How we homeschooled today #26

Maps, mangoes, Middle Ages

Regular readers will know that last week was pretty academic. There was lots of handwriting and sitting at the table and working through maths books. I thought this was my new life. I was wrong (of course). Today I felt like I made many bids to interest the children in things they politely declined to be interested in. As I write this my son is throwing pencils across the sitting room as if they are spears. Perhaps he is learning Newton’s laws of motion.

I am attempting to go with it. Here’s what we got up to today while we were spending no time at all with our workbooks. (And now I write it down it doesn’t look as hopeless as it occasionally felt.)

• My son took to his bed and listened to National Geographic Kids’ Greeking Out.

• I took my daughter to the shops to spend her money from Granny. After much calculation about how much change she’d get, and how she’d feel handing over the money, she chose to leave empty-handed.

• We all played Sleeping Queens (which I wrote about in Three Card Games we Love).

• My daughter practised a new spelling.

• Multiplication by Heart

• Lots of playing with Daddy (and a quick visit from Granny), plus Pokemon cards and Happy Families.

• At lunch I read aloud another page from Awesome Engineering: Tunnels

• We checked on our mango seed. I think I forgot to write about this but about a week ago we cut the seed out of a mango stone, and now we are watching it grow a little every day. We are using the instructions on this site.

  

• We did a bit of butterfly ID using our new Percy the Park Keeper nature activity book. I recommend it for ages 3+. Activities range from colouring a rainbow to keeping a nature journal so there is something for a wide range of ages.

• I stuck together our various maps of the Thames to show the children how far we have walked on our Thames Path challenge so far. I hope it is giving them more of an idea of what London looks like, and where they fit into it.

• We stuck another date on our timeline: French Revolution, 1789, and the children noticed how this overlaps with the life of Nelson.

• At tea time I read aloud from A Kid’s Life in a Medieval Castle (which is full of toilet humour, children being rude to their parents etc, so not for everyone).

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