How we homeschooled today #114

India, bribery, gym geometry

If you’re new here, my daughter is 9 and my son is 7. If you want more info on any resources I mention in passing, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Monday is here, and Tuesday is here.

Wednesday

We spent the first twenty minutes of the morning’s work revising the spellings and maths facts the children learnt yesterday. We moved on to ten minutes of Multiplication by Heart, including a brief study of all the common factors of 36 and 48, which also involved reminding the children what the word ‘factor’ means! (Have a look at the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching website, which lists important ‘facts to know and remember’ for each year group.)

Then on to further reading about India. The Usborne Encyclopaedia of World History covers 300 years in one double-page spread, so I borrowed Lands of Belonging: A History of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Britain to give us some more detail. We’re not doing a proper detailed study of India right now so we won’t read every page, but what we read was good and the children were interested enough to read up to the world wars.

Then a 30 minute break before we embarked on what is often the most challenging work of the week: getting the children to turn their history reading into a page of writing to add to their history folders, which are arranged chronologically and which they add to with each new event/topic we cover. It took an hour, working with each child one at a time because trying to manage both together is disastrous. My daughter wrote a brief timeline of the major events in the history of Britain and India, and was pretty pleased with her efforts (as was I). If I expected my son to do the same we’d be here until Christmas, so he writes the first sentence or two and I do the rest. Yesterday I’m afraid I cracked at the sight of his handwriting and offered him a small treat if he made more of an effort. I say ‘cracked’ because mostly I trust that he’s doing his best and will get there with handwriting in his own good time. We’re using a handwriting programme that I think is excellent, but of course these things aren’t overnight miracle-workers.

However, it has to be said that a small bribe did seem to focus his mind and prompt him to take more care over his work, and when I asked him why the second part of his writing was so much better than the first he openly admitted it was because I hadn’t mentioned chocolate when he wrote the first part! So I’m not certain how to proceed, because we largely try to avoid sugar and I don’t love the idea of rewarding the children for everyday work. But on the other hand…

After that everyone was running low on energy, but it was nearly midday and we rarely manage much academic work in the afternoons. So to keep things ticking over each child did one page in their Master Maths and Home workbooks before we stopped for a lunch break.

In the afternoon they begged me to take them swimming for the second day in a row. I’m desperate to get them both strong and confident in the water so I was keen to encourage this enthusiasm, even though spending an hour barely moving in chilly water is not my idea of a good time!

Swimming also meant that we didn’t get to piano practice yet again, or French. Something I consistently struggle with is that you can only prioritise so many things at any one time. If we focus on piano, some academic work will suffer. If we focus too much on the academics, things can get a little bit joyless. If I decide to make an effort with housework, the house looks great but we definitely do less work, but if I dedicate myself completely to homeschooling the house descends into chaos. For a while we made a point of going out for a walk and some fresh air each morning, which was wonderful but meant we started work later and so managed to do less. Goodness knows what’s slipping while I write these posts each day…! Being a home educating parent involves many different jobs and it seems to me that you are doomed to be always neglecting at least one of them.

Hopefully, much like aiming for a balanced diet across a week rather than at every meal, we achieve a balance of priorities across the whole year, as moods and interests and energies shift. I’d love to hear how readers manage this in their own families. I’m sure there’s a happy medium but I definitely haven’t found it yet.

After swimming the children ran to an outdoor gym and we discovered that the instructions say things like ‘bend legs to 90 degrees, extend to 170’, so my daughter got some geometry practice while she did her workout.

My daughter made herself a kite in the afternoon, which is definitely a prototype but she is looking forward to improving the design (and hoping for windy days). She went to Cubs in the evening, while my son reread hundreds of pages of Skandar. The bliss of being able to just sit and read uninterrupted for as long as you want!

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