Top Tips for Organising and Decluttering a small home!

I have been trying to get organised and decluttered for many years, and more importantly, once there, to stay organised and clutter free! Recently I seem to have achieved this more or less, and I thought that I would share my top tips and things that I have found work for me. Most of the organisational ideas have evolved over time, and the decluttering is like painting the Forth Road Bridge (to coin a phrase of my Mum's - the bridge is so huge that once the painters finish it is peeling again where they started and they go right back and start over!). So here we go for my organisation ideas:

• Storage doesn't HAVE to be pretty - it's nice if it is but clutter definitely isn't pretty and I'd rather be tidy than stylish! Examples of this in my home are the divan bed base with four drawers under it, the plastic box by the front door for shoes, the toy storage tubs with a set of toys in each and stored in the garage which keeps them complete and dry and are easy to carry.
• Bags for everything - I have bags for swimming, bags for gymnastics, a bag of climbing gear, a rucksack for going out everyday, and a few more in reserve. I store in them everything needed for each activity, and as soon as we are home, equipment is washed/dried/cleaned and replaced in the correct bag ready for next time it is needed. This stops any crazy running around searching for things at the last minute!
• Lists - I have a master to-do list and then a daily list with one or more to-dos picked from the master list and whatever needs doing that day. Depending on how fluffy headed I am feeling, I even write what activities we are going out to and what I'm making for lunch and dinner on it. I keep these in the same notebook and I can't do without it as I note down ideas that I think of during the day or resources I come across, write bits of blog posts and so on. I work through my home education plans in there and they all stay together. I pull out the pages and throw them away when I'm done with them.
• Have systems that work for you and your space - I now store all the children's toys in trugs in the garage, each has to be packed back in and returned before another is checked out - it stops everything getting muddled together and gives them plenty of choice as they can access it all when they want. I have almost perfected a laundry system that sees clothes being put away as soon as they are dry rather than gathering in piles in the lounge - loving it! 

My top decluttering tips are:

• Have realistic expectations - we home educate and have three children in a pretty small house. It is unlikely that I will have a home fit to grace the pages of 'House Beautiful' until they grow up and move out! When the children, and especially when I am ill, the clutter builds - I have learned to just accept this and not stress about it as it can be tidied once normal energy supply is resumed!
• Have routines - never leave a room without taking something with you to put away, when you have a spare moment, choose three things out of place and put them where they should be, deal with mail the moment you pick it up and file it in one of three places - a 'to-do' folder, a 'to file' folder, or the recycling bin!!! Remember to add dealing with the mail 'to-do' list to your master 'to-do' list!!
• Declutter and purge regularly, be ruthless and move on things that are not used/needed/are duplicates etc. I often filter a few items of clothing from the children's wardrobes that I've noticed are no longer worn or are too small for them. They are either put away for a younger sibling or given away to friends. There is way more to be said for decluttering them I can do justice here but do it when you can. Tackle small decluttering jobs rather than going for a whole room - one cupboard or shelf at a time will make you feel great and you'll see fast results! I have a 'room 101' pile for extraneous clutter in the garage. I tackle it every so often when I have the energy, it looks a mess but saves it from making rooms in the house look a mess!!
• Make a place for everything - this doesn't always have to be the most obvious place - store it where you use it most often and where you will be more likely to put it away straight away. 
• Keep to what is necessary - do you really need five different spatulas or do you only use one or two and the rest can go? My rule is that if we haven't used it in six months then we won't use it. I put things away in the garage and if we haven't wanted it in six months then  it goes. I limit myself to one book case for my books and only keep my absolute favourites that I know I will read or refer to again. Others that I have enjoyed but aren't necessarily keepers are sold on Amazon market place, I can always get them again if I want them!
• Make your storage systems child-friendly if you want the children to help with the clutter control.... labelled baskets, child height chunky pegs to hang coats on

I'm not sure entirely why I have become so much better at tackling clutter and keeping the house tidier and more organised...... but I like it!! Do you have any top tips for clutter? Leave me a comment and share!

