How we homeschooled this week

Plus Chinese education, Lego obsessions, the £12 purchase getting us out of the house every morning, and book lists

I never intended for the children to take the summer off, but for one reason and another they did. So, like many others, we had to get back to work again as summer turned into autumn.

(I know it’s not officially autumn yet. But London is grey and wet, and this morning my yoghurt and fruit breakfast felt positively cold and heartless, and I wished I was having a steaming bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon apples and an indecent amount of cream instead.)

The children were quite keen and ready to get back to work. Readers who’ve been here for a while may remember that some time ago I introduced a daily list for each child of what I wanted them to do that day, and that it was really effective (see my post The Life-Changing Magic of a Homeschool To Do List). Over time the list evolved, and in recent months it was just a scribbled list for my own purposes in my home education file. But for this new term I have moved to a typed-up and printed-off ‘timetable’ (except there are no times on it, because that would have us falling at the first hurdle).

My daughter in particular loves the timetable. It means the children can see what’s in store for them that day, and they enjoy ticking things off as we get through them. I’ve made it clear that just because it looks very official in black and white, the plan is still subject to adjustment—who knows if I’ve happened to get it just right first time? Here’s what it looks like (the children are 6 and 8, but on their way to 7 and 9):

Some details on the subjects for those who like detail:

For maths the children are currently working through their DK Master Maths at Home workbooks. I’ll mix it up with some activities from Math For Love and NRICH and games etc when they get bored.

We are having a big push on spelling. On Mondays I teach the children a word from the lists of Common Exception Words from Oxford Owl. We revisit the words throughout the week. On Tuesday I teach them a spelling rule from Alpha to Omega, and they copy it into their new spelling exercise book, along with some examples of words that follow that rule. On Thursday they take a few words out of their spelling lucky dip jars, and write them out, either from memory or copying them. They’re quite enjoying the rigour!

For science, I have followed Susan Wise-Bauer’s advice and my daughter is working through Adventures with Atoms and Molecules. This is a very old-school, black and white book, but I love that it is actually about real science. So much so-called science for children is really just craft activities or magic tricks with no scientific learning going on at all. I’m keen to get her writing more this year, so this week after carrying out the first experiment, she recorded her work in her new science exercise book, including definitions. It remains to be seen how keen she is on the write-ups when the shiny-new-term feeling has worn off… We are also reading the Usborne See Inside Atoms and Molecules lift the flap book, which is great.

For Greek we’re continuing though Basil Batrakhos, slowly but surely. For French I have subscribed to French With Mr Innes, which is a series of 15 minute videos which are both fun and full of French, with lots of repetition of vocabulary. He also provides worksheets, which I’m keen to get my daughter doing. We’re on week six, and I’m pleased with the children’s progress.

A few weeks ago my husband asked me when the children were going to start reading the Bible. The only sensible answer seemed to be “Er, now?”. Fortuitously I found a DK Children’s Bible in a charity shop last weekend, retold by Selina Hastings. It is excellent, and has panels on each page with factual information. (We already owned two different children’s Bibles, but as it’s been the cornerstone of Western civilisation for the past 2,000 years, three different versions doesn’t seem excessive. Right?) So part of our weekly plan is that I read a page or two, and then read a short passage from the King James Version from the same story. We’re not a religious family and the children are rarely in a church, so these foundational stories would otherwise easily pass them by. They groaned when I told them we were going to start reading the Bible, but when I stopped after the first two pages they begged me for more.

The ‘15m reading sessions’ are what we do when the children can’t seem to find a good book and complain that they have nothing to read. I tell them they have to read a new book for 15 minutes, and if they don’t like it, they never have to pick it up again. They almost always end up finding something they can get stuck into. As an adult, I also have phases where every book I pick up isn’t the right one, so I sympathise. But we have books coming out of our ears in this house, and it drives me crazy to hear a child saying they have nothing to read. It’s like Henry VIII complaining he’s got nothing to eat.

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For history studies, I didn’t feel we were quite ready to move onto James I yet, so this week we stayed with Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, explorers of the 16th century, and looked backwards to the Reformation. We visited the Golden Hind, the full-scale replica of the ship in which Francis Drake circumnavigated the world in 1577-80. We learnt that, thanks largely to all the Spanish galleons he raided en route, investors in the voyage made a return of 4,700%. Elizabeth I’s share of the profits came to over £160,000. That’s £61 million in today’s money!

The Great Events series includes a book on the Armada which confident readers will race through in a single sitting. It’s also a fun read-aloud.

Can’t seem to do captions today, but this is Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Philip James de Loutherbourg

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Talk to me about Lego

My children are obsessed with Lego. When they’re not working it’s pretty much guaranteed they’ll be playing with Lego. It’s the first thing they go to when they wake up, and the last thing they do before they get into bed. Much of their play is based on Ninjago (URGH), but they also use it for more imaginative games. Magnetic tiles and Kapla planks are used solely to provide bases for their Lego figures.

