Like many parents around the globe, Mrs K and I have been landed with the job of educating our brood ourselves. And what a week. Never have we appreciated the patience and skills of professional teachers more. Needless to say, with two Sustainability bods as parents, there’s a big skew in the syllabus towards environmental issues, with Mrs K covering photosynthesis yesterday and me doing ‘materials’ by sorting through the recycling, identifying different plastics and metals (above), and talking about waste in terms of the natural cycles they’d been discussing with their Mum.

I’ve also been teaching them ‘survival skills’ at their request – cobbling together various things I know like map-reading, safe use of knives and tying knots and filling in the gaps with Google. How long we can keep this up is anyone’s guess, but we’ll give it a go.

And, to all the others suddenly pitched into the pedagogical world – solidarity! Have a good weekend.