How We Homeschooled Today #69

Back to earth with a bump

How We Homeschool Pen Pal Exchange

Nearly 40 children have been matched up around the world, and more are on the waiting list waiting for a match. If you have a child who’d like a pen pal, leave a comment or e-mail me with their age and home country, and I’ll add them to the list.

And if you can help me spread the word I’d be so grateful. All children welcome, however they are educated.

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

Yesterday I collected the children from their grandparents where they’d been staying for nearly a week. So this morning was their first normal day back at home, and it’s fair to say there was a period of adjustment for all of us. I was reminded of EM Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, one of my favourite books ever:

July 30th (after returning home from a holiday).— Readjustment sometimes rather difficult, after absence of unusual length and character.

And, from The Provincial Lady Goes Further:

September 1st.—Home once more, and customary vicissitudes thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.

The ‘leaves in Vallombrosa’ is a reference to a line in Paradise Lost. That’s the sort of information I didn’t bother sharing with my children today. If you don’t know The Provincial Lady, give it a try. I’ve been rereading it for nearly two decades and it still has the power to make me cry with laughter.

I lobbied hard this morning for a visit to the British Museum to see the Anglo-Saxon displays, but was overruled. My son traced four words of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and my daughter managed even less, and then there was… how can I put this…? much family discord until my husband, showing true courage under fire, took the children out to a nearby park. They stayed out for so long that eventually I came to take over. Fresh air, as always, was a magic cure-all.

When we came home, Henry Huggins had arrived in the post and my daughter immediately dived into it and somehow read 57 pages in the time it took for me to cook lunch. She had finished the Ramona series and was in a state of withdrawal waiting for Beverly Cleary’s next book to arrive. Now I’m anxiously wondering when the next in the series will be delivered.

There was much Lego play (by this point I had given up on any of our usual daily learning taking place today), and then we turned our attention to my daughter’s latest science box, which this month is all about codes. Both children sent messages in Morse code using torch flashes, with surprising success (which also turned out to be a good spelling exercise). Then we moved on to a Caesar cipher, so called because it was used by Julius Caesar. (It’s the sort of code where you move the alphabet on X number of letters. Caesar used a shift of three, so A became D and so on.) I thought it was pretty amazing that we were using a cipher used by Caesar, but the children were less impressed. Nonetheless it was a lot of fun and very interesting.

My husband took my daughter to Beavers/Tiger Cubs, and my son stayed at home with me. He asked to listen to Deep Sea Dive, a Ladybird Audio Adventure, followed by Ancient Rome. I can’t recommend this series highly enough. They are packed with information and are available on a wide range of topics (Vikings, Big Cats, Inventors etc). We listen to them multiple times. Expensive but excellent value. Some are available to borrow in the UK on the library apps Libby and BorrowBox. His sister came home and listened to some of Ancient Rome before I bundled them into bed.

Bedtime reading: Who Was Genghis Khan?, Henry Huggins, Huckleberry Finn (an easy reading version) and Can You Find Me? (a sweet board book for young children, involving counting, looking, and lots of different animals and habitats).

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A recommendation

Eloise Rickman

is running her course A Beautiful Education again this autumn. I took this course myself when I first started home educating and it’s really fantastic. There’s a private facebook group you can join when you sign up, which is a lovely community of parents, and a resource list which I turn to whenever I feel we’re lacking in a particular subject or topic. If you’re interested in homeschooling or just starting out I think it’s a great place to start. (This isn’t an ad!)

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