A Nature Box for the Car!

I made this box up to be kept in the car for the Spring and Summer. Last year I found that we would be out and about, find something that really interested the children, or that we wanted to look up the name of, or we would find THE perfect dipping stream and have no nets. By the time we got home, the moment had passed, or the children were so tired that it wasn't the time to delve into the books. So I had the idea of a nature box to be ready and waiting when we wanted it! It contains:

• nature identification guides for trees, flowers, birds, animals and insects
• a sketch book and pastels
• bug boxes with magnified lids
• pond dipping nets
• ziploc bags to keep finds in
• washed out hoummous pots and a packet of tissues to protect finds like birds egg shells, dragonflies,  old wasps nests and so on that we find.
• A white bottomed tub for putting some stream water in to keep our finds safe whilst we look at them.

I'm looking forwards to using them..... any more suggestions for the box?

A week of decorating, indoors and out!

We've had a couple of weeks break from our usual Home Ed activities so I started back in fairly gently this week with having the girls read to me, and some maths and phonics with Reading Reflex. Another reason for keeping things minimal was to have time to do some decorating. We have remodelled one of our upstairs bedrooms to accommodate space for two little bedrooms and they need painting and papering and all the sanding, sizing, cleaning and other jobs that go with that! I've spent two hours a day decorating for three days this week and I'm pleased with what I've done. I made my first attempt at hanging patterned wallpaper and it went rather well!! I'm not even halfway through yet but it's moving along at any rate!

We spent a great day in a little coppice attached to a school doing a Forest Fun day with a forest school trained home ed Mum from one of the groups that we go to. The girls made tree spirits from clay, Faith's is above, Eve's below. They used tools to whittle and cut their own bow and arrow, we baked bananas on a campfire, made shelters around the coppice, put together rain forest biomes and did some rain forest tasting. It was the coldest, wettest day of the week unfortunately and I was thoroughly chilled by the time we went home but well worth the fun and adventure that the children had!

The rest of the week, the weather has been much better than of late and the children have been playing out for hours in the garden. It has made me smile as last March when the weather warmed, the children were disappearing for hours when it got to about 16 degrees..... this year, in April, it got to 10 degrees and they were off like greyhounds from the trap, so desperate to be out that 10 degrees and dry felt balmy!! Idris loves to potter out of doors so we spend lots of time outside too. We've finally got some little veg plants out, so space on the window ledge for more now!!

I have continued with my techie goal of 2013, adding 'pin it' buttons to the pictures on the blog, using this tutorial from code it pretty. I have also downloaded the kindle app onto my tablet and purchased a book to read on it to try it out! I had thought about buying a kindle as I read a lot and never seem to have the book that I want with me when I have a few minutes to read. I wanted a back-lit reader though and didn't fancy the option for that at the time (the nook) as I still needed an app on that to read kindle books on it. I need back-lit so I can read in bed without disturbing others who are sleeping or trying to sleep! Trying it out on the tablet is a good solution, I will see how it goes! Hope you all had a good and productive week!

Curriculum Planning Made Easy! (Part One)

Writing your own curriculum from scratch can seem a daunting prospect initially but it needn't be that complicated! It can be a fun and rewarding process that causes you to really think about your children's interests and needs and what works for you as a family. Even if the plans go belly up the first time you try, you will have learned from the experience and be better prepared to do it next time!  I used to think I couldn't possibly write one as all the self-built curricula I saw around the net were planned out to the hour for a full twelve months with the number of pages to be completed each day set out and worksheets to back everything up, and covering about twelve subjects - they scared the pants off me!!! I realised slowly though that all a curriculum really is, is a plan and that plan can be as detailed or as light as you feel comfortable with!