I’d love to hear from parents with older children that this Lego phase too shall pass, and that my children may still grow up into well-rounded individuals with interests beyond bricks.

(Since I started typing this my daughter has spent the entire afternoon making a cardboard model of the Tower of London. Sometimes it’s as though they can read my mind.)

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Read-aloud list

One thing I wanted to do more of this year was reading good stories aloud to the children. In the past few months I read My Side of the Mountain and The Farthest Away Mountain to my daughter, and we loved them. I realised that one of the reasons I don’t read aloud more regularly is because I struggle to choose a book, so to solve this problem I spent a small amount of time making a list that I can select from when needed. We started with The Children of Green Knowe, and my daughter and I are enchanted. (I’ve never read it before.) My son continues to read his own book while I read aloud, which drives me mad. He is, somehow, still managing to sort-of follow along though. Here’s my list, in case you’re looking for suggestions. My aim is to read books that the children might not find enticing enough to pick up by themselves, but would love if I gave them a nudge:

• The Phantom Tollbooth

• Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

• The Jungle Book

• Emil and the Detectives

• The Borrowers

• Charlotte’s Web

• The Family from One End Street

• Arabel and Mortimer

• Finn Family Moomintroll

• A Bear Called Paddington

• Fungus the Bogeyman

• The Tale of Despereaux/Because of Winn Dixie

• The Children of Green Knowe

• Tuck Everlasting

• A Wrinkle in Time

• Bridge to Terabithia

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• Anne of Green Gables

• The Rescuers

• Peter Pan

Independently, my son has just finished Dragon Rider, and my daughter is racing through the Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence. I tried this a year or two ago but thought it was a bit too scary, but now she’s finding it thrilling.

I also made a short list of poetry to learn by heart. Here you go:

• An Emerald is as Green as Grass, Christina Rosetti

• From a Railway Carriage, RL Stevenson

• The Mock Turtle’s Song, Lewis Carroll

• The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tennyson (part)

• The Song of Hiawatha (part), Longfellow

• Stopping by Woods, Robert Frost

• Spring Song, William Blake

The £12 purchase that is getting the children out of the house before breakfast

As the days get shorter, greyer, and less inviting, my family needs some help getting out of the house each day. Once it gets cold, we mainline hot chocolate. Until then, I finally bought the children the litter pickers they’ve been begging me to buy them for months. This morning we spent an hour and a half, barely 500 yards from our home, tidying the streets and local green areas. In four days we’ve collected 14 big bags for life full of rubbish (that’s what you get for living in an area that is perpetually ‘up-and-coming’). People stop us and say thank you. The litter is gross, but the overall experience is delightful, and we have actually made a visible difference to our little local area. Who knows when the novelty will wear off, but for now it is proving to be money very well spent. If you want to leave the world a slightly better place, picking up rubbish is not a bad place to start.

An online news fast

Today I saw a headline on a news website that I wish I hadn’t read. I was reminded, yet again, that although it’s important to be informed about the world, most online news websites are not aiming to inform you. They’re aiming to titillate, and terrify, and most of all to generate clicks. Most of what they share doesn’t better inform me about the world. Why do I need to know about some awful criminal in another country? (Or indeed, in my own?) What book was I reading recently, where someone says that once you’ve read one terrible story about the worst of humankind in the newspaper, you don’t need to keep reading more of the same every day? Gilead? Jayber Crow?

In The Children of Green Knowe, Tolly asks Mrs Oldknowe if she’d like to read the papers:

“Good gracious no, child. What should I do that for? The world doesn’t alter every day. As far as I can see, it’s always the same.”

So I’ve resolved to give up online news for the rest of the year. I’ll probably still read The Week, which is a slower, more considered digest. If there’s a truly newsworthy event, I’ll listen to the radio or buy a newspaper.

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Speaking of The Week, in their latest UK issue they excerpt a longer article from the Guardian about two American twins who went to primary school in China for two years. It’s an eye-opening read:

• Their class had 53 children

• Chinese children have to learn 1,600 characters by the end of second grade. (Compare this to the outcry we get in the UK about children having to learn what a fronted adverbial is aged 8-9.)

• The class learnt about a dozen poems by heart per term

• Chinese school children tend to revere the best students, not the coolest, most athletic, or the socially supreme

And much more—not all good, of course. It’s taken from a book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler, which I will definitely be adding to my list.

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Have you read this brilliant post?

It’s about a dad and his boy and their first year of homeschooling, and what comes next. It’s a great read. I’ve asked

Latham Turner

if he’d like to write me a ‘How We Homeschooled Today’ guest post—and if you’d like to write me one, please get in touch!

An Education of His Own

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