My Resume

I have titled this post my resume, but really its just a bit about my experience and credentials.

I taught in secondary schools for 10 years in the UK, during that time I occupied various positions. I was Head of Key stage 3 for a while, then Head of Key stage 4, then 5. Yes it was an incremental takeover.lol
I was then promoted to Head of Department, eventually occupying a senior management position of Cross curricular Information Computing Technology (ICT) . Which involved working with each of the subject heads in the school and helping them to write ICT into their curriculum's and deliver effective ICT lessons. I would then monitor and train teachers within each subject area to enable them to effectively use the technology, should they need it.

During my time as a teacher I also trained two students who were part of the Graduate Teacher Training Program. I taught them how to dissect the curriculum, write schemes of work, write lessons plans and classroom management skills. Although to be honest this last one, can be really challenging to teach as it relies some much on an individuals personality.  Any way I digress, I also mentored two Newly Qualified Teacher's, this involved making sure that they were implementing the curriculum correctly, offering support regarding any concerns, and coaching them.

In addition to my duties in school I also published teacher of Key Stage 3 ICT books complete with lesson plans, electronic resources and print outs.

As a home schooling mother, I have also mentored two other parents on how to home school, giving them my curriculum, helping them to plan, deliver lessons and how to choose the best curriculum. I have also visited them in their homes and delivered lessons for their children to demonstrate effective techniques and pace.

I have also worked as a paid tutor for undergraduate students at university helping them with essay structure and proof reading work.

Ancient Greece - Edible Parthenon

We have been reading about Ancient Greece for some time now in history, we use CHOW for this. Today we read about the Parthenon, we followed our normal strategy for this, I read to him in small sections and then he narrated back. At the end I asked him to tell me his favourite part of the story, I then wrote this out for him to copy.

We then did the activity which he had been looking forward to all morning, making an edible Parthenon. I used marshmallows, marshmallow glue (I don't know what to call this, I ordered it from amazon) and Belgian Waffles. Nuh loved assembling the structure, but most of all he enjoyed eating it. It was very sweet, too sweet for me.

Starting with the Alphabet

As Nuh is 5 and not ready for YR1 Charlotte Mason, I have followed the advice of 'Charlotte Mason Help' and started teaching him how to write each letter of the Alphabet. I am looking for perfect execution ala CM methodology. This is perfect execution for a child of 5, I do not expect him to be able to write the letters perfectly, this will be a difficult concept for Nuh to grasp as he is by nature a perfectionist and I am prepared for many tears and much frustration.

I decided to work on each letter both, lower case and uppercase until he has mastered each, we will tackle two letters at a time. I am hoping that the fact that he will only have to complete a line of each will encourage him.

I demonstrated the correct way that each letter should be written using a small tray and some salt, like in montessori, we then practiced writing the letter on the small whiteboard. Nuh liked this a lot as he could erase any mistakes easily.

After the practice on the whiteboard we progressed to paper, I used one inch lined handwriting paper that I printed off of the net. I can't remember where I got it from maybe Simply Charlotte Mason. I even had to show Nuh what a typical 5 yr olds handwritting looks like on the web so that he didn't get upset when his letters were not as neat as mine.

Static Addition

Static Addition

We have been working on static addition for some time, we started out with the golden beads using multiple add ends. I followed the Karen Tyler album for these lessons. You start these lessons using multiple add ends, so you start adding numbers in the thousands together first.

This is one of the sums that Nuh did at the beginning of this process, when he was still using the golden bead material:

I used to write out the sum for him on paper using the correct colours for thousand, hundreds etc.. I know you are meant to use the number cards for this but I prefered to do this as it makes more sense to me, especially as we will be moving onto written sums eventually.

I cannot remember how long we did the static addition like this for, it was a good few weeks though. Once he felt that he had mastered it, he asked to do the sums with out the manipulatives. This is known as moving from concrete to abstract and is the goal of the album. I purchased some static addition sums from the Montessori Printshop. They were cheap and good value for money, I feel.

Globe and Continents

We are dipping in and out of Karen Tylers montessori geography ablum, the reason that I have not chosen to follow it rigidly is that Nuh is 5 so much of the earlier sections do not interest him, so I selected the parts that I thought might interest him the most.

I used the presentation from the album that explains about the concept of the Globe and what it represents.  We also made a paper mache globe and painted it with the continenets, Nuh really liked this, so did Zuh. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the imge for this.


This went down well, I also covered the continents breifly.



We also looked at the countries on our continent that are relevant to us as a family. So we looked at Spain as this is where Pink Nanny and Perfect Grandad live, we looked at Belgium because this is where Daddy lived during his teens and finally we looked at Italy which is where Little Nan is from.