sewing

[oneboy3girls]

Looking back the one thing I learned most as a child was sewing and something I enjoy now .I learned this at home ,school and Brownies.What skill or subject was your most useful? Where were you taught it?

...can't say I learnt much at school or home! Ha! But I self taught myself to knit & crochet as an adult & will look into sewing soon for my DD. I think it's a good/useful skill :-)

I'm racking my brains trying to think of something that school gave me that I use today. I think as soon as I left school all the stuff that was crammed into me to pass my GCSEs left pretty quickly. I cook a lot which I love but that skill didn't come from school. I recall our first cooking lesson making a blancmange! Take one packet mix add sugar and milk then heat! I think being able to cook a meal from scratch is a good thing to pass on to our children.when food prices are so high, its a necessity to be able to meal plan, budget etc. That's what I am sharing with my family.

I learned a lot at school. Most of it was not the stuff they wanted us to learn though. (Which is why I want to HE ds. he is learning far too much at school that he should not be learning, mainly that he wants to die rather than go back to school ever again) We did not learn enough grammar and language.

I hope to teach the children life skills like cooking, sewing buttons on, (sucessfully taught h that so there is hope) using a bank, how to shop, talk to people, how to behave in the library... (yesterday he had forgotten all that)

This is a good question.

School
Obviously Maths and English has been invaluable. 5 years of French still didn't give me the confidence to speak any in France. I love biology and other science to the extent that I watch documentaries but I don't 'use' all that knowledge.

Home
Manners, cooking, sewing/crafts, how the world works, how to look after a house, how to get a job (school offered no career advice), how to explore/investigate the world, and I got most of my knowledge of English from home.

I enjoyed school; I found it easy. It's scary to look back and realize that I don't use much of what I spent 16 years learning.

one summer holiday long ago I taught myself to juggle! I've recently started it again and the muscle memory is still there. Next stop - Rubik's cube, see if I can still do that too.

Other self taught skills ; sewing / embroidery. Welsh ( I'm not Welsh)

School - a lifelong love of French, from A Level. But the Latin ..... all gone. All of it. 7 years and none of it stuck.

We had a maths teacher who used to make us do mental arithmetic. We hated it and used to moan that it wasn't on the curriculum (horrible children). But he was right, out of everything I learned up to A level, only mental arithmetic and statistics are relevant to my everyday life. My biology knowledge I use daily at work. The facts I learnt in history aren't useful to me but we were taught to look critically at evidence and that approach has stayed with me, at home and at work. The most practical GCSEs I did are the least useful! The cookery course I did was useless! I passed but didn't know how to boil an egg at the end of it lol. I made a toothbrush holder in design and technology (what a useful life skill!) but am still self teaching myself DIY. I wish those courses had been better taught.