How we homeschooled today #107

Snow leopards, spellings, the struggle to get dressed.

Before we get started:

1. Don’t forget to book your tickets to the Educating Otherwise UnConference. 27th April, Conway Hall, London. Travel grants and essay prizes available, and young people welcome. Eventbrite booking page here. Tickets are free but need to be booked so we can manage numbers. Tickets are selling quickly so if you’d like to come along please book sooner rather than later. Looking forward to seeing lots of you there! Sign up to the Substack for updates:

2. Tomorrow I have a How We Homeschooled Today guest post from

   Jamey Fisher Perkins
   , complete with a full and tempting list of her favourite resources. Don’t miss it.

3. If your child would like a penpal, the How We Homeschool penpal exchange is here to serve. Leave a comment or send me an e-mail with your child’s age and home country, and I’ll get to work. All children welcome, however they’re educated. Please feel free to share!

   ---

How we homeschooled today

This morning was one of those mornings where every time I thought I could quickly get dressed, two or three other things suddenly needed doing slightly more urgently. I think it was 11am before I finally achieved it. The children have spent a lot of time playing happily together today, which is always nice—and not guaranteed: some days all they seem to do is quarrel and squabble, so I don’t begrudge them a day of contented playing. This morning I thought it was wonderful, by the evening it was driving me slightly mad because they were so obsessed with the game that they were deaf to everything else, but I am trying to count my blessings!

On the other hand we did have some work to get through. Here’s what we managed:

• During breakfast, we all played yet another round of Prime Climb, which lasted so long that by the end of it we were all delighted that someone had won, even if it wasn’t us. (Discount details here.)

• I got the children’s attention for five or ten minutes and we went over our new Greek words and revised some of the old ones.

• I had written on the blackboard that ‘a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing’, and we had a brief chat about nouns.

• A handwritten letter arrived for my daughter, to wild excitement, and she immediately wanted to reply, so that was her writing work for the day. A couple of spellings came up as she was writing that I wrote on the board, and afterwards I asked the children to write the words in their spelling books. This was not a welcome request. I pointed out to them that the work would take less than two minutes and they would spend longer whingeing about it than actually doing it. I also told them that I wasn’t turning the TV on until they’d done it. I very, very rarely resort to this sort of thing, but spelling is not something that they ever actually want to do, and I do think that the act of copying a word into a book is a good way to learn a spelling, even if you do it under duress. Usually work done under duress seems pretty pointless to me, because the child isn’t remotely engaged and just wants to get it over with, but today I made an exception. In the end they both did it pretty happily. Spelling is a subject I know a lot of homeschoolers struggle to approach with much joy—if you have the secret, please share!

• After lunch we managed to leave the house—hurrah!—initially for a short walk to the shop for biscuits, but we managed to string it out to a bigger walk, and eventually ended up in a playground where the children ran around and yelled and generally made the most of being outside. I thought how wonderful it was to be able to sit outside and see the sun and not feel freezing and miserable. The outside games continued when we got home because they met up with some friends in the garden and played until it was dark.

• At teatime I read them the book Snow Leopard: Grey Ghost of the Mountain, which they loved. It’s part of the lovely Nature Storybooks series. I thought they might be too old for these now but I was delighted to be proved wrong. Did you know snow leopards can leap up to 9m in a single jump? I thought of you and the Goliath frog,

  Amy Challis
  ! Then I tried to read them a page about Florida mangroves from The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth, which they tolerated because they knew that was the quickest way to get me to leave them alone to play their game in peace. Yesterday we went to the Horniman Museum to explore some natural history, including mangroves, and I was keen to develop that today, but it turned out not to be the day.

  

  Reading in bed: The Explorer (my daughter’s finished it, and was so enthusiastic about it that my son decided to read it too), and Vile Visitors by Diana Wynne Jones.

  ---

Thanks for reading. If you’re not subscribed, sign up for free and never miss a post.