Planning it yourself is the perfect solution as it will really meet YOUR family circumstances and needs. Think about your children and your circumstances and brainstorm all the things you need and want out of a curriculum, are you expecting a baby soon (my hand going up here!) so need a flexible lighter option, do you have an older 'high school' aged child that is beginning to focus on exams? Do you have a child with particular educational needs (my hand up here as well, I have a dyslexic learner)? Do you have a toddler needing lots of attention? The things I decided that I needed out of a curriculum were:

• I want to teach the girls together as much as possible, adapting the material on the spot to differing levels of understanding and reasoning powers.
• I want to integrate subjects, and make it relevant and alive, showing how things relate to each other, creating links and understanding rather than lists of names and dates.
• I want it to be flexible to their developmental levels, maturity, learning needs and preferred styles of learning. We are lucky in the UK in that we don't have standardised testing or prescribed content, so removing the pressure of getting children 'up to grade level'.
• It has to be able to be a 'take out' curriculum that I can mostly pack in a bag and take out for the day to the woods etc in nice weather.
• It has to be flexible enough to allow us to take a break when needed, make use of opportunities that come up through the year, and adaptable as their needs change.
• Most of all I want them to LOVE it, and be ENTHUSIASTIC and ENGAGED!

Personally I found that pre-packaged curricula were unsuitable for a variety of reasons. I have looked at many over the last few years, from boxed National Curriculum costing hundreds of pounds a year, to free on line plans. I either found them too prescriptive (either with scripts I was supposed to read out, or content the children were supposed to cover), too pricey, too basic (I find that my children are a little behind their school peers in literacy and maths but way ahead in their understanding of science, technology and history for example), or too American (No offence intended, I have seen some fantastic plans made by US Mum's but the books they use relate to presidents, American Indians, US geographical features such as the Grand Canyon and so on, so I must build UK friendly book lists from scratch!).

I do advocate reading a wide variety of curriculum plans through as they all have their areas of value and even if you only gain a strong idea of what you don't want to do, you have gained useful information! In the past I have gained ideas for books, topics, websites, found links to different methods and approaches and have picked and chosen the best fits for us! As a home educating parent I am continually learning and developing my knowledge and skills, coming across ideas new to me as well as different ways of incorporating well-known philosophies (see my Charlotte Mason Pinterest board for my current research focus!) and resources that are an excellent fit for us such as the Reading Reflex. 

Children also develop and change throughout the year, they may have difficulties with something and want to take more time over it, or fly ahead with something they click with. It is great if your plans are flexible enough to go with this! We also school 'year round' without following the terms and holidays that the schools take. They sometimes coincide (as did the last two weeks as we were all unwell and then were spending time with relatives so we took a couple of weeks out). I tend to continue through the summer months as I find we are all motivated and life is easy in the warm weather, but we usually take an extended break through December and into January to enjoy the festive season and give ourselves a break when the damp cold weather is dragging us down!

I feel blessed to be able to accommodate our daughter's education at home. In school by now, our eldest daughter would be expected to do a large part of lessons through reading and writing. Being dyslexic, it would take her so much energy and time to do the reading and writing part that much of the interesting materials and learning would be lost and frustration and disillusionment could set in. At home we can work on her reading and writing where she is right now and I can read wonderful books to her, provide audio recordings and documentaries and explain things at the higher level she is at with science, history etc. The issue of accessing information just isn't an issue at home but it is an important aspect that moulds the curriculum plans that I create!

Next week I will post details of the actual 'how to' of creating your own curriculum, along with the draft plans I am working on for September! 

Living Maths Curriculum - Multiplication

I am so glad that I bought the Mathematics explained book to help me understand how children learn maths and what they need to know to help them make connections between ideas! I had a simplistic view of multiplication before I began reading but a much better understanding now!! I used the information I read to put together some activities and ideas to bring multiplication to life for the girls and make it understandable, non-threatening and fun! Here goes the theory bit; 

If children know a range of ways to tackle multiplication increases the ability of a child to handle multiplication problems. There are two ways to approach it:

• Repeated aggregation structure - language used is "so many sets of/lots of" and "How many altogether". An important use of aggregation is in shopping, for example buying 8 tins of tomatoes at 31p each, how much does it cost altogether?
• Scaling Structure - increasing a quantity by a scale factor, language used is "doubling", "trebling", "so many times bigger/longer than", "so many times as much as/as many as". Comparisons are important in scaling operations, for example I paid 50p for my drink, Daddy paid three times as much, how much did he pay?

