Emilie 17 months old.

My daughter Emilie was born on Christmas Day 2009. She is a miracle child, following years of fertility problems and two precious angels in heaven. She was breastfed exclusively, started solids a week before she turned 6 months and she is still currently a boobie girl, in the morning and before bed at night. She has an older half-sister, Madison who is 10 and living with her mother.

Emilie has white blonde hair and blue eyes, she is curious and inquisitive and extremely active and outgoing.

She sat on her own at 6 months, started crawling at 7 months, cruising furniture at 8 months, standing at 10 months and walking at 12 months. She is an independent child, wishing to try things for herself, and very attentive, copying everything she sees, which means sometimes she can do things that I didn’t even know she could do, just from watching other people.

For example, one day she grabbed my keys from my hand and ran over to the car and tried to put the correct key (yes, she carefully selected the car key as I watched her) into the car lock. Considering my car has central locking, I was amazed that she even knew that some cars need keys to get into, and how she could recognise and select the correct key was freakish!

She has also taught herself how to hold a pen/pencil in the correct way as shown in the photos below.

I did not teach her that, she must have seen me writing and taught herself how to hold the pen.

She can only say a handful of words, but amongst those words are the numbers “One, Two and Three” (which she can use to count actual items) and the letters “A and E” (I’m always saying “E for Emilie”!)

Her first word was “hello” shortly followed by “daddy”, pretty generic words for a child. These were first uttered when she was around 8 months old and were spoken mainly as a repetition of the sounds we were making to her (she would say “HAWWOO” when we said hello to her). Her first word that I consider to be her first ‘real’ word (mainly because it’s a noun and it was the first word she used on her own and recognise the object) was “Shoe or Shoes”. She said this at 15 months.

Other words that she can say and recognise are:

Ta (thank you), No, bye-bye, car, banana (nah-nah), nose, baby, fish, ball, dog (which she says gog – very cute), gone, All-gone, Rachel (way-choo – she doesn’t call me mummy yet but we are working on it!), cheese and chair although cheese and chair sound very much like her saying SHOES so I suspect she may be using the word SHOES to mean all three things LOL!!!

She can understand simple sentences for example, “Where’s your ball? Go and get your ball!” Or, “Look at the plane in the sky!” (She is likely to point, then wave and say “bye-bye” to the plane!)

Although her language isn’t very developed yet, she likes to babble all day long, she enjoys ‘writing’ which are small precise scribbles on paper in a script fashion. She LOVES pretending to read books, pointing to letters and numbers and going, “A, A, E, A, E, E, A!” I think this is extremely cute as sometimes I spell words out to her and even though she cannot recognise the correct letters yet, she is giving it a go!

We read books together. Her favourite book is a book called ‘Bed-time Peek-a-boo’.  It is a book with flaps that conceal toys underneath. It also has a photo of a baby on each page that she points to and says “Baby”.

I use a few signs on her. Not conventional signs (the only conventional sign she knows is Boobie, which I might add she uses quite a bit!!!) I have made up all of the other signs, mostly because that way they will be easy for me to remember and easy for her to learn. I only started doing this about a week ago, since she sometimes gets frustrated when she can’t express to me what she wants in words.

She knows all the actions to: “Open, Shut Them”, “Twinkle, Twinkle”, “Rock-A-Bye Your Bear”.

She can stack ten stacking cups in the correct order from a scattered state, and we are working on the shape holes!! Not quite there yet, but she will pick up a shape and try different holes, usually unsuccessfully. She has been able to make a tower of pegs since about 8 months old.

She likes to play with simple picture puzzles, but still hasn’t mastered getting the correct pieces where they belong (sometimes she flukes it though!)

We enjoy doing a lot of picture gluing. I cut out interesting pictures from wrapping paper,
junk mail and magazines and she glues and sticks them to her scrapbook, and we make stories out of them. She loves stickers too. Sometimes if it’s nice weather outside I will get some paint pots out and we do some painting, but I find this very stressful for me as she tends to get very innovative and more likely to paint the house than paint on her paper! So this activity is reserved for when I have enough energy and when she is in a good mood.

I am going to start researching different ideas and activities. Of course once our house is built I will have a little play area for her where I want to set up a ‘home corner’ where she can role play with pretend kitchen stuff or dolly stuff or cars/trucks/workshop – whatever she is interested in when the house is finished! I have a few hand-me-down dress-up clothes that I will keep in a chest for her, that will be fun.

Next post I’ll write down some ideas that I have come up with J

Thinking about Homeschooling...

I am starting this blog as a beginning of a journey into home schooling. I want somewhere where I can refer back to my daughter’s development and progressions, also as a place I can have feedback hopefully in the future from followers, who may be my mother, friends, or other home school families I meet along the way.

My daughter’s name is Emilie and currently she is 17 months and 6 days old :-P

I have only recently considered home schooling, probably because my husband and I just assumed that a public school is just “the thing you do” when your children reach school age.

