Life, Love & Literature

Just another Home Education blog

Jan 7

New Term

by sarah

A few months ago Jack made seri­ous indi­ca­tions of want­ing to try school, rather than airey fairy one day type com­ments.  I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t react well and got a bit upset, not say­ing no of course, it has always been their deci­sion just overly neg­a­tive.  2 days later, PMT had gone and I’d done a U-turn. Once the ratio­nal part of my brain kicked back in I know full well it is curios­ity based on the fact most of his friends go rather than unhap­pi­ness at home that is the moti­va­tor, and I am rather proud of him hav­ing stuck to his guns when I was clearly against the idea.  Aca­d­e­m­i­cally it won’t do him any favours but doubt it will be that bad either, we’ve given him a good start and home envi­ron­ment will always play a major role whether a child is in school or not.  Also he’s a social being and I am so not, so the idea of let­ting him go off and do his social­is­ing with­out me is not with­out appeal.  And it might be nice to focus on Sam a bit more (he is very adamant that he doesn’t want to go), he has always kind of had to slot in around Jack.  Of course in the time that it took me to reach these con­clu­sions Jack cooled on the idea.  Based on the fact we have some days out and week­ends away booked we (to clar­ify by we I mean the entire fam­ily, Pete included!) have agreed to put the idea on the back­burner to revisit Feb time, and if he wants make inquiries then with a view to him start­ing after Easter.

With my ‘enjoy the moment’ frame of mind I’m not let­ting what might hap­pen in the future effect too much what we do now.  I let him type most things at home and I think this is some­thing where he does lag behind schooled kids.  And any­way at some point in 3 or 4 years he will start on GCSE’s so will need to write more quickly and leg­i­bly.  We’re try­ing to make it inter­est­ing though by tran­scrib­ing poems that he likes, thanks to work I have the fonts avail­able to pro­duce hand­writ­ing sheets eas­ily.  Aca­d­e­m­i­cally I sus­pect he is way ahead in many areas and where he does lag behind he is bright enough to catch up quickly.

I’ve rejig­gled (or rejigged if you insist — I quite like the word rejig­gled though even if it is a ‘com­edy word’) our timetable a bit to take account of var­i­ous things

  • With not aim­ing to attend Home Ed Groups I don’t need to work around them, so it is all about suit­ing us.  I’ve left space for our reg­u­lar catch up with Lisa and her boys and after­noons are always flex­i­ble.  If we’re in then we’ll work on crafty, sci­ence exper­i­ments type things but equally well these can be put to one side to catch up with friends or run errands.
  • So we are ‘school’ Mon-Thurs, with Fri­day as a day off for trips and out­ings.  Some vis­its to friends, oth­ers fam­ily days out.
  • Boys want to swim reg­u­larly and they don’t want to go to a group ses­sion.  So I’ve hired the local pri­vate pool in the vil­lage on a weekly basis.  Bliss, warm and only us in it.  Has the advan­tage of being near library too so two birds one stone.
  • Sam starts Beavers in a cou­ple of weeks.  He’s a bit meh about it.  Per­son­ally I think it will be good for him to do some­thing with­out Jack but won’t be sur­prised if he doesn’t like it.  He’s used to mix­ing with older kids and gets a bit non­plussed by kids his own age.  I’ve con­vinced him to try it for a week or three but if he isn’t keen then fair enough.
  • We found when Jack did piano prac­tice mid morn­ing it dis­rupted our flow, so moved it to first thing before we actu­ally sit down
  • Split work into two hour blocks , with a break.  Included project work and other extras along­side Galore Park.
  • I am not split­ting Jack’s work in to days but ask­ing him to man­age a weeks worth of work. Sam is still at the stage of doing what I ask when, he is not ready to self man­age yet.  Obvi­ously I expect less out of him than Jack and we’ll spend a fair amount of the time Jack is work­ing read­ing and colour­ing etc.

