Productive home education day

Contrary to some perceptions, as home educator's we don't actually spend a lot of time at home (of course every family, home educating or not, is different and this just refers to my family). We spend a lot of time outdoors as open space, exercise and fresh air is great for all of us, especially my small boys. We spend time playing with friends, out at Harry's classes and working at our allotment. We also visit lots of interesting places - museums, libraries, historical and National Trust sites. We do normally do some reading/writing/maths based work or activity alongside this, usually very early in the morning. 

So today we had a day at home and I tried to make it productive. Harry played some games of Math Bingo on the iPad and practised his cello again first, using the book from his lesson. I am really pleased that he is so enthusiastic and I hope it lasts! He really wants to use the bow but they haven't started that in the lessons yet so I am trying to get him to wait so he doesn't get into bad habits with it.

We played a game of nonsense stars, where Harry reads nonsense words to practise sounding out words. He doesn't like doing this and got several wrong. He had a great attitude though (I mention this as it is not always the case!) and had a go even though he didn't know - I compare learning to being a scientist with Harry as he loves science so we say that you often have to try many different ways of doing something and have many attempts before you get the right answer. He was genuinely delighted when he did remember the correct sound to help him to read the word. 

After this they watched Balamory from CBeebies together. During this time, I cleaned the bathroom and hung up washing - I just have to grab the available opportunities for household chores! 

We did some measuring and graph creation before lunch. Harry's last Conquer Maths lesson involved measuring objects using virtual shoes and pencils as the unit, so we measured some real things. We recorded it in a table, although we only did pencils today as Peter drew all over our shoe column! Peter did really enjoy getting involved and did some good counting of the pencils. We measured Harry, Peter, Harry's dolly and Peter's dog. I asked Harry to find something measuring 1 pencil and he went off trying out lots of things before finding that the height of his toy barn is 1 pencil. 

We then turned the table into a bar chart. Harry drew the axes and marked the units on. We used a colour key to label each bar. He was really pleased with the finished article. We talked about how the bar chart and the table show the same information but in different ways.

Peter went for a nap today after a 5.45am start, so we had a nice hour of peace! A friend called round with some fresh, warm bread from a bakery and Harry and I did some Hama bead threading onto straws. 

We had a special craft project to do this afternoon, which I am going to keep secret just in case my sister reads this. We needed to do it today so it would be ready to take to my sister's wedding party on Saturday.

After this, the last 2 hours of the day was spent making rockets, running around in the rain with them and playing with tin foil! 

Harry read lots of sections of our bedtime story books tonight and did it really well.