the learning process of C at all, which was not acknowledged by the class teacher, who was of the opinion C was to blame for being bullied. C regularly came home with bruises and came home crying every day. The mornings became harder and harder. C didn't want to go to school and was trying to find all kinds of ways of being able to stay away. As it was not possible to just take C out of school or change schools due to local laws we were awfully stuck.

So C had to stick with it and I had to stick with a child that was getting more and more unhappy and was more and more becoming of the opinion that C was a problem to others. I did not like that at all. I knew C wasn't to blame for the whole problem. I just didn't know the details to it yet.

At some point the remedial teacher came to the conclusion that because C was behind on arithmetic and reading C needed remedial teaching, but in stead of actually getting further with things, C ended up going backwards in the learning process, which I found quite disturbing. The remedial teacher was unwilling to acknowledge that. She was of the opinion that that was impossible and that C had just had lucky shots before, so C didn't really know before.
There was one assistant of the remedial teacher that C got along with really well and who understood C and could work with C the way that was necessary for C. His name was Jos, he was a wonderful man, I have kept contact with him until he died unexpectedly. He explained to me that the problem didn't lie with C, but with the methods used. He explained that C was quite intelligent, no doubt about that, but that C needed a challenge and not dumb repeats. Unfortunately his views were not heard by either the teacher of C, nor the remedial teacher. As he had these same issues with several other children of this school, he ended up quitting because of these problems.

During this whole ordeal I was told that C was going to be referred to being tested for learning disabilities and behaviour problems, as in school they were convinced that C had ADHD, as the son of her class teacher had that as well and C was so much like this boy.
I was sure that was not the case, if anything than it would be something of high functioning autism and maybe dyslexia, which I had filled out in the forms, but it seemed that nobody was interested in that, as C was tested for ADHD and dyslexia, but not autism.

The result was that the verbal intelligence of C was well above 100, but the on paper intelligence was 94, which was the only thing that counted, not the verbal intelligence for some weird reason. I guess it's because school is pretty much only on paper. With regards to the ADHD there weren't enough markers to give C that diagnosis and it was recommended to test C for that in a few more years. I am still very pleased there weren't enough markers as I would not have wanted to go through the ritalin discussion as that would not have been something I would have been willing to discuss.

The result of these tests meant that the school of C was going to refer C to a school for children with Special Needs. This I found mindboggling as there wasn't much wrong with C. Several of these Special Needs schools I visited did not want C because there wasn't enough wrong with C. But one school was interested, later on I found out that this particular school was closely working together with the school C was in and they had a mutual financial interest. But that was also the school that was the furthest away, which meant I would have to send C by taxi as I would not be able to take C myself any more. This all really bothered me, something felt awfully off. 

After thinking about this and know that most of the test results were not making C a special needs child, but a child that could stay in a normal school with a bit of extra help, I came to the conclusion that I didn't want C in a school that was not going to do much for C, only to get C through secondary school at the lowest possible level and make C a practical worker. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I knew C needed more out of life than just a simple job like that.
So I decided I wasn't going to let that happen to C, so I didn't register C for any of the special needs schools, which resulted in the remedial teacher having a fit. She was of the opinion that I was ruining the life of C and wrote me a letter that, as I wasn't following their recommendations (orders?) they were withdrawing from the duty to teach. My thought was, nothing different than the special needs schools, they only do the minimum and nothing more, and that meant from what I saw, a lot of computer games, which were not necessarily the ones I would consider educational and I am very liberal on that.
The remedial teacher also threatened to report us to Social Services as I was neglecting the needs of C. Luckily she never pushed that through.

So C stayed after the summer holidays, the school required C to attend, but didn't make any effort for C any more. This gave some peace for the both of us. After a while it became clear to me that our time in NL was numbered and that we would move to the UK, which I found a blessing as that meant that there was no way C would go to school again. C could play computer games at home just as much as they were doing in the special needs schools, but I was sure I could do more for C than just that.

So we moved and left the misery behind. I was dumb enough to try to immediately "play school" at home. Of course that didn't work. C needed to de-school and not such a little bit. C needed a lot of time to get over the school trauma, which was huge. C thought that C would never read or write or learn anything substantial. C was 10 at this time and completely illiterate (remember that C could read a bit at 4?).

