New Year home education

Happy New Year! We had a lovely two week Christmas holiday and saw all of our close family. It feels like a long time since I updated here!

Stuart went back to work on Monday but before that we went swimming, visited the Centre for Life and Gibside together. We have also played many, many games of Uno, read lots of new books and built Lego Christmas presents.

We are slowly getting back into routine this week. Harry and Peter have both done some reading and writing practise, Harry had Beavers and his swimming lesson and we have started reading about The Stone Age, which we will be working on for a couple of weeks.

Harry has also been playing cello and we have watched some videos by The Piano Guys. We especially love this Batman themed piece. Peter and I listened to a BBC Playtime podcast called 'Robin'. 

We've been on the bus to City Library too, to return our Christmas books. Harry has borrowed a couple of Michael Morpurgo titles to read along with his beloved Beast and Sea Quests!

I won't be changing much about our routine this term. I think we are doing the right amount of external classes - both boys are doing enjoy-a-ball and music and Harry also does art class, swimming lessons and Beavers. Peter isn't school age until September so we may start him with an extra activity then if he wants to do one.

Last year Harry's main aim was to read independently and he has exceeded my expectations in that respect; he reads so quickly and fluently now and I expect he will start to read longer books this year. He will be working more on written English and we will be starting the Galore Park Junior English textbook. He will continue to use Conquer Maths online.

Peter is enjoying Reading Eggs online so he will continue to use that and he is now able to read three letter words by sounding the letters. He loves practising writing letters too! We will start using the early stage Oxford Reading Tree books as well. He will be using workbooks for learning to write numbers and practising early maths skills.

Michael Rosen Good Ideas

I had a great night last night with several other home ed mums at Seven Stories. We went to hear Michael Rosen talk about his new book, which is all about practical ways of learning. This is a subject close to the hearts of all those who went and we made the most of the night by going for a couple of drinks afterwards.

I am really looking forward to reading the book. Harry is a very practical learner and it will be good to have a different and third party perspective. Hopefully I might get a few new ideas too! 

Michael Rosen also mentioned a couple of new books he is working on, which sound interesting. One is an English version of favourite German folk tales and another was a book on humanism aimed at children, so I shall be looking out for those! 

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. 

Not Back To School Picnic

We have had a super day with around twenty other home educating families to celebrate the start of our 'school' year. It was a great turnout and the children all had a brilliant time in the bushes and trees of Jesmond Dene. It was nice to see people we haven't seen for a while and meet some new families as well.

We have continued with our BFG themed activities this week too and Harry has been doing the money maths lessons on Conquer Maths. He also wanted to make a new target for our place value maths game, using numbers up to one million.

Harry had his swimming lesson yesterday and swam at last with his face in the water! This has been a real mental block for him so he was very proud of himself. Peter has contented himself in the paddling pool for water play!  

We have been playing Alphabet Lotto and Bananagrams at home.

Harry has been playing cello every day ready for lessons starting again at the weekend. He has also been building his Lego shuttle, which he added to by making a moon buggy to hang underneath it. I love his creativity! 

Will he ever go to school?

I have been asked the question 'will he ever go to school?' several times recently so I have been thinking about it. Actually once the question was 'will he go to a normal school?' - is there such a thing!? Maybe all parents of four year olds should be asked 'will you send them to school?' as I doubt many have actually given much thought as to whether it is the right thing to do, or perhaps they don't know about an alternative. 

I slightly resent the implication in the question that school is a 'better' path - I don't disagree that it may be better for some children but our original reasons (arrived at after many, many hours of reading and talking) for deciding to home educate still hold strong and I can only see positives in them for my children and family:

- By following his own interests, Harry can learn about anything. He doesn't have to wait until KS2 science is covered at school (we have done most of this already as he loves science) or learn in detail about dinosaurs (which he has no interest in at all). 

- We can get lots of outdoor time, fresh air and exercise, which my children really need. If they are tired or under the weather they can spend their time doing restful but still productive activities like listening to audio books.

