How We Homeschooled Today #67

A home ed Unconference, giant spiders, and the facts of life

A Home Education Unconference

Ben Yeoh, who writes on Substack at Then Do Better, has been awarded an Emergent Ventures grant to hold a home education Unconference. Very early stages, but probably to be held in London, next spring/summer, 2024. He talked me through it yesterday. It sounds really exciting and I’m looking forward to helping out.

I’ll be sharing updates here, but if you’d like to be kept informed leave a comment or send me an e-mail and I’ll start keeping an e-mail list.

Step 1 is to find a venue. If you can help, get in touch!

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

I had a bad night’s sleep and have not been on top form today. I seem to have spent large parts of the day opening cupboards and wondering why there still isn’t any chocolate in any of them. In fact I was so tired that I forgot to write down what we did for most of the day, so what follows is an approximation!

• After breakfast and some playing we settled down to work at 9.30 again. I’m finding it works well to tell the children when we’ll start, so they can wrap up their playing and not feel like they’ve been rushed into anything.

• My son did his Beowulf tracing, my daughter did her spelling and a page of her Jolly Phonics book. We all did some Multiplication by Heart, and played another game of Number Hive. (Free printables here. We play the version that uses multiplication to 10x10, but there are loads of different versions for different maths skills). Then we took a break and I said we’d reconvene at 11am. I had grand plans to teach them the roots of the word ‘reconvene’, but forgot until I started typing this up.

(Another thing I love about the daily lists is that providing I manage to write them the evening before (which now takes less than 5 minutes), it doesn’t matter what sort of day we’re all having the next day, the work still gets done. And we are really seeing the benefits of even a tiny bit of work that happens every day. The work becomes easier, the children do it more willingly, and it’s all a beautiful virtuous circle.)

• After the break we did a little French and Greek. (A very little, but it all adds up.)

• This afternoon we planted some bulbs in the garden and my daughter helped me turn the compost heap, until an enormous spider ran into view. “Oh look, how beautiful!” I lied, but she wisely ignored this and ran away inside. I have been lying about how beautiful spiders are for nearly eight years and none of us are yet remotely convinced, least of all me.

• I took my daughter to the first Beavers/Tiger Cubs session of the term. She was so excited. My son stayed at home with my husband (The Common Reader), and I have no idea what they did, but it definitely wasn’t tidying up.

• At tea, my son asked me to read a page from The Story of Science, about the discovery of the dinosaurs. And my daughter said, could I please explain exactly how the sperm meets the egg. You can imagine that at 7pm this was not high on my list of things I wanted to do. But it has been on the horizon for a little while, so we went for it. This perhaps merits a post all to itself, but for now, suffice to say that they are both now appraised of the biology of animal reproduction, and were much more interested in how IVF works, and especially how you might know if you are carrying a genetic disorder if you don’t suffer from it yourself, which I was temporarily stumped by. Despite my many qualms in the run-up to this conversation, both children were no more or less interested in this subject than in any other, and pretty quickly moved on to talking about Pokemon. (Possibly the only time I’ve been pleased to hear them talking about Pokemon, again!)

• Reading in bed: Usborne See Inside the Middle Ages, The Big Mog Collection, and Ramona and her Mother (which my daughter isn’t enjoying, but is determined to plough through so she can read Ramona Quimby, Aged 8. I keep telling her she can just leave Mother unfinished, but she refuses.)

  

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How We Homeschool Pen Pal Exchange

If your child would like a pen pal, leave a comment/e-mail me with their age and home country and I’ll get to work. All children welcome, wherever they’re educated. And if you can help me to spread the word, please do!

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