Bamble

Thanks for a wonderful day out last Tuesday. One of the magical things about Bamble is that we can never predict all the outcomes that emerge in addition to our planned workshops. Paddle boarding & climbing were the ‘official’ activities on our schedule. The unofficial activities we did included geocaching, discussing the formation of the broad (peat digging in the Middle Ages), avoiding mosquitos, listening to swans landing on the water, litter picking (thanks to the barn cafe for providing the litter pickers), playing chase games on the meadow, playing circle games under the stretch tent during the heavy rain, meditating, learning how to tell the time, discussing our termly resources budget and agreeing we could afford to buy everyone hot or cold drinks from the cafe, filming advertisements for Coca Cola and San Pelegríno. And, of course, taking a group portrait ‘band photo’ looking out on the lake (as you can see here!).

It was our first day back at un-school today! And it couldn’t have been more different than co-founder Danny’s first day, decades ago.. Instead of uniforms, Bamble children donned pig, tiger & wizard costumes. Instead of ‘business studies’, they set up their own stationary shop (with Bamble currency Ønsop). And instead of learning to play 3 blind mice on the recorder, they translated their favourite folk songs on violin & formed a band with keyboards & bodhran. We were delighted to welcome 2 new children today & we hope they enjoyed the weird & wonderful first day of Bamble as much as we certainly did!

Happening tomorrow! :)

Come and have a look around and chat with the founders next Tuesday (3rd September) 11am-12pm. Email [email protected] to let us know you’re coming ☀️☀️

I’m making plans. What should I buy? Which subscription? How many hours? Should they be doing set work? How do I teach them? STOP!!!!

It doesn’t matter how old your child is go out, jump in puddles, have an ice cream, go to the zoo, meet friends& join your local home ed group, visit family, have a holiday, climb trees, watch movies, draw/craft, read together, laugh together.

Stop trying to think of school type learning.

Home education is not school.

Read up on deschooling, it’s a period of time you and your child take to see how an education can happen without being taught, sat to the table, with a workbook etc. It’s time to adjust to being out of the school system.

It’s really important you deschool, as well as the kid. It can take months to deschool yourself but it’s better to do it now than in a year when you and the child hate each other and you think home ed failed cos the kid won’t do as you’re telling them

An education has to happen from the first day of home ed, that doesn’t mean school type work. It can be conversation, exploring options and topics online , outings, websites, friends, etc.

As you settle in you’ll pick up on how your child learns, do they read a lot and quietly mull things over, do they have to physically be doing something, do they learn from verbal info rather than written, do they need to write it down/draw it or do they just memorise it? Do they learn in small bursts or like focusing on something for long periods. Do they prefer evenings to mornings. Are they sat up at night self learning or need some guided support during the day? There’s no right or wrong way.

But don’t make plans, or pay for anything in those first few weeks, you’ll be wasting your time and money. Ask any old timer and they’ll tell you 2 things ‘I wish I’d dereg’d sooner’ and ‘all my plans went out the window within weeks’.

Home education can be fully structured, semi structured, completely child led, or a mix, it will also change as your child and family life changes.

If your child is a teen then asking them to consider their future options is a good idea. What do they want to do at 16? Or maybe college at 14. Use their goal as a basis for what they need to do to achieve that. A child who knows they need 5 GCSEs in set subjects is more likely to achieve that than a kid who is told to sit 10 that they’re not interested in.

How to educate once you’ve settled in…. Encourage your child to ask questions, remember in school they weren’t allowed to so they need to relearn this skill. Encourage them to find answers for themselves. And critical thinking as to whether the source of info is correct. Encourage artistic expression. Be ready for a discussion on washing the pots to turn into a science experiment, or a maths worksheet to end in a garden replan, or a documentary about climate change resulting in a drive to the coast, or cuddled in bed to turn into a maths quiz, or watching coronation street to turn into questions about the lgbtq+ community.
Don’t force your child to stay on topic.

Think outside the box, Lego can be used for fractions, baking for reading and writing and maths, bath time for science experiments for floating, knex for engineering. Older kids who are doing GCSEs need to be more syllabus based but there’s many websites with different ways to learn from lessons to fun videos, to work books to hiring a tutor.

