How we homeschooled today #106

And entertaining small children on long journeys, pioneer-style

If you’re a new reader, my son is 6 and my daughter is 8. My daughter’s got a cold, so it’s been a fairly slow and gentle day.

• Reading in bed: The Hobbit for my son, and The Explorer for my daughter. Later they climbed into my bed, and my son and I did some of the space-themed activities from his Mysteries in Time subscription.

• After breakfast, my son played Prime Climb and Uno against himself, and my daughter and I did an activity from her Curiosity Box subscription: creating a rock bed from which she’ll be able to excavate a fossil once it’s all hardened overnight. We talked about the different layers, and learnt that 1cm of sedimentary rock takes about 2,500 years to form. We measured her finished rock bed and it was 4cm deep, so we worked out how long that would take to form if it was real rock. We learnt that fossils are only found in sedimentary rock.

• In the pauses while we waited for rock layers to set, the children made a Hobbit scene out of playdough… you wouldn’t have known it was a Hobbit scene, but they did!

• We moved onto the sofa and I read them The Pebble in my Pocket. I love this book so much. It’s about geology, rock formation, erosion, prehistoric animals, plate tectonics… and it’s got the most beautiful illustrations and is written so well that it’s almost poetic. Amazon says 7-10 years, but my children have been enjoying it since they were 3 and 5. Small children won’t take in all the details, but like all the best books it can be enjoyed by a wide age range and each child will take from it what’s appropriate for them. Highly recommended.

• I warned them at lunch that they would need to do a small amount of work in the afternoon (normally we get our work done before lunch). So after the lunch break they each did a small amount of handwriting practice, we revised some Ancient Greek and I introduced four new Greek words. I pointed out that all the words were nouns, and both children professed total ignorance of what a noun is. So we revised this and talked about examples of words that are or are not nouns.

• My daughter didn’t feel up to maths today, but my son asked to play yet more Prime Climb (this time against me instead of against himself!), while my daughter did a little reading, and then we all got back on the sofa to watch some more Prehistoric Planet. But my daughter didn’t feel up to that either, so after trying a couple of different episodes we switched it off.

• My daughter and I went for a short walk, my son read more Hobbit, and at tea they each read their books in total silence, and told my husband and I off for talking too much.

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  Entertaining small children on long journeys, pioneer-style

  I’m currently reading Katie Hickman’s Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West. If you’ve ever wondered what life was really like for a real-life Laura or Mary or Ma, this is the book for you. I particularly enjoyed hearing how little Jessie entertained himself on the long wagon journey from Iowa to Oregon. No iPads for Jessie!

  Now there is a vacant place clear across [the wagon] that will be large enough to sit a chair—will set it with the back against the side of the wagon bed there I will ride—on the other side will be a vacancy where little Jessie can play he has a few toys and some marbles and some sticks for whip stocks, some blocks for oxen and I tie a string on the stick and he uses my work box basket for a covered wagon and plays going to Oregon. He never seems to get tired or cross.

  The language is Keturah Penton Belknap’s own, as she wrote it. In 1848 when she made the journey—not her first—she was 27. Jessie was 2. As well as making the wagon covers herself, and virtually everything else, she packed four tablecloths, so that when they stopped to eat with only ‘water and grass and plenty of wood’ for company, they could do so with a clean white tablecloth. What a woman.

  

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