How We Homeschooled Today #76

Equals, watercolours, chimney sweeps

Yesterday we spent all day at the Tower of London, as part of our year of Medieval history. I was amazed to learn that they only get about one home ed family visiting each week, so here is a Public Service Announcement for readers in or near London:

Home educating families get extremely reduced-price entry to the Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace (all are run by Historic Royal Palaces). Children 5-15 are £4.10 each, and the accompanying adult is free. For a standard ticket children would be £16.80 and adults £33.60, so this is a huge saving.

You have to book in advance using a booking form which is slightly convoluted, but not really. You have to suggest three dates/times during term time, and they respond with one of them. It’s madness that the Tower of London is only attracting one home ed family per week. Go!

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(My son is 5 and my daughter is 7.)

After yesterday’s big day out, we’ve had a quiet day at home today. We had a morning outing to a park for some sunshine and fresh air, and when we got home at 10am we did the following, with plenty of breaks in between:

• 1 spelling each

• My daughter chose Khan Academy for her maths today. It was missing number problems eg 76 = ? + 54. She found this quite tricky, though she can easily do something like 5 = ? + 3, so we spent quite a lot of time and concentration on it and we will do more over the coming weeks. We also talked about what the equals sign really means, because like a lot of children they have come to think it means ‘is the correct answer to’. For years I have been saying that equals is like a weighing scale, but it turns out neither child had a clue what I meant. So I explained again, and in different ways, and wrote on the blackboard:

  • 1+1=2

  • 0+2=2

  • 1+1=0+2

  • 1 x 2 = 2

  • 1 x 2 = 1+1

  I think this helped, but we will certainly be revising all this! NRICH has a useful article on the equals sign and activities to help.

• My son chose Number Hive for his maths, and we all played a game on the 10x10 board (practising all the tables up to 10x10), and then a game on the addition board, up to 10+10.

• A few minutes each on French and Greek.

• A few rounds of Animal Who Am I (thank you, GK!), which was a good way to continue thinking about animal classification after our recent visit to the Natural History Museum.

After lunch some quiet time, during which the children chose to draw some pictures. Later I suggested we look at the October chapter of the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and my daughter was so enthused that she suggested we all do some painting. So I got out the watercolours and we all had a delightful time painting quietly together, with Bach playing in the background.

A change of tack when they decided to build army bases with the Kapla planks, followed by playing out in the sunshine with their friends until tea. (I quizzed their two friends, both school-educated seven year olds, on what they think the equals sign means. One said it means “what is the answer?” and one said it means “is the same as”—well done her!)

At tea I read aloud from the story that came with my son’s latest Mysteries in Time history subscription, about Victorian Britain. They loved it so much that I had to finish it, which took us all the way to bedtime.

Reading in bed: See Inside Ancient Greece, The Wanderings of Odysseus by Rosemary Sutcliffe, and Grahame Greene’s The Little Train.

(My Greek-obsessed son asked me today when his teeth would start falling out, and I said that I didn’t know and nobody could say for sure. He said “What about Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, I bet he could tell me!”. I’m pretty sure Rosemary Sutcliffe is to thank for this new mockery of parental fallibility.)

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