How we homeschooled today #102

Gently does it

Happy new year and welcome back to How We Homeschooled Today!

If you’re new here, my children are 6 and 8. The HWHT posts took a break over December because we really didn’t do very much formal schooling. I felt rather trepidatious about getting back to work, but when I said yesterday, casually, “I think we’ll do some work tomorrow”, the children replied by saying… “OK”. They didn’t pump the air and jump for joy, but they didn’t throw themselves on the floor in despair either, and I count that as a win.

My main goal for today was for the children to do some of their usual academic work without putting up a fight, so the lists I made for them were brief:

• Choose a maths activity

• Ancient Greek

• History read-aloud

• Handwriting

At breakfast my daughter pulled out a new question from the maths jars we have on the table. One maths focus over the next few months will be fractions, so yesterday I added a few fraction questions to the jar. We talked about what 1/3 means and different ways to think about finding one third of a number.

After a gentle start—more breakfast, drawing, Lego, reading—we sat down at 9ish and my daughter practised her cursive handwriting, copying a sentence from Ramona Quimby, Aged 8 that I’d written out for her last night. My son was still eating breakfast, very slowly because he was reading Flat Stanley.

They both chose the board game Prime Climb (by Math For Love) for maths, so we spent over an hour playing together. It doesn’t need to take so long, but they enjoyed it so much that they refused to win, and sent me back to 0 at every opportunity, which did drive me slightly mad but was all excellent mental maths practice! On Notes yesterday I shared this excellent TED talk from Dan Finkel, founder of Math For Love. I highly recommend you find 15 minutes to enjoy it:

STOP PRESS: I’m currently setting up a discount code for Math For Love products. It will probably be for US readers only, but I’m working on a UK discount too. So if you’re thinking of buying something from them, you might want to wait a couple of days!

After all that maths we took an extended croissant break. Frozen croissants may be a homeschool essential over the next few months. My son then did his handwriting (he traced one word, and then wrote it out himself. As I said, I was aiming to avoid resistance!).

Then onto the sofa, where I read the first few chapters of Who Was Joan of Arc? We’re going to learn about The Hundred Years’ War (all of us, because I know nothing about it either), and I thought starting with Joan’s story might be a good way in. Followed by another break, where the children built things with their magnetic tiles (their Christmas present—many thanks to all of you who suggested this! It’s been a huge success and a brilliant way to add some geometry to their days.)

At lunch they asked about the word imbecile, which they heard in Ninjago (ugh). We’ve told them it is not acceptable to call someone an imbecile, and they know roughly what it means but wanted a proper definition, and I wanted to find out the etymology. So my daughter got the dictionary off the shelf, thought about the alphabet in order to find i, and I helped her find the word. I read them the definition, and we learnt that it literally means ‘without the support of a staff’, from baculum meaning stick or staff in Latin. It originally meant physically weak, rather than mentally.

After lunch and their daily TV (Magic School Bus, hurrah!) I said we’d have some quiet time. I introduced this as a habit months ago, and then one day forgot all about it, but I’m determined to bring it back. I find spending all day with the children relentless, and the 40 minutes they spend watching TV is not enough of a break for me (or more accurately, not enough time for me to eat, rest, and do some sort of housework). So I put my earplugs in and read Bleak House for 25 minutes—two passages from Dickens on education below. My son played quietly, and my daughter read some science magazines (and spent a lot of time staring out of the window and looking at the clock.).

Then they played, and I wrote this, and then they asked to do some Greek, which was the last thing on their list. Last night I’d written a single Greek word on the blackboard, so they started by transliterating it and having a guess at what it could mean (it was biblos, meaning book, or technically the inner part of the papyrus that was used for writing on). Then I suggested they each have a go at finding three Greek flashcards they remembered from the pile. But they surprised me by going through the whole pile of flashcards, so we spent a really good 20+ minutes on Greek and I was amazed at how much they had retained over the December break. My plan is to work through this list, starting with nouns, to build up their vocabulary. (For new readers: we were working our way through Basil Batrakhos, but hit a roadblock in Chapter 4. It’s designed for 9-12 year olds so I was aware I was being ambitious! So now we’re just focusing on vocab for a bit and will return to Basil when we’re ready.)

It’s been very stormy in the UK today so I suggested we get some fresh air by collecting sticks that had blown off the trees. (You may laugh to hear that I made the children wear their bicycle helmets in case they got hit by any falling branches!). We were out for barely ten minutes which isn’t ideal, but was better than nothing. When they came inside they started exploring one of the science kits they were given at Christmas.

The very lovely, and very expensive Connetix tiles the children got for Christmas.(This is not my house!)

At tea they requested more Joan of Arc, and now they’re running around the flat, sounding very much like two children who needed a lot more running around time than I could give them today. Luckily tomorrow’s weather looks more friendly!

Dickens on Education in Bleak House

Dickens in this novel is scathing about public schools (ie. the most prestigious private schools). His criticisms struck me as pretty apt with regards to aspects of education today, wherever it takes place:

He had been eight years at a public school and had learnt, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much.

And:

But though I liked him more and more the better I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted that he had been educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through his tasks, always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won, but like fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters. If they had been under Richard’s direction, they would have been his friends; but Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies.

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