- We can fit family into our life. We don't live near any of our family so it's very important that we can visit and this can't always happen at the weekend. It also means we, as a family of four, spend most of our time together and share our experiences, which I think at age 6 and 3 is a positive thing.

There are undoubtedly things that children miss out on by not going to school (I am not claiming we inhabit some kind of home education utopia), just as there are things that schooled children miss out on while at school. The school play and sports day are two that spring to mind but on balance I believe that home education can offer broader, better experiences (again for my children). We can visit the beach on what might be the only sunny day in a fortnight, or read a long book in a few days because they love it so much. And the chance to take part in activities similar to school is there, by way of extra-curricular activities, if they are attractive to the children. Harry has performed in front of many people at his gymnastics club and at music concerts and made memories for life at Beavers already by flying fire balloons. 

My ultimate answer is that I don't know if either of my children will go to school. I would certainly look into it with them if they asked to go but I can't see that happening at the moment. School is not an issue for them; it has never been part of their lives so it is not the main point of reference for them as it is for schooled children (and the parents asking the question!). Of course Harry knows that other children do go to school and we have spent time with schooled friends these summer holidays and been camping together too. It is perfectly normal in his world that they go to school and he doesn't, as it should be in my opinion; home education is a normal educational choice. 

In any case, I will not be doing much more thinking about this question right now as I am sure that Harry and Peter will do their best and achieve their potential whether they choose to go to school one day, or not.

Half-year home ed quiz and review

I have been reviewing what we have covered in the past six months recently in order to put together a half-year quiz for Harry. We did this at Christmas too and he loved it. His recall isn't great so this is a good, fun way to practise and it allows me to take stock of what has been done. Often, this is more than anticipated, which I expect is the case for a lot of home educators where learning can become a natural process and you are not always trying to meet targets and tick boxes.

We cover subjects in different ways. I noticed that most of the geography topics were part of projects looking at major events - the World Cup, Winter Olympics and Chinese New Year, whereas English has mainly been workbook based. We do lots of hands-on science both alone and with friends and group history workshops led by third parties with other home educating families. This variety suits us and means that if a particular approach isn't working, we can fall back on other activities.

I went through my blog and chose some major areas to cover, which we did using quick-fire factual questions. This is how it was broken down:

English and art

Nouns, verbs and adjectives

Question marks and question words 

Apostrophes

Vowels

Plurals

The art of Matisse and Van Gogh 

Spelling 

Harry spelled forty words from the dolch lists by writing half and telling me half verbally. This area has improved a lot this year. We only started doing spelling in January and he couldn't spell simple words like 'with' but he hardly struggled with these words. I chose middle-difficulty words for him such as 'they' and 'every' and we will continue to work on this so he can feel confident when writing himself.

Maths

Units of measurement - ml, cm, degrees, grams

Right angles

Fractions - quarter, half and third

Rounding

Symmetry

Horizontal, vertical and parallel lines

3D shapes

Identifying the biggest number using numbers in tens of thousands

Days in a week and months in a year

Bar charts

We also practised the 2-6 times tables by rolling a ball to each other and saying them in turn

History

Ancient Egypt

Famous volcanic eruptions

Tudors

Great Fire of London

World War I

Science

Viscosity

Forces - gravity, friction, air resistance

Electricity - conductor vs insulator

States of matter

Solubility

Space - planet facts, constellations

Adaptation and food chains

Human body - organs, skeleton

Geography

Oceans

Russia

China

Brazil

Landmarks - Taj Mahal, Sistine Chapel

I don't think we will be starting anything new in August which will give me chance to get some advance preparation done for Autumn. We will continue to read and play games at home of course. We have a very busy period coming up: Harry is taking part in several summer holiday sports camps and swimming lessons which will tire him out, we have a family wedding, cousins visiting and a camping weekend and we would like to make the most of the summer weather and special summer holiday events too.

Home education day at home - ocean craft and treasure hunt

We have had a lovely day at home today. Harry and Peter were quite tired from our adventures over the last couple of weeks so we were due a relaxing day. It was well-timed too as it rained all day here!