Commutative Law can be used to make problems easier if children understand it. The law says that a x b is the same as b x a so in practise, 5 x 14 is the same as 14 x 5. As children are usually more able to handle multiples of 5 than multiples of 14, working out 14 lots of five is easier for them than the daunting prospect of five lots of fourteen.

Many children find it helpful to hand ideas on an image to help with remembering and understanding them. Multiplication can be associated with the 'rectangular array' which means that 3 x 4 can be represented visually on graph paper as three squares up and four squares along. This leads naturally on to using multiplication to find out the area of a rectangle in the future!

Children need to have concrete, hands on working of multiplication secure before they move onto mental arithmetic techniques.

With all this in mind I put together a few ideas to try alongside our living maths book called 'Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar'

We played a game from Peggy Kaye's book 'Games for Maths' which comes under the 'repeated aggregation' format of multiplying. This game was popular, and quick using scrap paper, pens and a dice. You roll it once and draw that many circles then roll it again and draw that number of dots inside each circle. The player with the highest number of dots wins.

This game was also from her book and was useful for introducing the 'commutative law' idea as the dice roll this time gave two side of a rectangle which was completed using the squared paper then the area was calculated by multiplying the sides. It showed the commutative law idea as I pointed out to Eve that is was easier to count in two's which she knew confidently, than struggle with counting in fours and get it wrong!

 The skip counting in this lead to us making a skip counting bracelet with flower beads and pipe cleaners for practising counting in threes. Having the bracelet on prompted them to count in threes quite often and progress was made in learning them. We also used colouring sheets from 'The Multiplication Tables Colouring Book' which the girls enjoyed as colouring the numbers in a pattern that were multiples of two for example, revealed a picture of something, such as a mouse. There is a multiplication table which asks them to colour in the multiples of two to reveal the pattern of numbers that are multiples of that number. This was the first time they had come across the idea of 'multiples of' and the language associated with that and it caused a false start or two but was generally successful. 

It was in reading about multiplication and researching activities to support this book that I realised just what a huge topic multiplication is and how it needs to be tackled regularly in small chunks rather than one dose, like the symmetry could be for instance. The girls enjoy multiplying and often come and tell me little snippets such as 'what four threes are' and so on. The idea of using cuisenaire rods popped up several times and that led me to another maths book which has added in a new dimension to our maths, it has also derailed my 'living maths' planning for a while as we swerved to one side to accommodate a new direction. I have got my head around it now though so will hopefully be back to posting a few more living maths explorations!!

Idris at 20 months!

Idris has begun to play with toys. He likes the baby dolls, wanting me to put clothes and shoes on and off them and covering them with blankets before kissing them fondly. The game degenerated soon afterwards into throwing the baby on the floor whereupon Daddy picked the baby up and made crying sounds and cuddled it which delighted Idris into fits of giggles before taking the baby and throwing it on the floor again - sigh!

Having said that, he shows real compassion when someone is upset - an anxious look comes onto his face or he copies the upset person's facial expression. Sometimes he is uncertain but then goes to the upset person and either pats them or cuddles them. It is very sweet, but no less than he gets when he is upset (except perhaps the copied facial expressions). He will also 'kiss better' if you ask him. He likes to be kissed better if he hurts a finger or toe, he will come over, pretend crying and hold out the offending digit until you kiss it then instantly stop crying and go off again!

He's very into clothes still and if he thinks no-one is looking will start putting his own clothes on, usually his trousers. The only problem is that he tries to put them on by putting his feet into the feet holes rather than the waist hole so some hilarious happenings have resulted from these attempts!