You don’t have to provide evidence to the LA, a written outline of what you’ve been doing is ok, so your child’s learning does not have to be on paper. But you do need to be able to demonstrate what has been learned if the LA have concerns. This again can be done in writing.

The key is ensuring your child can become a productive member of society and that they can achieve what they want/need to.

It is VITAL you read our website and learn more about your duty and how home ed can work.
Www.Educationalfreedom.Org.Uk

Come and have a look around and chat with the founders next Tuesday (3rd September) 11am-12pm. Email [email protected] to let us know you’re coming ☀️☀️

Thank you colleagues and friends for an amazing Freedom To Learn Forum last weekend! Feeling topped up with warm connections & a sense of solidarity, inspirational new knowledge and ideas. We know from having organised early Forums how much planning and effort goes in behind the scenes and are hugely grateful to Phoenix Education and East Kent Sudbury, and the team of volunteers who made such a dreamy and revitalising event possible. Sending love and courage across the pioneering network - Free We Grow The Garden Bristol CIC Maverick Learning Community Spectrum Gaming Live Play Learn - Unschooling Support Home Ed Swapa free minds

Happy holidays everyone! We’ve been spending a few delightful weeks at the original ‘Bamble’, an archipelago of islands in Norway where our founder Danny spent his childhood summer holidays, and the inspiration for the name of our children’s democracy in the heart of Norfolk.

We’re celebrating a beautiful first year of un-schooling with an awe-inspiring group of bright-eyed and curious children, and we can’t wait to reunite with everyone in September. Meanwhile, we’re off to the .uk Freedom to Learn Forum this weekend. And we want to mention a few opportunities to connect:

- a SITE TOUR on Tuesday 3rd September 11am-12pm. Many of you on our mailing list have joined an open day or seen our idyllic site. But if you haven’t, please come a long for a quick tour and an opportunity to ask us any questions you might have.
- our ONLINE WEBINAR taking place on Monday 2nd September 8-9pm. Danny will be presenting our core ideas: an EDUCATION you wish your parents had chosen (and your children will be glad that you did). There will be a space for some questions and a discussion.

We’re starting to plan for an 11+ provision in 2025, and we’re starting to run out of places and building a waiting list. If you think you might be interested in joining us at any point over the next year, please get in touch ASAP by emailing us or completing an expression of interest form on our website.

We are looking for sessional facilitators! This is an ad-hoc role which would suit people passionate about self-directed education, and with a desire to learn more about this appraoch.

Check out the linktree in our bio for the role description.

We actively welcome applications from people with a variety of cultural backgrounds, lived experience and specialisms, to reflect the diversity of children who may come to Bamble and to help us create an especially enriching environment.

As the role involves regular, unsupervised contact with children, successful applicants will need to undertake an Enhanced DBS check, which will check the barred lists for working with children, arranged and paid for by Bamble. Alternatively, if you have a relevant DBS check registered on the live update service, please be prepared to share the details with us to complete an employer’s check.

For Autumn 2024 we currently have 2 spaces for children aged 5, 6, 7 or 8, and 1 space available for a child aged 9 or 10. Enquire today through the form on our website 💫

For our end-of-term party, the children wanted to create a restaurant atmosphere, serving freshly-made sushi out of the hatch of their ‘Snack Shack’ 🍣. Children provided table service for their parents, presenting special ‘combos’ of smoked salmon and avocado nigiri. And of course there was homemade lemonade! Our yearbooks were hot off the press with personal pages designed by children, and we were treated to a few musical performances! 🎶 In Autumn, we currently have 2 spaces for children aged 5, 6, 7 or 8, and 1 space available for a child aged 9 or 10

Fun and laughter on our summer holidays! ⛱️ Our last adventure of Bamble’s first full academic year was to North Norfolk’s awesome beaches! With Danny doing his best (and worst) Cliff Richard impression on the minibus, we opened all the windows and felt the wind in our hair. We found plenty of barnacles and belemnites at West Runton, possibly even a small piece of mammoth bone, according to a local expert. A few paddled, and everyone had an ice-cream. It was the perfect send-off for summer ☀️

