How We Homeschooled Today #74
Glaciers, Little House, bumped heads and broken sticks
(My daughter is 7 and my son is 5.)
The children are feeling better than yesterday and are now in that awkward stage where they’re not ill enough to lie around all day listening to storybooks, but not well enough to do very much else. We started with a visit to a park, for some much-needed fresh air after yesterday’s confinement, and it was all going well until, just as we were about to come home to do a little work, my daughter bumped her head. And then as soon as she’d recovered from the bump she noticed that her favourite stick had got snapped. Yes, her favourite stick. If you’re an adult you might think all sticks are much alike, and certainly not worth crying over, but you’d be very wrong.
So when we got home she was decidedly not in a good state for work. We had some hot chocolate and a snack, and then I explained that in less than 15 minutes we could do one spelling, a little multiplication, read one French story, and practise the latest Greek question and answer. We did it, and I can’t pretend it was a good day’s work, but it was what we could manage today and it all helps to keep things ticking over.
I had told my son that he is now old enough to practise one spelling a day like his sister. I printed off the ‘common exception words’ for his school year, and he chose one (‘a’, obviously), and wrote it several times in his new spelling notebook. He was delighted that he could write a recognisable ‘a’ and I think he enjoyed feeling like he was doing the same work as his big sister.
After lunch we watched a little more of the Yellowstone documentary, which led on to a discussion about glaciers and about how landscape affects weather. Later on I read about glaciers in the Usborne Geography Encyclopedia and we found Yellowstone on the map.
They spent the rest of the afternoon playing quietly together, making paper dolls, playing with Lego, and drawing pictures. It was delightful. At teatime I read two favourite chapters from the Little House on the Prairie books: the one where Charley gets stung by yellow-jackets, and the one where Laura and Carrie nearly get lost on the prairie coming home from the schoolhouse in a blizzard. Apparently in response to this sub-zero literature, they have both insisted on wearing their warmest winter pyjamas to bed.
Bedtime reading: The Wild Robot, and Henry and Ribsy.
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