I went to a Britmum’s meetup yesterday (which I’ll write about in another post) and got talking with someone who is working on a website full of activity ideas to get kids away from screens and into real life. This is something I am very much for – okay, my kids spend way too much time in front of the TV but they also spend a huge amount of time doing things: climbing, creating, imagining. I’m pretty lucky with them.
The website is Freaky Rivet, I’ve had a look and it looks like great fun. There’s a bunch of London itineraries based around themes (I’m curious about the children’s literature one of course!) and activities like Bomb your Artwork, plus more on subscription. I’ve had a look around out of curiosity, not because I was asked to (I wasn’t!) I think my children are probably on the young end to appreciate most of it. It looks like something that might be a useful resource for home educators?
So, I was having a conversation with one of the Freaky Rivet founders and saying that my children were too young really to be addicted to computers, although MG does go a bit ‘zombie’ when the television is on but she’ll also happily draw and write and play outside for hours on end (as I write this, both MG and DG are in the back garden playing with mud…)
That very evening, just to prove me wrong in my “they don’t use the computer much” comment, MG took possession of my laptop for the evening. I can’t really complain though, she logged herself in and found Paint then drew this picture:
She uses computers at school and goes on iPlayer or BBC games on my laptop but this is the first time to my knowledge that she’s used this Paint program and she taught herself everything as she went along.
She then asked me to open Word and typed these sentences:
This term’s topic is Toys and they’ve been looking at current toys and are going to a museum next week to see old ones. She’d asked me what my favourite toy had been and I said Lego. She asked what it looked like and I pointed to the huge box of my Lego in their play area and said that’s my old toys to which she said it didn’t look old enough!
All the sentences are her own thoughts. It looks like she’s been doing descriptive sentences in literacy recently!
As I said, I can’t really complain, but I did miss having my laptop in between cooking and tidying! I don’t plan to be getting my children their own computers anytime soon (no DS, iPad, games consoles etc in this house either) but I expect the pestering will start sooner than I hoped.
Actually, maybe Mr Chaos can buy them a Tablet so I don’t lose my laptop so often… 
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