So this week started gen­tly on Mon­day.   We used Activ­ity Village’s New Year Doo­dle Fun to reflect on 2011

Jack’s fun­ni­est moment

Sam’s favourite mem­ory of 2011

Sam’s favourite outing

 

And the same resource to help with them con­sider goals and make plans for the upcom­ing year.  I am not unaware of the incon­sis­tency here, I want to live in the moment more but am encour­ag­ing the boys to develop plan­ning skills.  I’m good at plan­ning, they’re good at liv­ing for the now (in the way that chil­dren are) if we all get a lit­tle bet­ter and the other, every­one will hope­fully be hap­pier.  For the kids some of this sim­ply means work­ing out plans of sav­ing up for things they want and every­day think­ing ahead.  If they are told the bus is due in 20 mins get­ting dressed and ready (ide­ally in weather appro­pri­ate clothes) in an organ­ised man­ner!  But also par­tic­u­larly in Jack’s case it is about him tak­ing more con­trol over his education.

Jack’s read­ing plans

Also been mov­ing on with galore park.  Sci­ence involved sort­ing food labels

New projects were started, WW2 and Vil­lage Set­tle­ments in Geog­ra­phy.  We are using resources from Plan­bee.  They are les­son plans for school but adapt well for home use and I find them a good way of check­ing we have cov­ered the major­ity of NC top­ics.  Par­tic­u­larly like the geog­ra­phy resources as I strug­gle to find good UK based Geog­ra­phy resources.

Sales have also meant boxes of books turn­ing up with reg­u­lar­ity and caus­ing dis­trac­tion and excite­ment.  I treated us to a globe with my Ama­zon voucher which has given us all (Pete and I included some fun).

 

Activity Village Curriculum Day to day life Jack's Work Sam's work

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Sep 17

Sam’s Curriculum 2011

by sarah

For Sam focus remains on Maths and Eng­lish, with every­thing else being mopped up with project work.

He will join Jack to study French and Latin.

I toyed with a more for­mal approach to Sci­ence but the book I bought looked bor­ing so think we’ll stick to projects, join­ing in with Jack’s prac­ti­cal work and ad hoc investigations.

Maths

We’ll con­tinue to work through a com­bi­na­tion of Schofield and Sims and Heinemann.

Eng­lish

We’ll con­tinue with An Ordi­nary Parent’s Guide to Teach­ing Reading

We’ll use Schofield and SIms for hand­writ­ing, spelling and com­pre­hen­sion practice

And Devel­op­ing Lit­er­acy work­sheets for other aspects of Eng­lish includ­ing cre­ative writing

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.

Music

I hope to do a bit of music appre­ci­a­tion using this

Art

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

Project work

We will con­tinue to work through Evan Moor’s Ancient Civ­i­liza­tion His­tory pockets

We also hope to look at

Dinosaurs

Ancient Greece (in more detail than the His­tory pocket)

Space

Ancient Rome (in more detail than the His­tory pocket)

Human Body

British Monachy

Olympics

Lon­don

But will go with the flow to some extent.

Curriculum Sam's work

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Sep 17

Jack’s Curriculum 2011

by sarah

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.

 

 

Curriculum Jack's Work

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Mar 10

Home Educating Jack

by sarah

The deci­sion to home edu­cate Jack was never a big issue for us. When he was very young, Pete said ‘I wish he didn’t have to go to school’, my response was ‘he doesn’t’ and that was pretty much it.