As usual for a day at home, Harry has listened to lots of his current audio book. It is one of the few things he will sit still and rest for! He is listening to George's Secret Key to The Universe, by Lucy and Stephen Hawking. I haven't heard much of it but it sounds like there are lots of space and science facts. There are two more books in the series so he may want to continue with those. I have managed to catch up with some housework too, while Harry was listening and Peter was looking at books and doing jigsaws.

Harry has played his cello and started reading another ebook on the Oxford Owl website - a stage 8 Oxford Reading Tree book called 'Flood'. 

We have been reading The Troll by Julia Donaldson every day since we borrowed it from the library so I devised a treasure hunt to tie into the book and we did that today. I wrote a sum for Harry and a key showing which letter the answer represented. The resulting words spelled out the location of the treasure. Peter also had a letter to identify with each sum. I hid these around the house and they had great fun finding them and eating the treasure!

 (Harry guessed at this point that the location was 'under the sofa'!)

We have also continued with our ocean theme to celebrate World Ocean Day at the weekend. We read these books, which were very interesting.

We also spent a couple of hours creating a large ocean collage using a variety of materials. I cut out some fish shapes, dolphins, starfish and crab claws and the boys decorated them using marbling ink. We used these in our collage.

We used some new craft materials I had ordered for this theme from the great Baker Ross - coloured sand and sealife beads. The boys really loved the sand! They used it for the seabed, along with tissue paper and shell beads and also for the sea, scattered over the sponged-on blue paint. They made jellyfish using paper plates and cellophane too.

They played with some loose sand and a little water while I cleaned the table then I transported them both into the bath!

French and play

Harry and Peter were enjoying some quiet activities this morning so I left them to it and ignored my list! I love it when they find their own things to do and usually don't interfere as finding their own, appropriate activities is an important skill I would like them to have. Harry was making geometric shape pictures while wearing bunny ears and listening to Gangsta Granny by David Walliams and Peter was dressed as a knight making various weapons for Lego men to fight dragons! 

We have also done some French activities as our class wasn't on this week. We played a memory tray game, where we said the names of the objects then someone took one away and the others had to try to remember which one had been removed.

We also watched some French BBC Class Clips - one about food and a song of Old Macdonald Had a Farm and did some French sticker book. Peter chose the pictures and Harry found the matching words.

It was quite warm this afternoon and Peter played in the garden lots with his ball and with water.

Harry made some tin foil boats for him to use.

Harry has spent a lot of time building Lego this afternoon. He has been saving his money for a few months and had enough to buy the set he wanted - Museum Break In. I was really proud of him as it's the first big thing he has saved for instead of spending money the moment he has it on smaller things.

He just finished building it all in time to go to enjoy-a-ball class and played with it afterwards when Stuart got home. He also practised cello ready for his lesson tomorrow. 

Sports camp

Harry has spent most of today at an Easter sports camp called Gamesweek. It is run in one of the private schools in Newcastle which has good sports facilities and he really enjoyed it, apart from swimming, which is not his favourite activity! He has done gymnastics, crafts, climbing and team games as well. This is the longest Harry has spent independently somewhere, including being responsible for his belongings, lunch box and swimming kit and I am really pleased he has the confidence to go and that he enjoyed it. The school holidays are a great time to access this kind of large group activity, which children are not exposed to daily in a home education environment. He is also going on Wednesday.

Peter and I had a day to ourselves, which is rare! We went to the park after dropping Harry off, where he fed the ducks and had a very long and high push in the basket swings.

We came home to hang washing outside and make pancakes.

We also read lots of Richard Scarry books (Peter's current favourite) and went to the allotment to water all our seed beds and seedlings. It has been very relaxing just having one boy at home today!

Home education and reading

I looked through Amazon this week with Harry to order some new reading books for him and he was delighted to find some Justice League superhero ones, from the I Can Read series. The ability to choose resources your child is enthusiastic about is a great benefit of home education - I have been upstairs tonight after bedtime and Harry had his lamp on reading one of these new books in bed himself - I have never seen him do this before! 

