How we homeschooled today #95

Judo, flags, and counting down to bedtime

I didn’t sleep a wink last night and it’s been a Long Day. The sort of day where you stand in the kitchen, paralysed by indecision over which plate to put your breakfast on. The sort of day where the supermarket has rearranged their shelves and the only reasonable response seems to be crying tears of incandescent, helpless rage. The sort of day where it’s very, very hard to stick to your self-imposed rule of No Mince Pies Before December. (Why do I have this rule? I’m sure there was a good reason once. Now it just feels like I’m doing it on principle, and I don’t know what the principle is.)

Via Unsplash

So it wasn’t my most inspired or inspiring day of home education. This morning there was more reading of the new library books, and some cursive handwriting practice for my daughter. Then we all trooped off to Judo which involved a good walk there and back in the sunshine. That somehow took the whole morning.

This afternoon my daughter (nearly 8) wanted to do a flag activity so she can complete International Badge for Beavers/Tiger Cubs. Her brother (just 6) joined in, and they spent an hour colouring flags, finding out what country they represented, finding the country on the world map, and then matching the country to the flag. We also talked about what some of the different symbols and colours represent. Bach was playing in the background, which I didn’t really notice but perhaps the children did. Then my daughter wanted to learn about big cats, so we got out the Natural History Book and were amazed at how many wild cats there are that we had never heard of. Also that there’s a real animal called an aardwolf which specialises in eating insects. (Alas, it’s essentially a hyena, not an aardvark-wolf hybrid.)

By 4pm I was counting down to bedtime and looking for something to smooth and soothe the last hours of the day. I hit upon Poetry Tea, which we haven’t done for ages. (If you don’t know about Poetry Tea, it’s an invention of Julie Bogart’s and is the genius combination of poetry with tasty treats. That’s it. But it is somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.) My daughter wrote a shopping list, and we went to the shops to purchase the necessaries. We even tidied up so we had a nice environment for the feast. I read whatever the children wanted, which ranged from animal poems to Tennyson and Robert Frost. My daughter stood up and recited a poem for us. I felt like something had been salvaged from the day.

Now they’re having a bath, and I can countdown to bedtime in minutes, not hours. Parents who feel like this every day because they have children who don’t yet sleep through the night: I salute you.

---

I know some of you like to read all the daily posts in one go at the weekend, so for you, here they are in one place:

Monday: Prime numbers investigation, Shakespeare, lots of Duplo.

Tuesday: Vikings, Reader’s Block, and parenting advice from Ryan Holiday. (Thank you so much to all the readers who gave me suggestions for overcoming Reader’s Block! If you’re looking for a book recommendation there’s a great list waiting for you in the Comments.)

Wednesday: A walking tour of Medieval London, and some vigorous discussion in the Comments about whether the rise in homeschooling is cause for alarm.

Thursday: Loads of reading, a dash round the British Museum, and the worst maths game we’ve ever played. (Plus, there’s still time to help out

Classical Wisdom

Kids with their very short survey.)

Have a great weekend!

---

Thanks for reading. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up for free and never miss a post. If a daily e-mail is too much for your inbox to cope with, you can opt to only receive posts in the app, which I find a lot more manageable.