My want for doing school at home resulted in a lot of stress and such and a lot of crying and upset people. So after a year of pushing I threw in the towel and gave up. This was a blessing in disguise. C could now deschool, which was sorely necessary and quite overdue, mess about with stuff and computers and get the brain working nicely again. C did all kinds of stuff that didn't involve paper or letters or numbers. We visited musea, we watched DVD's and did lots of stuff, other than just living. C asked lots of questions which we would talk about.

After another year, C was 12 by now I wanted to know whether C was actually dyslexic or not, so I had C tested by a friend who was doing this in our home. C was according to the results indeed dyslexic, but nothing bad, as C also is a visual learner, which meant that the dyslexia was because of the system of spelling taught in school. If C would simply learn words as pictures, there would be no dyslexia any more after a while. C could remediate it. The tests also showed that C was well ahead of C's age with knowledge, it showed the knowledge age was 14, while C was 12, so 2 years ahead with knowledge. So that meant that C was indeed not a retard, as I had been, in more polite words, told by the school in the past.

Due to the misery that had happened during the time in school of C, I was completely not interested in anything Waldorf any more, which was quite a shame I found out later, as the Waldorf system is not really what is used as such in Waldorf schools in NL. As the Waldorf schools are subsidised by the government, they have to play by the government rules and as such have to do tests and have to do 7 years primary school in 6 years and all kinds of things like that. So in essence it was a public school with some added on arts and crafts the Waldorf way, but not a real, proper Waldorf school.

This I only learned after several years when we ended up living in Switzerland and we had a very proper Waldorf school in the village right next to ours which was totally awesome. I also made a friend in Switzerland who had taught at a Waldorf school and was totally into it. This sparked my interest in Waldorf again and I ended up reading and reading and reading about it, much more than I had ever done before. I had read about Waldorf, but only the books that were available on loan from the school, which was interesting, but didn't go deep into the philosophy. Now I did and I was amazed. My friend Cari and I also had several conversations about Waldorf and she helped me learn quite a bit more about it, for which I am forever in her debt. Unfortunately we lost contact over the years, but I still remember her fondly.
So I adopted a more Waldorf type of talking to the kids and also did lots more arts and crafts with them and we ended up teaching more and more in the Waldorf way. This worked for all of our kids, not just C. They love the arts and crafts and love the toys, in the meantime several of them have outgrown most of the toys, but they still love the look of them :-)

At around the age of 15 C decided that C wanted to read and write properly as C wanted to write fan-fic stories. I stimulated this and within a few months C had it all sussed. I could not fully help as C needed to this mostly alone, C wanted that. So C only asked for help when it was needed. It was slightly more complicated for C to learn it all as C had first learned it without effort at 4 and was then taught that the way C had done it was wrong and was taught in school to do it in another way. So C had to unlearn what was taught in school and C had to find C's own way, which worked out just fine in the end.

My next child was never taught to read in any way and managed, at the age of 9 to learn to read - without much help - in 3 months in 3 languages. This child just took books and went through them, irrelevant of the language. We have childrens books in 3 languages.

After this C became more and more confident that C could do things. It took several more years before C felt fully confident C could learn. In the meantime I think this has been achieved. But for a few years it was still a struggle to find out what C could and wanted to do in the future, work and such. C loves computers and loves drawing and such. It never occurred to me that that could be combined. But at some point my partner came with the idea that maybe C could be interested in Graphics Design. C had no idea what that was, so he had to explain that to C. Once C figured out what it was there as a spark. C liked the idea of it, so C looked into a bit and thought it was worth a shot to do a course or so on it.

Anyway C is now doing a series of Graphics Design courses on Coursera.org and has aced (93.1%) the first course C did and is continuing with the other 4 in the series and is actually having a great time doing it as well.
So much for that child never being able to reach anything and as I a parent I should stop dreaming and accept that my child was slow and such as I was not doing my child a favour by keeping up the pressure and such. The worst insanity I ever heard. As far as I am concerned there are no children that will never achieve anything. Some may need more time for certain parts, or less time, but anyone can achieve much more than is usually thought or even expected. Too much misery being created by thinking people cannot.
No such thing. I was ******* right!

*** Update 13 May 2016: Today C got the results back from course 2, typography and she aced that one as well, 97.2%. It feels awesome to be right :-)

Please do leave a comment or ask a question if you have one. I'd love to hear from you and will do my best to answer questions you have.

