How We Homeschooled Today #59
3, 2, 1, Lift off!
Pen Pal Exchange
It’s going well—I shared a Note this morning that there are now 18 children matched up around the world, and more on the list awaiting new sign-ups.
If your child would like a pen pal, leave a comment or e-mail me with their age and home country and I’ll get to work!
All children welcome and please feel free to share.
If you’re new here, my son is 5 and my daughter is 7.
My son read Secret Explorers: Jurassic Rescue and my daughter read Ramona the Brave before breakfast. (Here’s a lovely piece from
about Beverly Cleary, if you’re also a Ramona fan.)My son looked through his Mysteries in Time Roman magazine, doing an activity where he had to add up Roman numerals to find the date of the Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. The most exciting thing about this was that his writing was legible. He can read like a 10 year old but his writing, until recently, looked like he lived in a pre-literate society, so for me to be able to read his numbers is something of a breakthrough.
They played an imaginary police game which involved turning the sitting room upside down.
Before we went out for the day we did some lightning-fast work: Jolly Phonics, revised 3 Ancient Greek words and added one new one, revised some French, did Multiplication by Heart (this all in character as police officers). Then my husband played a game where we had to choose what period and place we would travel back to (with no concerns about safety, asteroids, diseases, money, language etc). My daughter chose the Jurassic period, my son the Blitz, I chose the American Frontier and/or prehistoric Britain, and my husband chose to hear Bach being played by Bach, Shakespeare being performed in Shakespeare’s time, or to meet Samuel Johnson in 1745 (which is a pet subject of his).
Via Unsplash. This is the near side, that we can see from Earth. Surprisingly, the far side is really quite different and much less cratered. Then to the Planetarium, courtesy of a kind friend with membership. We watched a show about Moon missions past, present, and future. I was impressed that they included up-to-the-minute information about Chandrayaan 3’s landing on the Moon’s South Pole.
Lots of playing in the sunshine, followed by more Secret Explorers and Ramona on the way home.
At tea we watched a video about the Artemis programme (I wanted to watch something about Chandrayaan 3 but couldn’t find anything that would make sense to the children). Artemis is a NASA programme to put people back on the Moon again, and use it as a launchpad for missions to Mars.
Reading in bed: Illustrated Tales of King Arthur and Illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales (surely the apostrophe is in the wrong place, as they were the Brothers Grimm, plural? Nearly the whole internet seems to disagree with me though.)
Two things I enjoyed today that you might too: The new post from
, about how Rachael is preparing for the new school year and also contemplating previous years. If you don’t already subscribe to Rachael’s Substack I highly recommend it. Rachael wrote me a guest post about how she homeschools with her family in Vermont.And
shared a new post including this excellent podcast about how to learn to love maths, and the problems of teaching maths in schools, which I felt was especially relevant for those of us home schooling. Mary-Ann, who writes the newsletter, also wrote a guest post for me about she home educates her son both at home and on holiday.If you’d like to write me a guest post about how you homeschool, please leave a comment or send an e-mail!
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Wikipedia agrees with you! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales
Thank you for sharing my Beverly Cleary piece!