 He is beginning to connect words together to explain his meaning such as "cold - top, trousers" when it is bedtime and he is chilly without his pyjamas on. He also says "car - deep deep" because he wants to sit in the front and beep the horn, which I'm not sure the neighbours would find so amusing a second time!! He tells me when he's done a poo as well now but isn't any keener on having it changed and since the advent of him learning the word "no" about three weeks ago, we have had some tricky negotiations over getting dressed. Hence why he was outside one morning dancing in the snow in his pyjamas because 'no' he wouldn't get dressed, and 'no' he wouldn't put his coat on. I figured he'd realise it was cold pretty soon and come back for said coat, which he did!! Having tried out the power of "no" for a few days, he just uses it so say 'no' to things like more food or a drink now - phew!

 He loves to play jokes on people and will take their fork at dinner time and hide it behind his back with a big grin on his face! He's much more aware of who HE is now, pointing to himself when his clothes are being folded from the laundry basket, as well as naming every other family member's clothes. He has used the word 'mine' a few times as well as pointing to himself. He loves to jump with both feet off the ground, jump jump jump like a little kangaroo! I have also caught him standing on the sofa arm saying "two two two yay" and leaping off the arm onto the sofa cushions. He says two three times as it is the only number he says right now, although he knows it is for counting as he counts things in books and if I pick up two pieces of fruit for example, he will say 'two'. His other hilarious saying is "din din din din din din din din ba ba" which is copied from the girls saying 'dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner batman', accompanied by kangaroo jumping and general excitement whilst I serve the food up!! He had a huge tantrum one day staying with family as he was hungry for his breakfast and they didn't realise. I said to Dewi that he needed to learn a word for 'hungry' or 'food' so he could say what he needed. The very next day early in the morning he grabbed my hand, pulled me into the kitchen, pointed to the cupboard and said 'din din' very firmly, indicating that he wanted his breakfast - problem solved!!

He has started to sit and play with toys a little now - I picked this farm up second hand for him as I noticed he was looking for little animals to play with in another toy set the girls have. He really likes it and we play often. He has also got more into books too. For the first time today he asked me to read the same book four times, it has text in rather than just pictures and words and he listened carefully all four times before having had enough. Admittedly it is a book about making noise, one of his favourite subjects, but still, a special moment!! He still isn't into veg much - he will eat pasta sauces with chunks of courgette, aubergine, peppers, onions, celery, carrots etc in but won't eat steamed veg plain from the plate. Then one day at a friend's house for lunch, he saw a bowl of black olives and said 'grapes' and asked for one, I passed him the bowl expecting him to spit it straight out and instead he ate it followed swiftly by seven more! i was very amused that he won't eat carrots or tomatoes but will eat strongly flavoured olives!!

His new words this month are f(r)uit, bag, George (the baby of a friend of mine whom he is very keen on!), pancake, mine, d(r)awer, c(l)ose, 'earis' meaning 'here it is', Sam (his cousin), g(r)apes, no, down, up, head, toe, bott(om) (which he finds very amusing, especially making bubbles in the bath!), for(k), pee(ka)boo, c(l)ock, pig, (sh)eep (pointed at from the car window after seeing them at close range at a farm), (Dad)cu (his Welsh grandfather), table.

And the really amazing news this month? He refused breast milk and demanded JUICE at five o clock one morning - was not impressed when I returned with water from the bathroom and repeated his request firmly for JUICE!!!! He's now back to preferring my milk!!!!

Learning About the Water Cycle and Water Filtration

We started out by reading the book 'A Drop in the Ocean, the story of water' and then demonstrated a couple of the rain cycle processes to illustrate what happens.

The set-up above is very simple and examples can be found all over the net so I have not attributed it to any one source. It consists of having warm water in a jar/jug, and placing a plate/bowl of ice cubes at the top, then waiting a little. What you see happening is water vapour that has evaporated from the warm water condenses onto the cooler sides of the jug and then runs down the sides into the water at the bottom (this represents precipitation!). I found a cool idea on the net for making this in a ziploc bag with the cycle drawn on the bag with permanent marker pen

Next we made clouds in a bottle using instructions from this great website and the children were amazed by this. You have to roll the bottle between every try to get rid of the condensation and look carefully as you release your grip on the bottle. What you see is a faint cloud very definitely forming as the pressure drops inside the bottle. What a fantastic way of showing the conditions needed to form clouds!