We read around the sub­ject a lot. We spent one morn­ing look­ing at local pri­vate schools on the web before dis­count­ing that. We could have afforded it if I worked but he would still be one of 20 and we would have hol­i­day care etc to deal with so we couldn’t see any ben­e­fit at all and then along came Sam and ruled it out com­pletely as couldn’t afford to pay for 2.
We never started off with any pre­con­ceived ideas or any par­tic­u­lar edu­ca­tional philosophy.
Jack was quite a demand­ing and ‘full on’ tod­dler, always wanted your atten­tion. And I’m ashamed to admit that both Pete and I used to get frus­trated with his ‘being’ games (he never really ‘did’ toys). His games often seem to con­sist sim­ply of you repeat­ing exactly what he told you to say, no imag­i­na­tion or spon­tane­ity allowed. As a result, Pete in par­tic­u­lar used to divert his atten­tion by sit­ting down with him and doing ‘early learn­ing stuff’. I don’t mean in a stale sit­ting at a table way but as games. We had a croc­o­dile from ELC, one of those ones with pock­ets that you put let­ters in, if Jack got the let­ter right he’d throw the let­ter in the air and the croc­o­dile would jump up and eat it, accom­pa­nied my much exag­ger­ated chomp­ing noises from Pete and squeals of laugh­ter from Jack.
Also with no car, we walk or bus every­where so I became expert at enter­tain­ing a tod­dler with what was around me. We’d stop for a rest at street cor­ners and try and recog­nise let­ters on street signs. Prac­tice count­ing while at the bus stop, ‘I think bus will be here before we get to 100′ etc. The point of these games were never to ‘hot­house’ Jack, just as nat­u­rally ‘aca­d­e­mic’ peo­ple (both of us have stud­ied OU for ‘fun’) this was just how we felt com­fort­able play­ing. But the knock on effect was Jack was per­fect in his alpha­bet long before he started preschool.
He did 2 morn­ings a week at pre-school, purely for the social aspect. I always stayed if he asked, although in prac­tice his friend who I’d also take used to ask me to stay more often (and I did). He loved it and I know would have been rel­a­tively happy trot­ting off to school when the time came.
How­ever, we never doubted home edu­ca­tion was the right option for him. He is a very bright child but he seems to learn very much in fits and starts, he seems either to be phys­i­cally grow­ing or men­tally grow­ing but rarely both at the same time. Less obvi­ous now but still appar­ent, those who have fol­lowed the blog for a while will have read we’ve strug­gled a bit lately, and in the last week I have noticed he’s grown out of 3 pairs of trousers. I hadn’t con­nected it in my head until I started typ­ing this but it fits with every­thing I have seen in the past. And this is why home edu­ca­tion is the answer for us. A teacher who has a class of 30+ chil­dren for one year can’t pos­si­bly know the kids well enough as indi­vid­u­als to recog­nise things such as this and even if they do, there are so many con­straints imposed by the National Cur­ricu­lum and class sizes that they can’t respond and adapt to the rhythms of individuals.
Over the years I have had numer­ous wob­bles, feel­ings of fail­ure, hic­cups and phi­los­o­phy swings.
Much of it result­ing from doing the dreaded ‘com­par­ing your­self to oth­ers’. While Jack has always been aca­d­e­m­i­cally ahead of the major­ity around him it wasn’t com­par­ing him that was the issue it was me. Oth­ers seemed hap­pier, more con­fi­dent, to have a belief in a cer­tain way of doing things, to fit into a group better…
When you get involved in home edu­ca­tion (in the UK at least) you can not fail to notice how vocal the autonomous edu­ca­tion fac­tion is. And it is easy to get caught up with the pos­i­tive sto­ries and in a way the irrefutable argu­ments behind it. It seems per­fectly obvi­ous that a child will learn more when they are inter­ested and the best way for them to learn is to carry on the way they learnt to walk and talk. How­ever, for many kids I believe it is not enough and most do need some prod­ding and inspir­ing (espe­cially Jack). A Jack who doesn’t do a reg­u­lar amount of struc­tured work is a dif­fi­cult Jack to be around. It seems if we don’t reg­u­lar chal­lenge his brain he looses the abil­ity to con­cen­trate on any­thing, and expends his brain power on wind­ing Sam up. I recog­nised early on that he needed ‘work’ to ‘calm him down’ but it has taken sev­eral years for me to accept that this needs to be a rou­tine and not a response, that we need to do a cer­tain amount every week in order keep Jack ‘bal­anced’. Also I want school to remain an option for the boys should they need for any rea­son, or want to go at any point, so felt some form of struc­ture is impor­tant. That is how I went from some­one who is quite sym­pa­thetic to the idea of autonomous edu­ca­tion to some­one who spent quite a lot of time at the week­end draw­ing up a 14 week timetable.
