How We Homeschooled Today #57

A day of Big Questions

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

• We all read in bed together, more Mysteries in Time stories and the latest magazine all about the Romans.

• Jolly Phonics writing, Multiplication by Heart, and we stuck the dates of the Emperor Justinian on our timeline.

• At snack time we read more of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I didn’t realise that things get a bit steamy between Gawain and the lord’s wife so there were some pages that I edited rather heavily. (Better-read readers can laugh at me, and I’m sure my husband will be amongst them!).

• My daughter did some hammering. She loves a bit of DIY and sometimes makes patterns in bits of wood with a hammer and nail. This morphed into a game of blacksmiths involving the dolls’ house.

• A new maths book arrived for my daughter, and she was very keen so has completed several pages. She especially likes that you can colour in a star every time you complete a page.

• We revised some French. Grudgingly.

  

  Toys for Family 416, living in Nepal on $96 per month. From the Dollar Street website.

• Last night I read about the wonderful website Dollar Street. It contains information about lots of families from all around the world, on a wide range of incomes. There are words and photos, and the photos are all of the same kind of thing. So you can see how someone in Burkina Faso cooks their food, and how someone in Belgium does the same task. You can see the favourite toy of a child in Haiti, and of a child in Ukraine. It’s fascinating, and eye-opening, and slightly addictive. I showed it to the children. Beforehand I asked them how they thought we would compare to the other families. In everyday life, like many parents, I spend a lot of time saying “we can’t afford that”, “that’s very expensive” etc. So sometimes the children feel that we must be very poor. But of course on a global scale we’re extremely rich. Personally, every day I curse the fact that we don’t have a dishwasher. It’s a good reality check to see that for some families the nearest safe water source is over an hour’s walk away. I’ll think of that next time I’m washing an apple and worrying about pesticides. My daughter asked why some families are so poor. I don’t have a good answer for this and will ask my husband to weigh in tomorrow. I thought of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and wondered how to summarise it for a seven year old. I think this is something we will keep coming back to.

• We went to the library so the children could complete their Summer Reading Challenge. I wrote about this several weeks ago when they first started and I was a bit grumpy. The librarian had quizzed the children about the books and it hadn’t felt great. But today, with a different librarian, each child had a chance to chat with an adult about books they have loved reading recently. It didn’t feel like a test, just a conversation. I don’t think the challenge encouraged them to read, because I’m lucky to have two keen readers anyway, but they enjoyed taking part and have said they’d like to do it again next year.

• On the way home, my daughter asked what ‘civilised’ means. (I shrink inwardly when they ask things like this on a bus. What a question to have to answer in front of a large adult audience who all have their own opinions, at the end of a hot day!) I talked about isolated tribes in the Amazon and how some people say they are ‘uncivilised’, as if they are somehow further down some scale, but that of course they are humans living today, in 2023, just like we are. I talked about ancient ‘civilisations’, which generally means cities, organisation, laws. I talked about how in the past people found ways of showing just how ‘civilised’ they were, for example by using lots of different types of cutlery, but that this doesn’t really mean someone who just uses a spoon is uncivilised. As I type I realise there’s much more I could have said. If you have further observations on civilisations, please feel free to leave a comment!

---

Thanks for reading. If you’re not subscribed, sign up—it’s free—and never miss a post.