A really good morning

And really good customer service—please share your own experiences!

I haven’t done a ‘how we homeschooled today’ post for a while, because they were all starting to feel a bit repetitive, and there’s no point just sending you the same old list every day. But this morning’s work went particularly nicely, so I thought I’d share what worked today.

If you read this and despair because you never have mornings like this, please don’t worry. This is only one day. We have bad days too, and days where nobody wants to do anything, and days when everything is so hard that at least one person ends up in tears. Celebrate the good moments when they come along!

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While my daughter was still sleeping my son (6) woke me up. He read beside me in bed, and after I’d had a cup of tea I suggested he try a question from his geometry workbook, which he did. (The maths books series is DK Master Maths at Home—we are enjoying this series so much. I have no idea if you’ll enjoy it too, but it’s worth trying a few different workbook series to see if you can find one that works. We used the same approach when learning to read. We tried all the easy reading series at all the libraries until we found one that we loved.)

Then my daughter (8) came in, already fully dressed—see, everyone had a good morning today! After a short while I suggested she do a little bit of handwriting from her hated CGP Handwriting workbook. This is because she has been complaining about her handwriting recently, and I said that handwriting can easily be changed and improved, but only with practice. I had talked to her about Mark Twain’s (I think) idea of ‘swallow your frog in the morning’, and so today she did. She went from groaning about how much she loathes handwriting, to telling me she’s really quite good at handwriting, actually. (I had also reminded her that when Nelson lost his right arm, his left-handed writing was initially pretty bad. But within a year it looked like perfectly normal handwriting. There’s hope for us all.)

Then there was breakfast, and lots of playing, and I made a cake so we’d have something to eat after swimming later on.

Then I wrote down the main periods and events from our history study so far this year, about a dozen items. I cut each item out and the children took it in turns to arrange them in chronological order. Not all of the items had dates, so they had to know that eg. the Vikings came after the Romans but before Magna Carta. This was a very useful and revealing exercise, because although the children have learnt lots of history this year, they don’t have much grasp on what happened when (even though we have studied the period chronologically, and even though we have a timeline on the wall, and each child is working on their own history folder). We will definitely be revisiting this activity.

Next I did some maths with my daughter, from her Multiplication and Division book, also from the Master Maths at Home series. She enjoys it so much that she was doing lots at the weekend out of sheer delight. This morning we worked on some different methods for division, which was not straightforward, but she did it, and with a pretty good attitude.

Next I put a sentence on the blackboard from their current favourite series (Polar Bears Explorers’ Club), and they took it in turns to identify different parts of speech—noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and today I introduced adverbs. Because it was a fun sentence this was quite enjoyable, even when they found it tricky.

Then they had a break while I got things ready for swimming. After that, I decided the priority for the rest of the morning was some multiplication practice for my daughter, and introducing Johannes Gutenberg with some videos (can anyone recommend a good book about Gutenberg?).

So with one eye on the clock, I laid out the Multiplication by Heart cards from the 7 and 8 times tables, and my daughter went through them twice. We’ve been doing this a lot recently, and she especially likes timing herself with a stopwatch and trying to beat her own time.

Then onto Gutenberg. We just watched three videos that come up when you search for ‘Johannes Gutenberg video for kids’, and they weren’t brilliant, but the children were very enthused. When I turned the iPad off they said “we should put Gutenberg in our history folders!”, and I was, of course, thrilled. We haven’t had time for that yet, because at that point we had to go swimming with our friends, but I shall hope to get to it later in the week.

So there you have it. Geometry, division, grammar, two history sessions, multiplication, handwriting, and they each spent time just playing together and reading their books. Oh, and my daughter went off on a walk, on the safe little route we’ve worked out for her near the house, and my husband and I played some badminton in the garden.

Why do some mornings go so beautifully? What is the magic ingredient? If you know, please share.

Chris Curry on Unsplash

Good customer service is rare, so I have to tell you about it

I don’t know if it’s just Britain, but I feel I encounter terrible customer service all the time. The many, many people who never bother to reply to an e-mail. The organisations that list a phone number online, but when you call it you just get a recording of the opening hours before they hang up, without even offering you the option of speaking to a human. I KNOW THE OPENING HOURS, I FOUND YOUR NUMBER ON THE INTERNET! The people who seem to delight in telling you that ‘it’s company policy’, or that ‘it’s data protection laws’. My blood boils.

This morning my daughter told me she was imagining a world where everyone was friends, and people helped people who were struggling, and there was no litter, and so on. I was going to tell her that we can help to make our own little patch of the world like that by being friendly and helpful with everyone we meet, and picking up litter when we see it, but we were climbing the hill after swimming, laden with bags, tired and hungry, and it was beyond me. I’ll tell her tonight. But it occurred to me that good customer service is like that—it makes the world, in a teeny, tiny way, a nicer place to be.

When you come across good customer service, you want to weep with gratitude. And I want to tell you about it, because, like a good morning, good customer service should be celebrated.

So I’m going to tell you about Boden. They’re not paying me to write this, I just think they deserve it.

Last year, my son wore a pair of lightweight Boden trousers all summer long. By the end of the summer one knee had worn through, and I called them asking if they could send me a fabric swatch so I could patch it. They couldn’t, so instead they sent me a brand new pair of trousers, even though there was nothing wrong with the originals—they’d worn out through use, not because of any fault.

This year, his granny got him a pair of shorts. At the weekend I noticed that a seam was coming apart—this time a fault, not wear and tear. On Sunday I e-mailed them a photo. I was pretty amazed when they got back to me on Sunday night and helped me track down the order, and today, Tuesday, I was even more amazed when a replacement pair arrived in the post. I’ve returned the originals, but they haven’t arrived with Boden yet, so this is entirely on trust.

I’m not saying you should buy your child’s clothes from Boden. Apparently there are enough clothes already in existence to dress the entire world for the next century, which is why we buy lots of the children’s clothes secondhand, and why all the Boden clothes get passed from one child to the next. And Boden clothes don’t come cheap—which is why most of ours come courtesy of generous grandparents. I just think that good service is a rare and wonderful thing. Well done, Boden.

If you’ve had some excellent service or come across a lovely human recently, go ahead and share it in the comments. It will cheer us all.

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