Wednesday 28 September 2011

Three Weeks of Flexi-Schooling

I started flexi-schooling this week. At school we learnt how to use Photostory and when I told my new teacher that I was going to go to an exhibition with Joan Miro's art in it, he suggested that I make a Photostory about it. The point of flexi-schooling is not to get homework from your school, but I thought it would be quite fun to do, so I started doing it. I haven't finished doing it yet, but my teacher seem to have forgotten about it. Anyway I will carry on learning to use Photostory on my own.


Joan Miro was a Spanish artist. I like his work a lot, especially the really colourful ones like "The Farm". Miro uses a lot of symbols in his paintings, like a red hat to symbolise a political identity. He is a Surrealist, which I think means things that are a little unreal and dreamlike and strange. I also liked the black and white cartoonish ones called "The Barcelona Series". I really didn't like Miro's sculptures though.


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It has been over three weeks since I started flex-schooling. The way it's structured is like this: On Mondays and Tuesdays, I go to school like any normal day, and on Wednesday I go in the morning and come home just as we break for lunch.

It's been great fun, but I've been missing out on a lot things too. I was a bit ruffled that I'd missed out on Art, but when I did Art today, I changed my mind and became quite glad that I hadn't been around for art. The people there were disruptive and annoying. There was a bossy girl there who was one of the most irritating people I'd ever met. The artist who was teaching us wasn't that good at managing the kids: she did not tell them off, she laughed when she made stupid comments, and that egged them on.

On my days at home so far, I've been cooking, working (at Math especially), reading (which is something that I hadn't been able to do a lot before I started flexi-schooling), going out with my Mum (once), trying out a dance class twice (which I found too fast and difficult), and enjoying my Scouts activities.

Also, because both my sister and I have September birthdays, I've been doing lots of cake and cookie making for our parties. We had pizza parties both times, and I helped deciding what toppings to get and preparing the very long shopping list. On my sister's birthday my mum was decorating a birthday cake but she got too stressed to continue so she asked me to decorate it instead. I really enjoyed piping the icing on even though I made a lot of mistakes. In the end the cake came out really nicely and I was quite satisfied with what I'd done, especially since I rescued my mum;D


For my birthday I made "Petrified Tree" Cookies, which is what they were called. First of all I measured out all the ingredients and it was pretty tricky because I had to double everything. I then melted butter in a rectangular pan and sprinkled home-made crumbs onto it. After that I sprinkled on layers of raisins, muesli, condensed milk, chocolate and nuts that I had browned (and burnt some!). Then I baked it. When it had cooled, I put it in the fridge for an hour. It wasn't that hard cutting it up, but when I scooped the cookies out, lots of the crumbs were left at the bottom of the tray. A lot of the people at the party said that they loved it.

Anyway, coming back to flexi-schooling, there is a horrible teacher at our school called AnDeville  - twice she has asked me those annoying predictable questions about home-schooling and in fact the questions were so irritating that it felt like she was interrogating me than asking me out of interest. The second time she asked me was when I said 'hello' to her politely. She stopped me and said, very rudely, "Are you the new girl who comes to school part time?" or something like that.

All in all, I think flexi-schooling is working out better than going to school all the time.