Next we played a water cycle game, which was inspired by an idea I saw (and now can't find again) where bowls of different coloured beads were placed around the room and the children rolled a dice at each station to see where their water droplet went next. They wrote a story about their water droplet at the end. I thought it was a neat way of showing that the water cycle is more complex than simply cloud-rain-lake-evaporation-cloud. I thought about it but couldn't make it work for a group of three children so adapted it by making several sets of cards using clipart and laminating them before cutting them out and shuffling them. I drew a basic cloud line and ground line on a large A2 sized piece of paper and the children took turns choosing a card from the pile and placing it on the paper where they thought it went. As the game went along we added a house, rocks as we talked about groundwater, a well drawing on the groundwater, a drainage system, and lots of arrows showing the potential movements of water from one area of the board to another. I had considered that I was under prepared for this part of the session as I didn't have a pretty pre-drawn game board all well thought out in advance. As it happened it was the best way to do it as the children TOLD ME the links and showed me where the arrows should point as we went along and it was a really good learning exercise for them.

After all the cards were used up, we talked about groundwater some more and linked it to drinking water and what our water looked like from a tap and how we thought it ended up so clean. The children thought that the water from a well would be muddy and not safe to drink. We talked around that a little with me asking them what was the point of digging wells if the water was going to be dirty and undrinkable? I lead them on to thinking about the layers of the ground that the water went through before it was drawn up in a well. They identified plants roots, mud, sand and stones as possibilities. Then I introduced the bags of materials I had collected (sand, stones, mud and some cotton wool pads as a control.

The girls were eager to get stuck in and split the tasks up between themselves to set up the filtration stations. I had prepared a bottle of muddy mucky water full of bits and they shared it between the filters. We eagerly watched to see what would happen, the girls made predictions, one thought the sand would filter the water the best and another thought the stones would. Disappointingly all of the filters produced filtered water of the same colour......

....... so we brainstormed what might have happened - what was different between the filter stations? What was the same? They realised that each filter station also had a coffee filter in the bottom (to stop the materials falling out of the milk bottle lid hole), and wondered if that may be very good at filtering and be the reason why the water samples all looked the same was because the filters were there?

We had a quick think about the problem to be solved..... we needed something in the bottom to stop the materials falling through but not affect the water being filtered. I suggested the fruit nets that were in the bin from the shopping yesterday and off we went to reclaim them! They plugged the holes nicely and the girls carefully scooped out the materials from the coffee filters and put them inside the new filters. We made some more mucky water to filter and off we went again. This time the sand did produce the cleanest water, not completely clean but not bad and the girls noticed that the particles that came through sank to the bottom so Faith decided that she would try it and just be careful so she didn't drink the bits..... erm no, maybe not Faith but full points for bravely offering your services! I prompted the girls to look at the filters and see what had changed about them and what was the same, they noticed that the water had made holes in them and that the stones now had big pieces of muck in it, like grass and twigs.

Enthused by their success the girls wanted to try layering the materials to see if all of them together produced cleaner water than individually. They set this up independently but in the end it produced filthy water as there was a sudden 'whoosh' and the net plugging the pouring hole gave way under the weight, leaving a hole through the materials. The girls were intrigued by this hole...... and chatted about how and why the water had gone through in that particular place.

All in all, although I felt under-prepared, and hadn't thought through the effect that the coffee filters would have on the experiment, it was the perfect set-up as it posed natural problems for the girls to think about and solve. It high lighted the importance of the design of an experiment and the planning, and that a failure doesn't mean disaster, it means thinking and adapting and testing again. The experiment was flexible enough that the girls could take it in the direction that they were interested in so was great for allowing them to take the lead instead of being narrow and one-directional. The happy occurrence of a bit of water erosion on the combined filter at the end could lead nicely onto other topics!