It as also taken us a long time to find a sys­tem that works for us. Pete has always been very involved in Jack’s edu­ca­tion and likes to spend time work­ing with him at the week­end, usu­ally play­ing with maths. And with no knowl­edge of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem he basi­cally intro­duces Jack to top­ics at ran­dom that he finds inter­est­ing. Hence we have an 8yo who is able to con­fi­dently deal with a lot of the con­cepts that I cov­ered in my level 1 Maths degree course last year.
How­ever I have always thought it a good idea to bal­ance this and work through a maths cur­ricu­lum too. Even with a sym­pa­thy towards autonomous I do believe you can’t learn many aspects of higher maths from every­day life and you need to get a good under­stand­ing of the basics. We started off with Sin­ga­pore Math, did Early­bird level 2 and the worked through My Pals are Here up to Level 4. At which point I felt we were get­ting too far ahead so we worked through some CGP books. We alter­nated through the yearly frame­work books for years 3,4, 5 & 6 and the tar­geted ques­tion books for lev­els 3,4 and 5. And also did the men­tal arith­metic books. But around Christ­mas we fin­ished them. We hon­estly don’t do that much, it’s just home ed is so much more effi­cient. At that point we moved on to KS3 CGP books, but as I said we have strug­gled really. While I am con­fi­dent that Jack could do the work, for what­ever rea­sons, low con­fi­dence, lack of abil­ity to con­cen­trate, not find­ing the style of book inter­est­ing, he struggled.
Since he is only actu­ally halfway through yr 4, I can’t see the point in per­se­ver­ing so we have gone back and started a third KS2 course, the Galore Park So you really want to learn Junior Maths series. We have gone right back to the begin­ning, although hav­ing looked through it for the major­ity of chap­ters in the first book I expect he will just do the sum­mary exer­cises, more as a con­fi­dence boost.
Struc­ture in other sub­ject areas has for a long time used to take the form of project work. For a long time we per­se­vered with Hands of a Child lap­books (every­one around us was doing them). But I can finally accept that I think they are rub­bish and the only thing they are good for is cut­ting out prac­tice. Even­tu­ally his inter­est in Ancient His­tory led us to start the Galore Park So you really want to learn Junior His­tory series. I had looked at Story of the World but the reli­gious ele­ment and cost put me off.
As he got a bit older we started on Schofield and Sims series of Under­stand­ing Eng­lish work­books, cho­sen him­self from WH Smiths and when he fin­ished we moved on to the Galore Park So you really want to learn Junior Eng­lish series (spot a theme).
For other things (Geog­ra­phy, Sci­ence, ICT) we have CGP books, cho­sen by Jack. I think the major fac­tor dri­ving that choice was that work­books don’t allow much space for writ­ing. While Jack loves (and is very good at) cre­ative writ­ing. He very much has always had a thing about writ­ing what he wants when he wants and hat­ing any­thing else that has required him to pick up a pen. But the prob­lem with the CGP books is that if you ask him in the evening about what he’d done that day he could never tell you so he wasn’t learn­ing any­thing from them.
So where you find us now is that we have a rough timetable. Morn­ing is ‘work’, toys are banned. How­ever, I do like us to do trips so fac­tor this in and we are flex­i­ble with what amount we do each day.
Cur­ricu­lum wise we use the Galore Park books for Maths (which he writes) and Eng­lish, Sci­ence and His­tory (which he types). Trail Guide to World Geog­ra­phy arrived this morn­ing but we prob­a­bly won’t start that until Sep­tem­ber, we started the Galore Park books ‘late’ so we’re work­ing at catch­ing up with them. Plus I like to throw in some project work now and again.
So that’s where we are 4 1/2 years after Jack would have started school I finally feel we’re ‘there’ and have found a sys­tem and way of work­ing that suits us.