Flexibility is an advantage in terms of type of resources and time. We don't have set times or days to complete reading targets and Harry isn't under pressure to meet arbitrary targets or keep pace with others - he can work at his own pace free of this pressure. Sometimes Harry reads three or four times a day and sometimes not at all. Sometimes he makes huge leaps forward in a short space of time and sometimes he stays at the same level for several months - either way he is praised for trying and generally enjoys the reading. 

There have been times when we haven't used our reading scheme books for a few months as his confidence has taken a knock, but we have played literacy games instead, so he has still been learning and progressing. This takes quite a lot of trust and I do sometimes start to panic that he may start to fall behind, but he has always proved that this is not the case and re-started stronger.

We have mixed and matched reading books, using Oxford Reading Tree, I Love Reading (non-fiction series) and normal books too. Harry often shares the reading of Mr Men books with me, which is great as they contain some super words. He has also read sections of the Roald Dahl books we have read. As well as Harry reading, we also read to him every day and he listens to lots of audio books.

Games have played a big part in Harry's literacy and he really enjoys them. I have used several ideas from this book, which I love, including pyramid reading and nonsense stars. We still play these and he is always enthusiastic about them.

We use post it notes on the wall - words for Harry and letters for Peter - which they remove once they have read each note. They love jumping up to get them and throwing the notes in the air! 

We play stepping stones, where I write a word or sound on A4 sized pieces of paper and create a path of stepping stones from living room to kitchen - they cannot move to the next one until they have read the stone and there is sometimes a prize waiting at the end of the path. This can be used from learning single letters right up to difficult sight words and is very quick to prepare - you just need some paper and ideas of words to include. I have sometimes used words from the Dolch word list, words from books we have recently read, colour words or number words.

Harry has definitely had to work at learning to read (he has not been a child who has naturally picked it up and started reading chapter books at age 5 - I know a couple of these, both home educated and not). The important process of learning to read, although sometimes challenging, has been enjoyable and fits in naturally to our life. I hope that Harry becomes more confident reading himself this year through all the methods mentioned above.

A natural home education day

I would say that we have had a natural day of home education today. We had a really bad day yesterday - we were all very tired recovering from our holiday, both boys were grumpy and actually downright rude and just didn't want to do anything other than chase around and hurt each other. This doesn't happen often but, when it does, it usually makes me think that we need to step back and have a free-flowing day.

I didn't make a plan for today. I just suggested things as they seemed appropriate and, as usual on days like this, we have squeezed in a lot of activities. More importantly, the mood has been nice and we have all been happy! 

We went to our allotment for our first proper work session together this year. We dug over and weeded three beds, swept the stone areas and greenhouse floors and went to the small wildlife garden to see the frogspawn in the pond and the beehives. We haven't planted anything outdoors yet but will prepare the beds ready for some peas and onions soon. Harry and Peter enjoyed chatting to a couple of the other, older allotment holders we know.

I am sure I needed this rest more than them! 

The boys also had fun playing in one of the unprepared beds with trucks.

At home we baked chocolate buns and fruit scones. Harry weighed and Peter broke eggs and mixed. He managed to cover himself with a lot of flour! 

Harry also made a sourdough starter, which we will feed with more flour and water until it ready for using to bake bread. We were inspired to do this by this bread page this morning, written by a friend who makes lovely bread whilst home educating her three children.

The boys also painted their clay models from Monday and some butterfly and flower cut-out shapes. We are planning to make a spring poster with these.

Peter had a bath after painting and Harry played with him, out of the bath, with superhero Lego. They played some really good scenarios, with all the baddies finally being eaten by sharks! 

Harry has done a Reading Eggs lesson and spelling list on the iPad today. Peter has been playing with this puzzle and managed to find the correct place for all of the letters.

We also built a train track in their bedroom. I have seen this Lego men idea somewhere and can't remember where! Lego men were lined up along the track then a marble was rolled down to knock them over. They really liked doing this! 

Harry also created some Hama bead designs whilst listening to the BBC Wind in the Willows podcast. Peter and I did some jigsaws at the same time.

We have read more Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator tonight. I am not enjoying it as much as the other Roald Dahl's we have read but Harry seems to love it. I will be looking forward to the next one we choose!