How We Homeschooled Today #60
A day of ups and downs
(My daughter is 7 and my son is 5.)
My daughter persuaded her little brother to give the grown-ups a lie-in. They stayed in their beds reading old comics, Ramona and her Father, and Life Cycles (a book I would highly recommend for science reading. There is also Water Cycles in the same series.)
After breakfast and some Lego the children sat down to do some work from their daily lists. My son has done most of the work in his Jolly Phonics writing book, but still needs lots of work tracing letters before he moves on to the next one. Last night I copied out a line from Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and this morning he traced the first part of it (to be finished over the next day or two). This was pretty successful and I was feeling pretty smug…
Today felt a bit like this… via Unsplash …Alas. My daughter’s writing task for the day was a spelling check—so-called because I am in agonies over calling it a ‘spelling test’, but it turns out the terminology makes no difference. She quickly got very frustrated and upset. The only remedy was a bag of sweets which has been languishing at the bottom of my rucksack awaiting an emergency, without which I might not be here to tell the tale. As the sugar kicked in, I explained that things we do every day (like Multiplication by Heart) become easy in nice little bite-sized chunks, and that if we used the same approach with spelling she would soon find it much easier. (“But maths is FUN, Mummy!” she said, which was a bright moment). The solution we have arrived at is that I have printed lists of spellings for her current and previous school years, and each day she will pick one, write it several times in her new spelling notebook, and tick it off the list. This will be a new standing item on her daily list. This puts her in control, and keeps the daily spelling work extremely brief. Despite the trauma of the morning’s spelling check, she chose to immediately do two words from her new spelling lists.
We did another super-quick session of French, Ancient Greek, and Multiplication by Heart.
I told the children about Hurricane Idalia. We read about it on the BBC News website, watched a hurricane video (which was a bit advanced), and read about how hurricanes form in Stuff You Should Know About Planet Earth, which also involved using the world map and thinking about compass directions. I suggested to the children that once or twice a week I put science reading on their daily lists, and they were both keen.
We spent the afternoon at the opticians. It took a very long time and cost a very large amount of money. We all came home feeling rather depleted and at the end of our collective tether. But now the children, who really should be in bed, are out in the garden with a friend and they have made a seesaw, by themselves, that actually works, which has cheered me up considerably.
Pen pal exchange
If your child would like a pen pal, just leave a comment with their age and home country and I’ll get to work. 20 children now matched around the world! All children welcome and please feel free to share.
Occasionally my husband, The Common Reader, gets a mention here. He’s having an end-of-summer sale, with 20% off. In his own words:
…when we read the best that has been thought and said, we don’t just want to have our own emotional response to it. These books are some of the highest achievements of our civilisation. We want to understand them. We want to be able to converse with great writers, not just gawp.
If you love reading and want to get the very most out of your reading time, take a look.
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