Calling all pioneers! Do you want to join a project reimagining education and co-creating happy childhoods? Bamble founders Danny and Sally both learned about self-directed education though volunteering, interning and working at different SDE communities around Europe, and we would love to welcome another passionate SDE facilitator to join us for an internship in 2024/25. See our website for more information: https://www.bamble.org/our-team

But what do the children actually DO all day? Well, here’s a summary of a single day, last week:

09:30 - arriving with parents, excited that the circus whip they’d spent over an hour researching online (for the right length and weight to do tricks with) had finally arrived! Taking turns, with goggles on, to break the sound barrier!

10:00 - morning circle, including an outline of a trip to the beach next week, that 2 children had meticulously planned (with an itinerary, safety guidance and kit list)

10:30 - 3 children booked the top room to transform it into a music studio (recording several of their favourite George Ezra songs, track by track, one instrument at a time). Others downstairs started planning the end of year picnic.

12:00 - at lunchtime, we played our new recordings through speakers and caught up with the detailed plans for a Snack Shack, with a nominated Head of Sushi, Head of Lemonade, a Maitre d’, and waiters on hand to cater for our families’ every need!

13:00 - after lunch, some children got inspired by a homemade book project, collaborating to generate plot ideas, draw cartoons & write out the storyline. It’s best not to ask why the cat has knickers on their head!

14:00 - others had been busy preparing a Bamble sports day, with egg & spoon races (pine cones instead of eggs), sack races (in a bag-for-life), 3-legged races (tied together with strips of sewing materials), and a human-wheelbarrow race (quickly abandoned). The joy of this event compared to many school competitions is that everyone was a winner and some had more fun preparing the event than actually participating as athletes.

All in a days’ work at Bamble!!

[Photo: homemade carrot and apple juice]

The next Scorsese? It’s fun to imagine that this enactment of a scene from Disney’s Moana could be equipping children with the skills and passion to develop new frontiers of filmmaking in the future.

And of course, just a lot of fun to be had in the activity itself! Everyone had a role (there was a lot of negotiation & rivalry for the pig and chicken roles), and there were even adverts during breaks from filming the main event, as children provided commentaries and sales pitches for items in their lunchboxes! ‘Do you like oranges? Oranges! Get them here!’

The world is our classroom! Several children went abroad recently. Being part-time & slightly out-of-sync with mainstream terms is helpful for families at Bamble who want to have more flexible schedules & travel off-peak. And all the other children benefit from their globetrotting peers, living vicariously through exotic stories, holiday snaps, new ‘facts of the day’ and even a few funny turns of phrase from Spain & Italy during our morning circles 🌍 🌞

And of course it gets us excited to plan our own trips together! In a few weeks we’ll be hitting the beach to search for fossils! 🏖️

What interests you and your family about self-directed education? This is an important question on our expression of interest form (Link on our website). We loved the following response we got from a parent who is planning for their child to join in September:

‘Naturally, we want [our child] to enter into adulthood with the most useful set of skills and abilities to enable him to flourish, and we see self-directed education as the most likely route to that outcome. This feels particularly important in this time and place where we are heading into an uncertain and unpredictable future.’

Note, we only have up to 1 space available when we restart in September (for a child aged 9 or 10). So if you’re interested in joining next term, get in touch ASAP!

[Photo: building a water fountain with a game of zombie tag in the background]

Our phone helpfully reminds us that this time 2 years ago we were drawing out a visual timeline of the steps that needed to happen to open Bamble & now we are hurtling towards the finish line of our first year. If we could have seen a glimpse then of what we have established now, we would have been (indeed we are!) over the moon… 🥳🥳

Most of the action this week has been around a glorious oak tree on one of Bamble’s meadows, where the children have been building a pallet platform and ladder to the higher branches. In fact, this development extended to an entire village of peashoot wigwams and hidden dens (ivy covered homes of multiple occupation), shops (with leaves as currency), and daycare provision (for squishmallows of all ages). It’s beautiful to see these worlds unfolding and to find our group is emerging from indoor winter retreats to bask in the sunshine and cool off under the shelter of our trees. This weekend, families and facilitators will be busy gathering more resources to expand the network of treehouses and temporary structures on site. We can’t wait to see what new buildings and enterprises will be unveiled next week!