Play dough

Today we made play dough again. We have the best recipe in the world to make play dough :-) This dough is softer and better and nicer than the stuff you buy in the shop. My kids started out with the shop bought stuff, but then we ended up on a bit of a tough spot and needed to cut back on expenses, so I went on a search on the internet to look for play dough recipes. I found several that were non cooking and several that were cooking. I tried a couple and found that many do not turn out too well. So then I took the one that came out the best and played a bit with the recipe and then we ended up with the best dough ever. My kids, big and small, love it. Honestly, I do!

Here are the results of our efforts of today:

The picture on the right is the set that my oldest made for the fun of it as she loves cooking and kneading dough and such. She frequently uses play dough to train making flowers and such for cake decorating as she can use it over and over again.

The picture on the left is of my 3rd child, she loves play dough and kneading was not too bad, picking the colours were for her the best. 

The picture below on the left is the set my youngest made. She just loved making adding the colours and essential oils. She loves playing with play dough. It is her favourite game.

These picture are all of a little ball or pancakes stacked up. The amounts that we made were huge. One batch of the below recipe give you 1,5 kilograms of play dough. We usually divide it in 4 to 8 balls per batch and then add food colouring. I have a huge preference for Sugar Flair food colouring as it is a gel and not fluid so it will stay much better in the dough and it much more friendly for little hands to knead it in. Furthermore the colours are very bright and strong, you only need a little bit of colour. I usually just dip the back of a fork in the food colouring pot and add that to the dough ball and with that you get the colours you see above. 

I'm sure that by now you must be thinking, give me the recipe already, woman! Here it comes:

Origin: my kitchen :-)

Difficulty: easy peasy

Time: about half an hour for a batch

Serves: adults and kids alike :-)

Yield: 4 to 8 pieces 

Toys

Equipment:

* scale to measure ingredients, I find a scale much more accurate, so I get more consistent results

* measuring cups and spoons, if you prefer using those

* pan

* hob

* silicon mat, if possible

Ingredients:

* 55 grams / 5 TBS oil. I used sunflower oil as it doesn't have a strong scent at all. But any other will do.

 * 625 ml / 625 grams / 2 1/5 cups water

* 380 grams / 1 1/4 cups salt, any white salt will do, it is to preserve

* 15 grams / 1 1,5 TBS cream of tartar

* 420 grams / 2 1/2 cups flour, any flour will do, as long as it is not strong flour

* food colour, I used sugar flair, because it is a gel and very strong colours

* essential oils, we used lavender for all this time, usually we use rose for red colours and others, today I was lazy, I had a blog post to write :-)

Directions:

* Add the ingredients in order mentioned above, but leave out the food colouring and essential oils. Those come in at the end when the dough is done.

* It starts out as a wet lumpy batter that looks like it is never going to work out well. No worries about the lumps. They cook out of it in the end. Don't ask me why, it just works. Below you can see it in the pictures how it went for us today. So no worries, you can see the end results above, they look and feel very, very good. 

* Put your pan on the hob when it is still cold. Do not let your pan heat up first. This is a great thing for cooking food, not for cooking play dough. So pan cold, hob cold, ingredients in pan, stir well, turn on the hob. Do it on your lowest setting. I have a ceramic hob and put it on 1, that's it. It will make it take time, but prevent burning and prevent overcooking. The water will cook out and it will become a lovely dough. It just needs it's time to get ready. 

* Stir regularly. At some point this becomes really hard, but keep at it. 

* You will see that the dough starts sticking together and comes of the sides of the pan and with your spoon you can almost lift it out of your pan. It is really weird how all of a sudden it goes from a batter to a dough. To check for readiness you take a bit of it and then it isn't goo, it's ready. Keep at it until then. When you have made it a few times you will easily spot the point where it is ready.

* Tip out of your pan onto a silicon mat to prevent food colouring going everywhere. This will go easy when it is ready, when it doesn't come out easily, it isn't ready yet, you can then cook it a minute or so more, it will be done soon. There will be lumps of dough that will stick to the sides of the pan, no worries, it's fine.

* So now you have it on your silicon mat and you can start kneading it. It is nice and warm, not hot, just nice and once you have a totally smooth dough you can divide it into several balls, we sometimes do 4, sometimes 8, and knead in your food colouring and essential oils to reach your desired strength in colour. Remember you can always add, but not take away.

You can keep it in double zip bags, we use Ikea bags for this purpose and it will keep for months. Once it starts to dry out, just chuck it and make new.

 
 To the right you see the batter just before cooking. See how lumpy and awful it looks? 

To the left you see the dough just before it is ready to tip out of the pan. Completely different consistency and nicely sticking together.

To the left you see the dough on my silicon mat, just before kneading it.

