How we homeschooled today #105

Working hard or hardly working?

(If you’re new here, my daughter is 8 and my son is 6.)

The children’s work today hasn’t look like I imagined it would when I wrote out their lists last night. On the lists were:

• Maths (my daughter had an activity in mind, my son was free to choose)

• Spelling

• French

• A read-aloud

The children are deeply immersed in an imaginary spy game at the moment, which this morning involved my daughter making lots of notes in a notebook, and asking me for spellings which I helped her to work out herself where possible. My son also played some Prime Climb against himself, and my daughter later joined him. She is getting the hang of working out whether it’s worth finding out the exact answer to eg. 4 x 32, or if that’s likely to be too big to be useful in the game. (If you’re thinking of buying this, make sure to use the How We Homeschool discount!)

First thing this morning (I was only just dressed), one of my favourite friends came over. This is the sort of person that my children actually like talking to—a rare honour—so they told her all about their imaginary game and took her through their Greek flashcards.

By the time my friend had left it was time to make a start on lunch, and the children continued their game. While we ate I read to them about trade and industry in medieval England, and we learned that there were 15 million sheep in 1300, compared to a human population of 4-5m. We watched a short video of someone using a vertical hand loom, which most homes would have owned at the time. We learnt that there were no factories, and that all wealth came from the land (either literally dug out of it, like lead or tin, or grown on it, like sheep.), and we learnt what goods were imported from elsewhere. We haven’t talked much about imports/exports, trade or production, so there was a lot of new information to assimilate.

This afternoon they were excited at the arrival of both our monthly subscription boxes—Curiosity Box (science) and Mysteries in Time (history). There was much debate about which to explore first, but the science box had a CSI activity—Cretaceous Scene Investigation!—which proved irresistible. We had to examine clues to assess likely suspects before coming to a conclusion. This also involved me reminding the children about place value to four digits (ie. What the ‘4’ in the number 4,571 actually means). We looked up some of the dinosaurs in our Dinopedia, and then I suggested an episode of Prehistoric Planet. The episode was all about North America, which was fitting as we have been learning about the present-day wildlife in North America recently. We got out the atlas to make sure everyone knew where we were learning about. Part of the episode was about a lake with toxic levels of minerals dissolved in the water, so we paused the video and talked about how dilution works.

More playing, and then my daughter noticed that I’d put the pile of French books on the floor, and she asked me to read one. My son chose one too. Our French studies feel extremely slow, but the children enjoyed the books and remembered lots of the vocab which was encouraging.

I’d given up on getting outside today, which was frustrating because it was a beautiful clear day, a good day for blowing away the cobwebs. But as I was reading aloud a friend knocked on our door and they all went racing around the garden in the twilight. When it got too dark to see they came inside and played How Close Can You Get? from Family Math, which involves estimating, place value, and addition and subtraction using the column method:

At tea I started reading the story from the Mysteries in Time pack, about solving a mystery on the Mir Space Station. It was so good I had to read it all the way to bedtime. (Reading in bed: The Hobbit, and The Explorer by Katherine Rundell.)

So although we haven’t done any work sitting down at the table, as I look through the day we have done maths, writing, science, history, French, and Greek, and a lot of imaginary games, which seems like quite enough for one day!

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