Curriculum Educational Philosophy Jack's Work

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Feb 10

At Home

by sarah

Jack did some prob­a­bil­ity and Sam fin­ished his shape book.

Jack wrote a report on yesterday’s HMS Vic­tory tour (see post below).
Sam did the work­sheets I’d copied from his Eng­lish books.
I had picked up a num­ber of books from Oxfam over the sum­mer that were obvi­ously a teach­ers stash. Among them were a col­lec­tion of pho­to­copi­able work­sheet books called ‘Devel­op­ing Lit­er­acy’ they have quite a few dif­fer­ent ones but with a bit of top­ping up from Ama­zon mar­ket­place we now have the Word, Sen­tence and Text level books for all of infant school. Since Christ­mas we have been using them to add anothe dimen­sion to Sam’s English.
Then we had been sent lots of print­able work­sheets by the edu­ca­tion offi­cer who had led Weds’ workshop.
We redid the spelling your name out in flags activ­ity as we’d mis­layed and I got the impres­sion they had not exactly under­stood it at the workshop.
Drew HMS Vic­tory
and did a word­search
Then on Jack’s sug­ges­tion we printed out more of the flags, coloured them and cut them out and used them to ‘write’ messages.
Jack’s says ‘You are a dork’
Mine says ‘What do you want for lunch’.
Con­vers­ing through flags meant the dis­cus­sion on lunch took a long time. So after a late lunch we had time to clear up and do a quick tidy before off to drama.
The walk to drama is too far for Sam so it is either bus or taxi. Since we have a bus pass this week, despite the rain, we opted for bus. The bus gets us there 35 mins early so we went for a walk in the lit­tle bit of wood­land near the school. .

Unfor­tu­nately we met a friendly, but large and bouncy dog who knocked the boys over and ter­ri­fied them. They are ner­vous of dogs any­way because this is not the first time it has hap­pened. The owner was very apolo­getic but it does annoy me — dog might be friendly but if they can’t con­trol it, it needs to be on the lead.
When I’d got them cleaned up a bit and calmed down, Sam joined Jack in his drama class. Whether he wants to join in long-term we’ll see…

Curriculum Day to day life

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Nov 22

More Pilgrims

by sarah

Today we spent try­ing to get back in a work frame of mind after sev­eral weeks of birth­days and vis­it­ing Grandparents.

Boys worked through Maths and Eng­lish. Then Jack wrote a story and did some of his sci­ence book and Sam worked on another pocket of his Pil­grim project.
Includ­ing mak­ing a dio­rama of inside a house.
I had hoped to find a nice Christ­mas project from Evan Moor Their Hal­loween one was good (even if we didn’t man­age much of it) but I couldn’t find what I wanted. We do have a Sym­bols of Christ­mas one from Hands of a Child that I had intended to start with Jack today, but had a look in detail at it and it’s woeful.
A cou­ple of years ago when we were just start­ing Home eding I bought loads of stuff from Hands of a Child, had a years mem­ber­ship. The graph­ics on them are very poor qual­ity and we found the activ­i­ties just too repet­i­tive. Some of the sim­ple ones I will redo with Sam but most sadly are filed away on the old com­puter never to be used.
Looks like I’ll be cre­at­ing my own.
We spent the after­noon work­ing on Christ­massy bits for Activ­ity Vil­lage’s advent cal­en­dar with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess — pen­guin col­lapsed and a glass work­top saver will not suf­fice as a mar­ble slab (I had to melt the caramel­lised sugar lolly off with boil­ing water). Do have a nice lit­tle Christ­mas tree to show for it though.
Then off to Sam’s gym­nas­tics class.

Day to day life

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