Home education and art, sport and music

I like having time at home during our week for me to cover academic work with Harry and also unstructured time for them to play at home, go to the park and visit interesting places. Our Fridays and Saturdays are quite busy with structured classes, however, which I also like as it gives Harry a chance to be taught by someone else and work in a group situation. In the case of art and music, he is being taught skills I am not able to teach. 

Just one of the great things about home education is that you can access as much or as little as your child needs and plan your week in a way that suits your family. Harry's only class purely for home educated children is art and we also meet up at least once a week with other families, sometimes for structured activities and sometimes for play. The other classes are out of school time and include schooled and home educated children.

Harry started a new art class on Friday morning with other home educated children. I am hoping he can improve his drawing skills and learn to use different art materials. They each chose a picture and worked on it for the whole hour. Harry chose a Batman image and will be finishing it next week, so he didn't want me to photograph it yet! He said 'I loved art' on the way out.

Peter is not ready to focus for a whole hour yet so we sat on some seats just outside the room and read books. I took his sketch pad so he could do some drawing too and he really enjoyed this.

There is also a play area over the road so I expect we will go there with the other children after art, which will cover exercise and socialising too. 

The builders are still busy with our new bathroom and it's going well. We can use the bath now so the boys have enjoyed trying it out as it's much bigger! We have also started some sanding in the hall as we plan to decorate it this year. 

Harry also had his first enjoy-a-ball class of term on Friday. This is his fourth year of this class! I really like it as it's a general skills class and introduces aspects of all the ball sports, so it's a good foundation for whichever sport Harry might want to continue playing. He really likes the coach and has a few friends there. Peter also does this class on a Monday, with his own age group.

We started back at The Sage too yesterday for cello and music class. Harry is quite rusty after the summer holiday and has three pieces of music to practise this week so we will be doing daily practise. He was all smiles when he came out of the group session and he enjoyed it. We often take Peter to the under-5's music session at the same time, which involves singing, small instruments and parachute play, but this doesn't start back until next week.