How we homeschooled today #104

Darwin’s finches, the tropical Andes, and just when it was all going so well…

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How we homeschooled today #104

(If you’re new here, my children are 6 and 8.)

This morning was meant to be a standard morning of working through our daily lists (today: maths, Greek, handwriting, history read-aloud). But at a very late breakfast we got sidetracked by the various bird feeder cams, particularly the one in Panama which had a keel-billed toucan making its way through a bunch of bananas:

Live from Panama!

So after breakfast (which took forever, because the children seem to be bottomless pits at the moment), we repaired to the sofa and I got out Amazing Evolution, where we read about speciation—the word for when a new species arises. We read that this happened to a species of squirrel that found itself on opposite rims of the Grand Canyon before splitting into two different species, and the many finches of the Galápagos Islands, which Darwin realised had evolved differently after finding themselves in different environments on different islands.

Then we moved onto The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth, where I wanted to read them something about Panama/Central America, but the closest I could get was the tropical Andes of South America. We looked at a map to discover that this is all in the same part of the world. This was another opportunity to learn about speciation: many unique species are found on only one mountain peak in the entire range (and therefore the entire world), just like islands in the water. We learnt that the tropical Andes have the greatest animal and plant diversity of all the designated biodiversity hotspots on earth. I showed the children what ‘tropical’ means by looking at the map and finding the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. (By the way, this book is wonderful, but at 6 and 8 I feel my children are only just capable of absorbing the information in it. There are lots of technical words—not a bad thing—and after a page you’ve taken in a lot of information. It’s recommended for 10+.)

Then, as everyone was still happy reading on the sofa, we turned to Amazing Earth, and read about the Chocolate Hills, which scientists think were formed by coral reefs ending up above water and being worn away by monsoon rains. So we talked about limestone, and tectonic plates, and monsoons. It was a great morning of natural history.

After all that we needed a walk, and after much discussion agreed on an outing to a nearby riverbank, which this morning was covered in ice and therefore even more exciting than riverbanks usually are to children. We watched birds (not as pretty as the birds in Panama, but we didn’t hold that against them), threw ice in the water, walked on icy puddles, etc, for far too long so that by the time we got home we were all desperate for lunch. At lunch we finally got to the morning’s list, and I read aloud about King John and Magna Carta, and medieval pilgrimage (from the Young Oxford History of Britain and Ireland). We all had the pleasingly rhythmic phrase “The year of Magna Carta is twelve fifteen” in our heads for hours.

As we hadn’t done any of our list work in the morning, I said that after lunch we’d do handwriting, Greek, and some dictation for my daughter before we put on the TV (this is all very brief and took less than 15 minutes in total). We very rarely do formal work after lunch, but today it worked. By the way, Classical Wisdom Kids has started an Ancient Greek Word of the Week post. If you’re studying Greek it’s nice revision/additional vocab, and if not it’s always good to know some ancient words. Take a look!

The children had their TV, I did some housework, and when the TV time was up we all investigated the broken hoover and wondered if we could fix it and avoid buying a new one (we couldn’t, and can’t).

And then, out of nowhere, the children were having the most enormous fight. I don’t normally write about their moods and squabbles here, because I don’t want to invade their privacy, but trust me: we have just as many family meltdowns as you do. The conflagration today was brief but intense. For small children, they can release an apocalyptic flood of adrenaline in no time at all. It took us all some time to recover, while I talked gently about how all feelings are ok, but that we have to learn to control our actions.

Aaaaand breathe….

So then the TV went back on again, because the children find Daniel Tiger very soothing after they’ve experienced some Big Feelings.

After all that I made an executive decision that we would skip maths today, but the children wanted to play Ludo so that gave us a bit of gentle mental addition practice. While I got tea ready they listened to Ladybird Audio Adventures: Big Cats, because tempers were still a little frayed, and I felt the less talking, the better.

Reading in bed: The Hobbit, and Harriet the Spy.

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