How We Homeschooled Today #52

Multiplication, yoga, and writing pen pal letters late into the night

If you’re new here, my son is 5 and my daughter is 7.

• A slow start. The children played with soft toys and Lego and neither of them got dressed before lunch.

• After breakfast we did Multiplication by Heart. Usually the spinner tells you which box of flash cards to do each day, but today I took out a stack of the cards we have finished with, spread them out on the floor and the children took turns seeing if they knew a multiplication fact. It was a nice change and a good way to revise the cards we no longer encounter in the regular game.

• They did their Jolly Phonics workbooks, which led onto a discussion of the past and present tenses and adding d/ed to verbs to make them past tense (jump, jumped). Not helped by my newfound ability to only be able to think of irregular verbs. I had no idea there were so many.

• The children requested Cosmic Kids yoga. They haven’t done this for years. They were thrilled to find a Pokemon themed video and did a nice job of following it.

• My daughter read another Magic School Bus book about rainbows, and we talked about some art books the children had been looking at earlier by themselves. Some of the pictures they liked connected to myths and stories they know. (This is actually a really nice little set of books if you can find it online. It’s tiny and chunky for little hands, and my children have enjoyed looking at the books for several years.)

  

  “Rustam Slays Isfandiyar”, one of my son’s favourite pictures from the Met books.

• Just as we were about to head to a park, the post arrived with a pen pal letter from the other side of the world. This caused huge excitement. (I’m tempted to set up a How We Homeschool pen pal exchange to spread the joy of receiving real letters from another country. Any takers?). So we delayed our trip to sit down and write letters. I scribed for my son so he was very chatty, but my daughter got stuck on whether to begin with ‘hi’ or ‘dear’, and after quite some time we decided to try again tomorrow.

• We did make it to the park, where I left the children to themselves for hours. On the way home we revised our Ancient Greek vocab, and as soon as we got home the children raced into the garden to play with a neighbour. At teatime we discussed slavery, the epiglottis, gravity and shark evolution (by now it was 7pm and I was very much done for the day).

• Then, just as I thought bedtime was in sight, my daughter got the urge to try again with her pen pal letter. As I type this she has finished it, and is starting on another one…

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