Life, Love & Literature

For once we begin the aca­d­e­mic year with Jack work­ing at the level he would be at school.  We’ll ignore the fact that in some sub­jects this is our sec­ond or third curriculum.

The plan is to spend less time focus­ing on Maths, Eng­lish and Sci­ence and intro­duce new sub­jects and do more project work.

Maths

Real­is­ti­cally I sus­pect that this is not enough to last the year but we will bulk out, with Maths puz­zles, try some test papers and prob­a­bly start on some KS3 Maths books we have, if necessary.

Eng­lish

Last year I did a lot of work with Jack on writ­ing for dif­fer­ent pur­poses and audi­ences (every­thing he was writ­ing sounded like it came from a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book) and it has def­i­nitely paid off.  How­ever, he is a bit fed up of writ­ing exer­cises so this year the aim is qual­ity not quan­tity.  I hope to encour­age him to start plan­ning a bit more.

We have also time for read­ing built into our days so we aim to read the books linked to the com­pre­hen­sion exer­cises in to Jack’s Eng­lish book.

Sci­ence

His­tory

Geog­ra­phy

Jack wanted to use these

I’m not impressed.  So the plan is to take the themes from it and expand them into projects.

Plan is to look at;

Coasts

Maps

Set­tle­ments

Lon­don

Rivers

These books form the core of our exten­sion work

Latin

Both boys will be work­ing together on Minimus.

French

These books are excel­lent because they work along­side each other.  The books address the same themes in the same order, but obvi­ously the work in Book 1 is more in depth than that in the Ele­men­tary book.  This means we can study the main ideas and vocab together but boys can work at their own level.

Drama

Jack is doing drama lessons at New The­atre Royal in Portsmouth.

Music

I hope to do a bit of music appre­ci­a­tion using this

Plus Jack has fort­nightly piano lessons.

Art

We will look at dif­fer­ent artis­tic works and pro­duce pieces inspired by them.

Project work

Jack is quite keen on the idea of these and as long as he remains so I will leave the entirely within his control.

He is start­ing with one about the seaside.