How We Homeschooled Today #84

The Ross Ice Shelf, plein-air painting, and poetry

Oct 23, 2023

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This is my daily post where I share the activities of my two children, who are nearly 6 and nearly 8. When I started this newsletter we were unschoolers, but since then we have gradually added in some more formal learning. How and why is a whole different post! Here’s what we’ve been up to today:

First thing, the children looked at their various Lego magazines, and played with the Roman fort. This is a build-it-yourself creation, completely unsuitable for children but strangely satisfying for adults. Don’t buy it unless you enjoy spending your evenings with a craft knife, glue, tweezers, etc. There’s also Viking Settlement, Medieval Castle, Greek Temple and more. When the children move out I might convert their bedroom into a model room.
At 9am we sat down for some work. We started with Collins Easy Learning Times Tables (at the children’s request), then I read a page from Lift the Flap Multiplying and Dividing, and then we played Race to the Moon, an extremely unexciting game to practise dividing. We used maths cubes to visually demonstrate the equations. Both children are good at ‘real’ division—if I had 16 sweets and four children, they would instantly know that each child gets 4 sweets—but the concept of division on paper is proving more mystifying. This adeed up to half an hour’s work.
Then we moved onto the sofa with a snack, and I read a few pages from some non-fiction library books we borrowed recently. From Amazing Earth I read about the Ross Ice Shelf (the biggest glacier on the planet. Bigger than France!), and from Water Cycles I read about crown-of-thorn starfish and sea snakes. Did you know that sea snakes are the only reptile to live exclusively in the water? And that starfish can not only regrow a leg, but can regrow a whole new starfish from a leg?! This also involved looking at our wall map to find out where various locations are.
The Ross Ice Shelf. 90% of it is under the surface of the water. (From Oceanwide Expeditions.)
Some work in our Jolly Learning books: Pupil Book 1 for my son, who doesn’t need the phonics work but really needs the handwriting practice, and Grammar 1 for my daughter. Last week she told me she HATED DICTATION!!! Today she told me she loves it and voluntarily did more than I asked. Keep up! She also added a new spelling to her spelling book.
At this point I felt they’d both done a good morning’s work and I could tell that if I pushed for French and/or Greek we’d be heading for a conflagration. (And actually they’d done a bit of Greek at breakfast because I’d left some homemade flashcards lying around.) My daughter went to play with a friend who is on her half-term break from school, and my son played with my husband (The Common Reader), while I read a post my husband is working on about JS Mill—and I can tell you, it’s going to be a good one.
In the afternoon I suggested to the children (now including the friend) that we go outside and draw pictures of the cherry tree which is currently aflame in autumn colours. They declined, so I said I was going to do it myself, at which point they all trooped out to join me. We spent a very happy time with all the art supplies, trying out different styles and talking about how art is not necessarily a question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The friend spent her whole time working carefully on one picture, my son did lots of leaf rubbings, my daughter did some imaginary pictures inspired by the tree. I did a few sketches in different styles and using different materials, hoping to demonstrate that art can be about experimenting and having fun. I read aloud about autumn leaves from Exploring Nature with Children, and also a few nature poems from I Am The Seed That Grew The Tree.
I had taken a postcard of Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ outside with us. We looked at it through a magnifying glass and then zoomed in on a digital version on the iPad, and marvelled at all the colours and the 3.5 million different coloured dots and dabs. I did mention his name, pointillism, and plein-air painting, but I’m pretty sure none of these things registered. No matter. The children mentioned the women’s odd shapes, and I explained about whale-bone corsets and bustles (linking to recent learning about whales and whale hunting), and we all agreed we were glad to live now and not in the nineteenth century.
Back inside, they all played with the Kapla planks and I wrote this. (My son and I had done some building with the planks earlier, and I had fondly imagined a subliminal geometry lesson as I carefully constructed octagons, squares etc, but my creations were swiftly requisitioned as army bases for toy soldiers.)

I’m going to send this now, because trying to send it at the end of the day when I’m tired and hungry and trying to get the children in bed and eat my own supper is Hard Work. I expect there will be more reading at tea time and in bed, which I’ll share in Notes.

Updated:

After running around in the garden with friends, the children came in and listened to some Greeking Out (new episode!) and Ladybird Audio Adventures: Big Cats. Bedtime reading: The Mouse and the Motorcycle (more Beverly Cleary) and Secret Explorers: Missing Scientist (fantastic fictional-but-educational series on various scientific topics to interest everyone. Great for first chapter books).

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