How We Homeschooled Today #62

Spiders, sketching, and hours of playing

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

A rather gorgeous unschooling start:

• My son climbed into bed where I was listening to a podcast about medieval pilgrimage. He said he knew about pilgrims—the pilgrims who sailed to America. I said this wasn’t quite the same, and he said maybe it was another kind—the pilgrims who went to the Holy Land that he’d read about in Crusaders. Not bad for 7am.

• When I went to open their curtains there was a spider building a web on the outside of their window. The children stood on the windowsill and watched it for ages. I talked about the spinnerets spinning out the silk, and we watched how the spider used a leg to pin each piece in place. We talked about how as he worked towards the centre of the web the distance around each circle got shorter. My daughter wondered if he had to calculate how much silk he’d need, and whether it was all stored up inside his body or if he had to pause to make more. We watched as he completed the web, and now we’re waiting for him to catch a meal.

  

  Believe it or not, this is an electron microscope’s view of a spider spinning silk. The long white strands are the silk.

• My son finished reading Who Was King Tut?, which he started in bed last night.

• And at breakfast, my husband read The Jaberwocky aloud and told us what some of the words, derived from Anglo-Saxon, really mean. We discussed whether it counts as nonsense verse. (He’s running an online book club on Alice in Wonderland on 10th September.) He showed us some of the original illustrations too.

• At 9am we sat down for some work. My son traced a little more of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, which I wrote out for him last night. My daughter tested herself on the spellings she practised last week and learnt a new one. We did Multiplication by Heart, and then I suggested a break for some Cosmic Kids yoga. They chose a Star Wars-themed video—they’ve never watched Star Wars and know nothing about it, but firmly believe that it is deeply cool.

• Then we revised last week’s Ancient Greek, added a new word, and did the same with French, followed by a short French book about colours.

• Off for a play at a friend’s house while I stayed behind at home—bliss! Later on the friend came over here, and later still they all went out into the garden.

• At one point everyone got a bit bored and grumpy so we played a nice little drawing game I miraculously remembered: one person draws a simple shape. The other person turns it into anything they like, real or imaginary. It’s quite addictive. The floor was littered with sketches. I like that there are no rules, no rights or wrongs, and no points for drawing something perfect or realistic.

• At lunch I read a few pages from the Usborne History of Britain Anglo-Saxons and Vikings (the link takes you to lots of medieval-themed activities), which is our current book to work through while we focus on British history for a little while.

• Reading in bed: The Gingerbread Man, and Puss in Boots.

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