How we homeschooled today #112
Gruesome survival stories, lots of work, and the joy of reading in bed in the middle of the day
(If you’re new here, my son is 6 and my daughter is 8. This is one of my fairly regular posts briefly detailing how we spend our days. For some recent in-depth posts, scroll on down to the bottom.)
My son woke up early (or early by our standards, 6.15). He read a story from Survivors while I finished Our Man In Havana. I mentioned Survivors in a previous post—I was nervous it would traumatise the children but actually they are unfazed by the stories of people cutting off their own arms, losing mothers in aeroplane crashes, deliberately flooding submarines so they can make an escape from 300ft beneath the surface… Sometimes our children are not as sensitive as we think they are! (And sometimes they’re not as sensitive as we are ourselves.) This book won a Blue Peter Book Award, and I’ve just discovered that in the same series is Heroes (courageous animals) and Rescue. Mostly I have just let the children soak up the incredible stories, but you could definitely use the book to inspire learning about aspects of science, geography, and history.
The children played until we started work at 9am. It was quite an intensive morning. When I started How We Homeschool last spring, I wrote that we were broadly unschoolers. Since then we have gradually moved to a much more traditional, ‘direct instruction’ way of working. How we work seems to change with the seasons and I don’t promise it’ll be this way forever, but it’s working well for now.
I reminded the children that Tuesday follows the same spelling pattern as blue.
We looked at their new spellings, and they each practised some previous spellings.
We revised the French foods and sentences we’d practised yesterday (at their request—I hadn’t planned on French today).
They transliterated three new Greek words, including paidion, small child, so I taught them the words paediatrics/paediatrician.
We revised pronouns, which I introduced yesterday. I gave them each a sentence (‘The knights were ready for battle.’), and they made up a follow-up sentence (‘They charged.’) This led onto a discussion of singular and plural (not singular and plural pronouns, just the meaning of the two words.) Currently I am teaching grammar myself, rather than using workbooks. I’m using the Usborne Junior Illustrated Grammar and Punctuation book, and I also like Gwynne’s Grammar which is very clear. I use it for me so that I can then explain things to the children. (My husband tells me Gwynne isn’t perfect and can be a bit persnickety, but we’re not yet at a level where that is a concern!)
We read about the Crusades in Usborne Medieval World, talked about why Jerusalem is so contested, read Sir Cumference and the Fracton Faire (a maths story about fractions), and reread pages from Lots of Things to Know About Your Body and Lots of Things to Know About Space. (This was our first Sir Cumference book. I know a lot of people love them and I’d love to hear from readers about which ones you think are good. The children liked it, and asked me to read it twice. It’s really only an introduction to the concept of fractions, and as we’ve been working on this for a little while now I didn’t feel it added much to the children’s understanding.)
Multiplication by Heart, looking at the 9x table pattern.
More of the Math For Love Fraction Curriculum, looking at the patterns made when using fractions to make 2 wholes, 3 wholes, 4 wholes etc.
At some point in all that we took a break, and the children’s new books arrived: the next Percy Jackson for my daughter, and the next Alex Neptune for my son. I took the opportunity to explain that the reason I’d been able to buy them was because we’d been so careful about not spending money on days out recently, particularly waiting to eat until we got home instead of buying food while we were out. Whether the children took this in I don’t know, because they went straight to their beds and read for nearly an hour.
After lunch and some TV I told the children I’d like them to write a page for their history folders, choosing a date from the Crusades reading this morning. My son only writes the date and I do the rest, but my daughter can do her writing herself. This afternoon it was like getting blood from a stone, but she was really pleased at all the words she knew how to spell, and she liked finding the right place to put the new page in her history folder and seeing how much her writing has improved since she first started.
They’re well and truly done for the day now. My husband is playing a quick game of Pokemon cards with them, and they will hopefully play outside with a friend this afternoon (it’s been raining all day but we really need some fresh air), and there’ll be lots more new book reading, and building robots out of maths cubes.
Recent posts from How We Homeschool that you might have missed.
Difficult Doesn’t Have to be Bad: The challenge of challenging our children and ourselves
The twentieth century was all about making life easier, and as parents we are evolutionarily programmed to smooth the way for our children. But all this ease isn’t good for us. We’ve forgotten how good it feels to accomplish difficult things.
Timetables, milestones, and going off the beaten track
Baz Luhrmann’s right: the race is only with yourself. But that’s not easy to remember in a world that’s obsessed with goals and targets and doing everything right on schedule.
The toys that go on forever
If you’re going to buy your child a toy, make sure it’s one that will last and last! Fashionistas talk about ‘cost per wear’, but as parents we’re all about ‘cost per play’. Lots of ideas here from me and from readers on the toys that give the most bang for your buck.
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