How we homeschooled today #100
Not what I had expected
Down at the bottom, don’t miss it—Educating Otherwise UnConference info, and posts you might have missed last week.
If you were anticipating a big announcement or celebratory giveaway to mark the 100th How We Homeschooled Today post, I’m sorry to disappoint. There may be announcements and giveaways at some point, but they’re unlikely to coincide with a nice round number. Coinciding with nice round numbers is not my style—or more accurately, not my skillset. So here’s a normal How We Homeschooled Today, with one unfortunate incident.
Yesterday I talked with the children about what they’d like to learn this week, how we could make the non-negotiable work more enjoyable, and why education matters in the first place. So we were all in a positive and receptive mood this morning and I had high hopes. Oops.
It was extremely grey and miserable in London today. The sort of day when it doesn’t seem to make much difference when the sun rises. After some Lego and drawing first thing (with some Bach in the background, which was nice), we went out for a morning walk before we settled down to work. To make this an appealing prospect, I said the children could choose the route, and they chose a good, long-ish walk ending at a playground. So far so good. They had a run around and a play, we had some hot chocolate, and made our way home. The children were getting a bit hungry but otherwise we were in a good position to sit down to some work.
Alas, as we walked back I realised that one of the children had somehow come into contact with… poo. Quite a lot of it. I said I was sure it was mud, but we could all tell from the smell that it wasn’t. So instead of settling down to work at home, we commenced a Major Cleanup Operation, which involved a lot of soap, and a lot of tears. Clearly after that nobody was going to chat about pronouns or triangles, and anyway it was somehow midday, so I waved goodbye to my perfect morning of fresh air and education, and instead the children had lunch in front of the TV.
But all was not lost. One of the items on their lists today was choosing a book for me to read aloud, so after lunch I read Peter and the Wolf, and a page from Water Cycles about northern elephant seals, which included looking at their range on the world map. This seemed to ease the children into some work, and my daughter (nearly 8) asked to do some of her Grammar workbook (pronouns and dictation), and my son (just 6) did a little tracing for handwriting practice (another line from Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf).
Then more drawing and Lego, while they listened to David Bowie narrating Peter and the Wolf (so good, by the way—thank you C!).
Another item on the list today was an experiment from our latest Curiosity Box—my daughter chose to make a periscope. This was an excellent activity: she used a protractor and a ruler, we spent a long time carefully following instructions and assembling the periscope, and then she had a great time playing with it (to spy on her family, of course). I wrote peri and skopeo on the blackboard in ancient Greek, and told the children that periscope means ‘look around’. Then I realised that this was the perfect activity to build on my introduction last week to the Law of Reflection: the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. I drew a diagram of what happens to the light in a periscope, and showed my daughter how the light bounces off the mirror at the same angle it hits it—we measured it with her new protractor. (If you also have this Curiosity Box, there’s a mistake in the leaflet for this experiment—they say the angle of incidence in a periscope must be 90°, but actually it must be 45°.) When I explained this she said light must travel really fast because when she looked through the periscope it seemed like the image was already there, so I (googled it and) told her that light travels at nearly 300,000,000 m/s, which to our brains seems instant. She was pretty impressed.
The downside to all this periscope fun was that my son was beside himself with jealousy that his sister had a periscope and he didn’t. So then I put on an episode of Greeking Out (ancient myths podcast from National Geographic) and everybody cooled off. At 4pm I gave up on seeing the sun today and closed the curtains, and wondered how we would make it to teatime in reasonably good humour. The answer involved snacks, reading, playing and more drawing. Actually it was easier than I’d thought. And I made meatballs from scratch and the children ate every last scrap!
Educating Otherwise: An UnConference—Sign up now for info!
Regular readers will know that Ben Yeoh, Then Do Better was awarded a grant to hold a home education UnConference in London. We now have a Substack where we will shortly be sharing information. Subscribe to Educating Otherwise and you’ll be the first to know!
The date will be 24th April 2024. Young people are welcome—and encouraged! Attendance is free, and there will be travel grants available for those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to travel to London. It would be great to meet some of you.
In case you missed it last week
For those of you who like to read all the posts in one go…
Monday: A Big Day Out: a farm, a museum, and a library. Plus an inspirational school creating a shared society of Jews and Palestinians.
Tuesday: Another Big Day Out, to Canterbury Cathedral.
Wednesday: a maths game, thoughts on mess, history, geology, outside play.
Thursday saw a square number investigation, outside play, and slightly scary children’s books.
Friday:
shared a guest post about combining flexischooling with Charlotte Mason for his son’s education.I have another guest post for you tomorrow, from
in Nova Scotia. I love Oliver’s writing. Try this post on children and manners for a taster.Thanks for reading. If you’re not subscribed, sign up for free and never miss a post.
100! Well done. Thank you for taking the time to chronicle your journey, share links to resources, and talk about your days with your children. Your work has been encouraging to me!
As you approached 100 I was rooting for you and thinking, "What a feat!" What a gift these posts are to our community.