I would like to, for my first blog post, write down some of my initial reasons for thinking about schooling at home.

Number  1. I love my daughter! Well this is an obvious one, not just the fact that I would love to spend every waking hour with her (oh, please let the waking hours be during daylight!!!) but that I also love watching her learn, showing her things that are old and boring to me, but delightfully new to her. Even at only 1½ years, she has taught herself so many things that I am amazed at how clever she is! Life and learning is for sure a real miracle! I would love to be able to be the one to guide her in her lifetime of learning, to be there to celebrate each achievement and to comfort and encourage at each pitfall.

Number  2.  I am scarred. Yes, scarred. The school system has ruined my desire for learning. One of my first memories as a child was of my mother, a teacher, tutoring school aged children when I was only about 2. I remember them learning to read using a cardboard stand, with word tabs that were slipped into pockets along the stand to make sentences. I REALLY wanted to be like those big kids and be able to read like that, so my mum showed me. I picked it up really quickly because I WANTED to learn it. My mother was a great teacher. She taught me so much in my years before school, and allowed me to explore and discover things for myself too.

Then I started year one. My teacher was heavily pregnant, grouchy and just downright awful! Not only did she squash any pride I had in what I was already able to do, she squashed my desire to learn on top of what I already knew how to do. She was not my last experience in this. I’m sorry to say that most of my school years were unhappy. I was angry at my mum for telling me that I was smart, when WHAT DID SHE KNOW??? Obviously I’m dumb because look! I can’t do anything right, I hate learning!

I do not want my daughter to end up in the same cycle of hating to learn. I want her to be able to discover life, to love learning, to share learning with me, my husband and any siblings that may come along after her! I want to get her off to the best start and to tailor her education to suit her ability and her pace. To slow down or speed up when she needs it, not when the classroom teacher says so.

Number 3. I can already see what the school system is doing to my step-daughter, Madison. Before she went to school she was a bright, bubbly child who loved to play “schools” with me and learn because she wanted to learn. I taught her the basics of reading and her proudest achievement was being able to count in “twos” – Two Four Six Eight Ten Twelve!! She is ten now, year 5, and she is lagging behind greatly. My greatest annoyance is that her teachers have never done anything to try and help her catch up, or understand something that is baffling her. I don’t want this for Emilie.

Now, I have a plan in my head that at the moment probably doesn’t match the plan in my husband’s head! My husband, Paul, and I have discussed our future. We are in the process of extending our house (which means a bigger mortgage :-/) which should be finished by Christmas time 2011 (Emilie’s second birthday) and we want to start trying to conceive our next child in July 2011, meaning that if we fall pregnant in that month we will have an April 2012 baby, or more than likely, we will have a baby later in the year of 2012 or even 2013 if we are unsuccessful for awhile.

Our plan we discussed was to have our two children fairly close, and as Paul is on good money working fly in fly out on the mines in Christmas Creek, Western Australia, I would be a stay at home mum until the children reach school age, at which time I would return to work either part or fulltime and have Paul come back to work in Perth again.

Now, I cannot say what will happen in our future. One day I will look back on this first blog post and think, wow, things really didn’t go the way we saw it!! But I have a plan hatching in my head (which hasn’t reached Paul’s head via my mouth yet LOL) to see how things go with homeschooling Emilie for her first few years while I would still be home with her younger sibling. Ideally, if I were to have a baby after July 2012, then their “school years” will have a larger gap (3 years instead of 2) so Emilie could be homeschooled for longer if it so happened that our situation meant that the kids were forced to go to conventional school in the end.

I have made a few comments about homeschooling to Paul just in passing conversation!! His reaction hasn’t been negative, so that is a start. I don’t want to jump in and say “I’m going to home school the kids!!!” That is likely to scare him. He will think, “I’m doomed to work the mines forever!!!” And to be honest, that’s not what I want for him either. I hate the fact that he is away from Madison and Emilie, and if we were millionaires (ooh that would be nice!) then we could all be together and he could even be involved in the homeschooling environment. On his two week break when he is at home, he will be able to see how well homeschooling Emilie is going (he has already complimented me on how well I am doing as a mother to Emilie) and possibly that may convince him that homeschooling isn’t just some backward, hippy-style, commune-ish, cult that weirdo parents do because they are paranoid of the government or teachers in general!

So my plan for now is to just go with Emilie’s pace at her age of 17 months. In my next blog post I would like to describe Emilie and her capabilities at her current age, and a few ideas I have tried, or ideas I would like to try. I’m going to go with what my mother describes as EPIC – Explore, Ponder, Investigate, Celebrate. See her website www.educationathome.com.au Emilie has plenty of time until she is what is deemed as “school age” but there is no reason why I cannot start the learning process today! She is a bright girl and all I want is to nurture her desire for learning and to see that passion be sustained into her future instead of getting squashed as mine did.