How We Homeschooled Today #51

It’s Back!

Aug 14, 2023

I’ve taken several weeks off from the daily posts, and I’m very excited that they’re back! The children have returned from their holiday staying with grandparents, I bought a brand new pack of pencils, the daily list is back and we are raring to go!

If you’re new here, my daughter is 7 and my son is 5. We are slowly transitioning from total unschooling to a slightly more structured approach. Here’s what that looked like today:

Over the weekend my daughter made a ‘perfume’ of rose petals and water. This morning she collected fresh rose petals and added them to the bottle, and observed how the fresh ones float but the older ones have sunk to the bottom. (“Like a Galileo thermometer”, she said, and she is quite right.) We talked about how the new petals haven’t soaked up the water yet so are less dense than the older ones.
My son read a few pages of The Jungle Book, which I am currently reading aloud to them.
We loved finding Mowgli hidden in this book cover
They both worked in their Jolly Phonics books (as per the list, and enticed by the new pencils).
While I cooked breakfast they went back to bed and read Crusaders, a Magic School Bus book about decomposition, and Secret Explorers: Ice Age Adventure (I love the Secret Explorers as early chapter books).
I had to go to the opticians this morning. Before I left, my son did some maths work with me from this book, and my daughter assured me she would do her maths later…
Whilst my husband was in charge, in his own words he largely “left them alone”. But he did come in to where they were playing, looked at their lists, and told my daughter he wasn’t playing in the garden until she’d done her maths. Then he… left her alone. And she… did her maths. If I had been at home, I would have sat with her, helped her, encouraged her. But instead she just sat down and did the work, entirely independently, with only one mistake. It truly pains me to say this, but I wonder if my husband might be onto something.
After lunch there was quiet time, with Lego and toy soldiers and more Ice Age Adventure.
The last ‘work’ item on the list was for me to read them a couple of pages from our Encyclopedia of World History. Regular readers will know we are moving on from the Ancients to the Medieval World, and I am experimenting with reading a page of the encyclopedia each week to give us an overview. Today we read about the Byzantine Empire and Justinian. The children weren’t hugely interested.
They each asked to add a page to their history folders. My son wanted to add the Fifth Crusade (a random choice, it turned out it was because it’s the same number as his age), and my daughter more conventionally opted for 1095-1291, the full span of the Crusades. We talked, briefly, about the rise of Christianity and Islam, that the Ancient Greeks couldn’t be Christians because Jesus hadn’t been born yet, and how the Crusades were about control of the Holy Lands. This is brand new territory so we are taking it slowly. (We are meant to be focusing on Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, but the Crusaders book arrived in the post at the weekend and my son was desperate to read it.)
Then they played an imaginary game, being early humans during an Ice Age. They built imaginary campfires, made imaginary things out of imaginary clay, and blew balloons up, representing pigs’ bladders full of water.
Bubble close-up by Philippe Monthoux
My daughter asked to do an experiment from her Curiosity Box. We made giant bubbles, and although the science value was limited the joy value was huge. The children and a friend ran around the garden chasing bubbles for over an hour. At teatime, I showed them these pictures of bubble close-ups, and then we watched bubble videos on The Kids Should See This. My favourite was this, which explained a little bit of science as well as being completely mind-blowing (excuse the pun).
Earlier today we all had to try to be quiet while my husband recorded a video for his own Substack. The children asked what it was about, which resulted in Henry telling them the story of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. I had explained earlier that this was by the same poet who wrote The Charge of The Light Brigade, which we had been reading a few weeks ago.
Reading in bed: The Children’s Book of Heroes (delightful), and Werewolf (not remotely delightful).