Thursday morning we visited a friend and her two year old daughter. This made Master R feel important to be visiting a friend ‘for him’ rather than one who was as big as or bigger than Ms R. He said in a pleased voice "She’s a very little child like me, is she" and when I agreed he said in an indignant voice "But I’m not little, I’m a big boy am I".
Ms R regressed two years and did lots of crawling around the floor making lots of noise which encouraged Master R to do the same. I didn’t leave there with the feeling that my children had been a good advertisement for home educating but luckily I think their decision has already been made.
We raced into a shop to buy their requested fillings for lunch. Master R as usual took charge of the points card and Ms R took charge of paying and recieving the change. We stopped off at home just brief enough to make lunch which we then ate in the car on the way to visit another friend and her two year old son. Having had a lecture in the car our behaviour was more appropriate although there was an uncomfortable few minutes where we got to witness first hand the realities of naughty steps. Master R enjoyed playing with another two year old boy and our friend very kindly gave Ms R some activity books (the education, curriculumy sort) from America.
Then we raced off again to fetch my Mum from work. At her house Ms R started on one of the activity books, filling in the missing letters of the alphabet and the first letter of words matching the picture. She wanted me or Mum to help her but I refused for a number of reasons. Firstly because when I visit Mum I want to talk to her, not do lessons. If I’m going to do one-to-one then we may as well be at home. Also, if I do help Ms R with that sort of thing in front of my Mum I can’t help but turn it into some sort of showing off session and instead of just helping I start doing the whole "What do you think it is?" type of thing, trying to make her do it in the correct order and willing her to get answers right etc. When Ms R chooses to do activity books at home (she goes through phases) she either does what she can and then comes to me with any left over bits that she wants us to do together, or she sits next to me doing it and I just help when she indicates she wants me to. We both agreed that she was clever but while I was thinking that she was being a good example of autonomy Mum was thinking I should be cultivating her interest in writing/reading. I guess the lines between doing nothing, autonomy and child-led are very blurry and hard to define.