How We Homeschooled Today #56

Square roots, housework, knights in shining armour

(If you’re a recent sign-up, my children are 7 and 5.)

• Lots of reading in bed this morning, because I had a huge lie-in (woohoo!). They read more of the stories from our Mysteries in Time history subscription, and a lift-the-flap book about the human body.

• Jolly Phonics writing/spelling practice. One of my daughter’s activities was to write all the words she could make from the word ‘elephant’, which I thought was a fun, easy, repeatable activity.

• Imaginary play, including a Lion King-themed game in which they needed to know where Rafiki would live. We looked up baboons in our Natural History Book, discovered that Rafiki is a mandrill, and that mandrills live in the rainforests of west central Africa.

• We moved on to the next chapter of our Ancient Greek textbook, and it was really, really hard. We drowned in new vocab and sentences that made no sense to us. I’d planned to read the whole chapter (they’re short, but dense), but instead we got halfway through and I decided to learn just one new word from the chapter. We’ll build from there.

• An impromptu gameshow-style quiz of Kings and Queens of England, compèred by my husband (The Common Reader). I’m ashamed to say that your faithful correspondent performed embarrassingly badly. He did it again at bedtime and everyone was in hysterics. He missed his calling.

• For their maths activities today my daughter chose to do a couple of pages from a workbook and my son chose to play a game of Math Dice Junior.

• Then, just as everyone was getting a bit grumpy and at a bit of a loose end, they spotted Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We borrowed this from a library recently but it has been languishing at the bottom of a pile of books. Last night I noticed it, and moved it into view. When they spotted it today, with its rather gorgeous cover illustration, they begged me to read it to them. What a story! I read more at teatime and we are all gripped. I have never read it so I’m as intrigued as the children. The story fits with our history theme for the year (Middle Ages). It was written in the 14th century, so we looked at our timeline to see what else was going on at that time.

  

• The children discovered their calculators. We don’t use calculators for maths work, but occasionally they find them and use them as toy computers. Today they were experimenting with the square root button, and getting answers like the square root of 8 is 2.8 (ish). They are familiar with whole square roots (2x2=4, 3x3=9 etc), so they could just about grasp that the square root of 8 would have to be two-and-a-bit. I took the opportunity to introduce the concept of tenths and decimals, and that ‘half’ can be 1/2, 5/10, or 0.5, or 50% (or of course lots of other fractions too). This is something we will return to many times but for a first pass it went pretty well.

• Then they were seized with a sudden desire to dust and clean the dolls’ house. They made liberal use of my homemade cleaning spray with the result that everything now reeks of vinegar. But one thing I will never complain about is anyone who wants to help with the (dolls’) housework. After making it look so nice they wanted to play with it, and I took the opportunity to do some housework on a larger scale.

• In bed very promptly at 7pm for reading, because my cold is getting worse and I’ve run out of both energy and good will.

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