A few weeks ago the group enjoyed a really fun and interactive workshop with .entertainment ! Rebecca offered so many fun activities - the children got to try out juggling, plate-spinning, poi, flower sticks, stilts, hoops and more. As always, when deciding our upcoming workshops, we discuss as a group the kinds of things that might be interesting for the most people. One of the things we love to see at Bamble is that children often end up trying new things that they might not normally have picked individually, but with friends, they’re excited to give it a go. Since the workshop, the group have been practicing more and even setting up their own mini circus performances. Thank you Rebecca for such a great workshop, we look forward to seeing you again soon

A big Happy Birthday to my amazing co-founder Danny! 🎉🥳 We all joined in with a waffle bonanza, using his norwegian grandmother’s secret recipe (now known only by everyone at Bamble!)

Wow! What a beautiful moment of play and connection at our open day last weekend! It was heart-warming to hear so many of you talk about the sense of excitement and relief that you’re not alone, meeting other like-minded parents and discovering that other ways are possible. Having dreamt of starting something like this for a very long time, the open day felt for us like an exciting glimpse into the future, as we slowly and sensitively grow our community and expand the number of children who benefit from the idyllic environment we are co-creating

"You're such a lovely group, it's a pleasure having you here. Are you home educators by any chance?"

It's nice to get this kind of feedback and interest when we're out and about with our wonderful group of inspiring free-range children! This was from a volunteer at the Norwich Aviation Museum earlier this week.

When I was at a conventional school in the 90's, my angry headteacher told us we should be proud of our uniform and yet shopkeepers demanded that we leave rucksacks at the door out of fear we'd shoplift, so wearing the uniform didn't seem like something to be proud about. In contrast, we don't have any uniforms at Bamble or artificial identity narratives that we insist children be proud of, there's no coercion to 'behave' or 'achieve' and the effect is a harmonious, enthusiastic group of bright-eyed and kindly children, appreciating all the hard work that goes into creating a space like the aviation museum. The tour guides pitched their presentations so well to our age group and we got some fantastic behind-the-scenes experiences in the cockpits of several types of aircraft. So our appreciation goes two ways: thank you for sharing your knowledge and passion with us aviation museum!

We've been tracking planes from the airport near our site with an app for the past few months, noticing passenger planes, air ambulances, military aircrafts and private jets, converting knots/nautical mph to something we can make sense of and even chartering our own fantasy tours around the world from plastic tub chairs in our main hall. So, it's unsurprising that a trip to the aviation museum was top of the list this term when we all voted on where to go. And it didn't disappoint! There's a saying in SDE that when children discover something they're passionate about they go 'up like rockets'. In this case, quite literally!

‘To educate themselves well, children need great amounts of free time — to make friends, explore, play, get bored and overcome boredom. They need time for fleeting interests and to immerse themselves deeply in activities that engage their passions. They also need space — to roam, explore, get away, and experience the sense of independence and power that can only occur for young people when no adult is watching.

Adults in western capitalist societies often assume that it is their job to keep children more or less constantly busy. But one of the crucial lessons that young people must learn is how to make decisions to shape their own life, and for that to happen the adults need to not take over. Living beings need space to grow, and children need plenty of time free from adults’ plans, meddling, “helping,” and judgements as they endeavor to discover and pursue their own interests.

A great amount of learning, growing, feeling, and experiencing happens in free play that is a huge part of how people thrive, both in developing a sense of self and in building relationships. Play helps us to develop a sense of self, belonging, and community; learn to communicate better, problem-solve, argue, and respect one another’s ideas; and find ways to fit our ideas within a community of conflicting and overlapping needs.’

From the Alliance for Self Directed Education’s - 6 Optimizing Conditions for SDE www.self-directed.org/sde/conditions