How we homeschooled today #99
Square numbers, looking at the moon, scattering Lego all over the floor
Thank you so much to all those who joined in the conversation on homeschooling and housework yesterday. I have felt much more inspired today knowing that I’m not the only one to face this never-ending challenge, and am enjoying reading all your tips and laughing at your excellent collective sense of humour.
A new question for you today: One reader of How We Homeschool is expecting her first baby any day now. I’d love to hear your words of wisdom, experience, and encouragement for her. Things you wish you’d known, the best (or worst!) advice you received, the product that changed your life. One rule: let’s not get into the fraught question of whether she should feed on demand or stick to a fixed routine etc. I think that’s one thing we all have to come to on our own terms!
Tomorrow I have a guest post for you from
, who’ll be sharing his experience of flexi-schooling. This is a first for How We Homeschool—don’t miss it!How we homeschooled today
Another quiet day at home. The children played Ludo over breakfast and moved seamlessly into Lego afterwards. At 9.30 I introduced another maths investigation: Square Building, another one from Math For Love. I thought the children would crack this pretty quickly as we’ve talked about square numbers a lot, but I was wrong! We built lots of squares using cut-up graph paper, and when the squares got too big and fiddly we just drew straight onto sheets of graph paper. I wrote the sequence of numbers on the board: 1, 4, 9, 16 etc. Once we got to 100 I asked my daughter (nearly 8) to have a look and see what patterns she could spot. I told her there were several different patterns and the idea was to find theories, not right answers. She said she had no idea what I meant or how to do that, and I realised we’ve never looked at number patterns before, so this was a very reasonable complaint! (We’ve looked at lots of visual patterns, but not numerical ones.)
So we took a break and went to a park with some hot chocolate. Today, in the kind of radical life-changing tip you can expect from How We Homeschool, we took outside toys and games with us! Balls and a skipping rope. It made the outside time much more enjoyable and active. We’ve done this before, of course, but sometimes it’s not easy to remember all the obvious little things that make life run a little more smoothly. With the bouncing balls I had an opportunity to show the children that when an object bounces off a flat surface, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. I told them that this also applies to light bouncing off a surface, which I shall try to demonstrate to them over the next few days. (If you’ve done this at home before, I’d love you to share in the Comments.)
Also at the playground, my daughter suddenly (and finally) learnt how to swing herself on the swing without needing a push. I’ve been trying to teach her this for years, but this morning something suddenly clicked, and she was off. She was so joyful. It struck me as a small metaphor for education—you can teach as much as you like, but when and whether the actual learning takes place is not always entirely within your control.
Back at home there was more Lego, and when we ate lunch together I brought the morning’s square number work to the table. I explained a bit about number patterns and we had a good conversation about what patterns we could spot. There are lots! There were some patterns we couldn’t explain, but it was a fun, collaborative, and intriguing exercise, which I think is a good outcome for a maths lesson.
This afternoon I attempted to interest the children in adding a page to their history folders, but they declined. When the ongoing Lego game got tense, we went into the garden and had a 3-man game of football (I lost). Then the moon came up, so my daughter ran to get her telescope and we all marvelled at how clearly you can see the moon’s surface with only a child’s telescope. (We have this one, which is good, but as soon as you’ve got it you’ll want a bigger and better one. I think it’s a catch-22: you obviously can’t buy the expensive ’scope straight off, in case the child isn’t interested. But as soon as the child is interested, you want the very best equipment money can buy. Ah well.)
At teatime I read The Story of Inventions to them. I hoped it might cover telescopes, but it doesn’t. It’s a good book, but beware: it covers plastic pollution, and, more scarily, nuclear weapons. Obviously these are important things for our children to learn about, but equally obviously we don’t want to terrify them. If you haven’t talked about these subjects with your children before, be careful with this book. The children said they wanted more information on the various topics covered—it is perhaps a bit ambitious to squeeze such a big and exciting topic into one small book!
On that topic, I mentioned Dominic Sandbrook’s book Fury of the Vikings recently. I’ve been reading it myself, and yikes, those Vikings were vicious. Of course, this isn’t news. But this book is super-gruesome and gory—there were bits last night that I really wished I hadn’t read just before I turned out the light. Of course some children love this kind of thing, and I certainly have a low threshold for horror. All the Amazon reviewers love it. But some children are more sensitive than others so I just wanted to warn you!
Don’t forget to share your first-baby tips, and any experiences with the Law of Reflection in the Comments. And look out for
’s flexi-schooling guest post tomorrow!Thanks for reading. If you’re not subscribed, sign up for free and never miss a post.
For the soon to be mama -- I wish I’d waited to buy things until I actually needed them (one day delivery is a big help here). I thought I’d need everything for every possible situation and for every possible iteration of my kid. My newborn actually didn’t need shoes, my 3 month old didn’t need a swim suit, and my one year old outgrew the snowsuit before she ever saw snow.
Also, shower every day. That may be my bigger piece of advice. Even if your baby cries for five minutes while you quickly shave your armpits, a shower every day gives you an opportunity to prioritize yourself in one small way, so you can still feel human in those early days.
*Advice*
For labour: Buy adult nappies. My waters broke before I got to the hospital so I would have ruined the car if not for them! Great for after as well, as they stay in place better and are more comfortable than the giant pads and mesh underwear the hospital will provide.
For after labour: I knew it would be hard, but it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I think I underestimated how quickly I would recover from childbirth. And recovering from major physical trauma whilst getting very little and poor quality sleep is that much harder! I don't mention this to scare you but to set exceptions. The reality is that for the first 6 weeks you will be in pure survival mode. Research shows that most pregnant women have unrealistic expectations about what life will be like after having a baby, and that having realistic expectations about what life is like postpartum is better for your mental health! https://theconversation.com/helping-new-moms-return-to-exercise-and-leisure-supports-their-physical-and-mental-health-182024
If breastfeeding: It hurts at first. That's totally normal. Sometimes it's because the latch is wrong but even if it's right it'll still hurt! There are various theories as to why but I think it's because it takes a while for your milk to come in, and that means the infant is providing a lot of consistent suction for long periods, which causes pain. Once your milk comes in, it just takes a lot less suction to trigger let-down, and then your nipples have an opportunity to heal. So my advice is that if breastfeeding is important to you, just know you might have to power through those first couple of weeks and it might be rough at first.
Also, however your baby is fed, take advantage of the drop-in sessions for weighing with the health visitors. It's very reassuring to see growth happening and know your baby is being fed enough.