To the right it is just after kneading, it feels so smooth and lovely!

And below you see the division in 4 balls that we do most frequently. If you'd like you could even add colour, or no colour for that matter, to the big ball and just make one big lump. It is lovely to play with. My kids love a variety of colour, so we always do that. At times the whole lot in the end ends up brown as too much has gotten mixed, no big deal, they don't like it any more and I just chuck it onto the compost heap and we make new. At the top you will see the results of today's event :-)

 
To the left and to the right you can see the things DD3 has made with the play dough today. 
















To the left you can see the rose that DD1 made today. She is practising a cake decorating technique that she learned from YouTube. She can practise lots and lots with playdough.

And to the right you see the rose DD3 made after she saw what DD1 did. She just wanted to give it go as well, it turned out very nice!

I hope you will enjoy this recipe. We certainly do.

Please do leave a comment or ask a question if you have one. I'd love to hear from you and will do my best to answer questions you have.

St. Nicholas, 5 December

I am very late with writing this blog post, but better late than never.
We are educating our children at home in the Waldorf tradition. This is one of the reasons why we celebrate St. Nicholas in our home. As I am Dutch, this only adds to wanting to celebrate it. We celebrate it in a traditional way. 

I always decorate the Nature Table in the theme as you can see above. I have made several of the decorations myself with wool, felt and silk. I still have several others to make. I have the kits for it, but this is a slow process, due to priorities being as they are.

When we celebrate it we keep an eye on when the arrival of St. Nicholas is in The Netherlands. From then onwards I let the children put their shoe out to get a little gift in them, which is a nice pencil, bit of chocolate, some bees wax, a pretty gem stone, crafting yarn, wool roving or so.

On the last day of November when they put out their shoes they know that the advent calendar will be in there the next morning, I love giving the advent calendar on that day.

On the day itself we always have the traditional Dutch Pea Soup for dinner, this we eat together with sourdough rye bread. It is just the way I grew up, so I still do that. During the weeks before I have done my St. Nicholas baking, so I have made kruidnootjes, pepernoten, speculatius, filled speculatius, taaitaai, banketstaaf and such. These we have already had since I started baking, but I like to make sure that we have enough for the day itself.

In the evening we receive a letter from St. Nicholas. In this letter he explains that his helpers have put the gifts for all the family members in various places on our home and that the children can search for them. 
The gifts are useful gifts and things they really like. I always make sure that we stay in budget as I am of the opinion that it is all in good fun and should not cost a lot of money. 

The children love it when I read out the hints on where the gifts are and to go out a find them. We do this one by one so that everyone gets to see what everyone gets. Once all gifts have been unpacked we have hot chocolate with whipped cream and some of the baked goods. Usually we have some left overs of that for a couple of more days.

Our nature walk today Sunday 17 January 2016

As we home education in the Waldorf tradition we daily take a nature walk. Today it was really lovely to go into the woods behind our house. We always take our dog along as this nicely goes hand in hand with each other. The children enjoy the woods, the running and looking at nature and such. Our dog enjoys the running around and playing with other dogs and the children. 

Often the children bring something home for our nature table or for our garden.
Sometimes the dog brings something home as well, usually the odd branch or so.

It had been freezing last night and it was snowing during the night. This morning it was still snowing. This lasted until well past 10 am, which was really nice. Our walk was around noon and there was still quite a nice dusting of snow to be found all about. Unfortunately for the children and the dog it all thawed away during the afternoon.

Martinmas

Last Wednesday, 11 November 2015, it was Martinmas. 

This is the day St. Martin is remembered. St. Martin was a Roman soldier who was station near Gaul. As legend goes St. Martin rode into a town and on the outskirts of the town he ran into a beggar who was only wear rags. He felt pity for the man and cut het cloak in 2 and gave 1 half to the beggar. The next morning when he woke up he found his cloak restored to a full cloak. 

As we are using a Waldorf curriculum for home education, we pay attention to this day.

So we made swede lantarns. We hollowed out the swedes, carved some shapes into the swedes and put a tea light into it, as you can see below. From the insides of the swedes I made swede soup.  I served the swede soup with roasted chestnuts for dinner. This is a traditional dinner for Martinmas.

In some European areas, such as parts of The Netherlands and Germany children go past the houses to sing Martinmas songs and will get sweets. It is very similar to trick or treating at Halloween.
Now that we live in England Halloween is what is happening, so we only do some stuff at home for Martinmas.