Given the pattern of our lives just now is radically different to how I expected this whole home education thing to pan out, I’m applying a bit more forethought to the approach atm. This fits in nicely with Merry starting up a new reading year sort-of-curriculum blog, so I’m going to see what we can do alongside what they are doing. This (brand new) blog category will be used to document our targets and our achievements 
Week one - I’ve printed out The Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo (unlikely as it seems, we don’t appear to have a copy of Just So Stories around, I was sure we had two!) and Chapter 1 of Our Island Story and I’m going to read one of them to the kids over tea tonight.
Big has requested and done maths already today, as she wants to improve her chess (??) and there was also much scratching of heads over a puzzle at group today with Barbara’s B and Jenny’s C. Both of them did lots of drawing - Small then repeated the letters as I wrote out his name. His other astounding achievement of the day was to inform me that he was going to draw an ‘a’ and then proceed to do so.
Rest of the week, I’ll dig out a poetry book and we’ll read some poetry together (I’ve got lots of poetry books about, so we’ll just see what comes to hand first.) Tomorrow and Weds is school, so I’ll assume that both education and socialisation gets taken care of there (big assumption I know, but I’ve been to this school, and I rather think it’s an accurate one ) which only leaves Thurs and then I’m working from home Friday. I might set Big up with a box of bits to pick and choose from over the two days.
Reading - the last couple of nights Big has decided to read one of the bedtime stories, she read Rattletrap Car and Hand, hand, fingers, thumb with Small chiming in at appropriate moments.
Other bits - we’ve had a long discussion about laws, religions, morality and commandments today, and I’m going to see if we can kick off some project work around that.
Only other thing I want to get into is finances, I want Big to understand about money from as early an age as possible, (yes, and Small as well, but he’s not quite past the ‘wow, it’s a coin’ stage yet). So I’ll be pondering what to do with that.
Don’t know whether ballet restarts on Thurs yet, need to fit in some more music and some science I think, then I’ll feel that we’re building a fairly balanced base to all of this. Going to fit in an extra language at some stage, but need to ponder how to achieve that. Occurs to me that our car journeys together could be a possible slot 
eta - first poem is Rainy nights, by Irene Thompson, first poem I ever learnt for speech and drama. Have printed it out in big type with half a page to spare so that she can illustrate it if and as she sees fit.
31 Comments
SOunds really positive. I’ve also been giving some thought to orgoplanning. Although we are nearer the autonomous end, there are plenty of times when SB asks me to read a book, or doesn’t know what to do, so I have been making an elements list! [ie what I would like to encourage/use of our resources!]
After discussing wiht her, she is keen for me to teach the piano, and just play the violin a hit, so I must try and do that. Also She had missed all her cdroms - actually I think I might blog this!
sounds like a great time and lots of thought going on
helen x
Pocket money’s pretty good for learning about finances
Sounds like a good plan though - is this the beginning of the new, organised Jax?
Pocket money relies on me being organised enough to remember to give it
Half time seemed like a good time for a rethink, don’t know whether I go so far as to say I’m going to get organised though
Hats off to you for doing some poetry as well as stories. Its one of those, ought to be good for me things that never seems to get past the what are they talking about? or that doesnt rhyme so why do they call it poetry? block. Perhaps thats something to do with lousy literature education so keep up the good work
Oh - you dont recognise <q> tags on your comments/stylesheet. They are in there somewhere!!!!
We have pocket money notebooks - i write the date it is deserved and tick it when it is spent!
Watch the space with the merry-orgo-plans-the-world thing - i’ve had ideas sprouting out of my ears all day
I like reading them poetry
Our PM is once a month, so that’s not too complicated!
In our house, PM is once a month, by direct debit from my account to Hannah’s, the day after I get paid.
I like pocket money. Tried and tested.
It is possible to integrate at a later stage with bank saving vs. stocks and shares to illustrate the concepts of markets, investment and risk. I’m thinking along the lines of saving money in the bank but choosing and tracking a share over time to see which was the “better” investment.
Pocket money has been unexpectedly fantastic here for Leo’s appreciation of how much things cost, the point of saving up, and general numeracy. It’s what we were aiming for when we started it, but I didn’t actually expect it to work!
Small person had pocket money from her granny each week, £2 I think it was initially. Granny kept a £1 of that in a tin at home for presents, as a way for small person to save and thus understand the value of money. The remainder was for her to spend on herself. When she reached 11, I opened her a proper bank a/c where she does her online banking (and she gets a lot more than £2 pw!)
The whole thing has been a brill way to teach her to understand money.
Liberta. the q tag is ignored by Internet Explorer so won’t show up if that is what you are using, Firefox should render the tag correctly though. Bearing in mind that most people use Internet Explorer, you might be better off just inserting the quote marks yourself.
Liberta says open quote I’m using Firefox close quote
Liberta further says:
The > and < characters and the q are stripped from the source of the comment and no longer appear. I’ve checked and my implementation of wordpress does the same before it stores the comment. Bugger.
Most people might use Internet Explorer, but most people in the world don’t use chicken legs to wrap a quote.
I’ll get Libertus to get dirty with the code he he.
I’d upgrade first if I were you, version 2.0 is out now. Tim says alternatively use textpattern. He says that a lot. I tend to ignore him
I’m not touching WordPress 2.0 for a while. Other people can shake it out.
If textpattern is a better comment editing plug-in then I’m interested. URL?
I’ll just go dig in the code for the <q&rt; stripper.
Of course, that should be >. I think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’, not ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’. Oops.
textpattern isn’t a plugin, it’s a system. .com
File wp-includes/kses.php contains code for a comprehensive HTML tag filter and cleaner, of which function wp_filter_kses() is called before saving comment text, via wp-includes/default-filters.php.
If you want to allow <q> tags and others, uncomment the appropriate lines at the top of the file.
A bit puzzled by textpattern. Does it do something that WordPress doesn’t, or a different way, or something? I got bored looking through the code before I could figure anything out about it.
We’re in reductionist design mode (spend as little as possible) for something that smells a bit like it needs a CMS and so our angle of interest is “what does a CMS provide that a text editor and a Unix web server does not?”
It works differently - it’s a cms that can be used for blogging. Very clean looking and theoretically very adaptable.
You know, sometimes the best way to figure out what something does is to try it out…
Jax, I’m a programmer!
I immediately tear apart anything that comes my way, find the bit that does the thing I didn’t know how to do, keep that and throw the rest away.
I guess I know now why I can’t find work
Um, and I’m what precisely?
Jax Please! - you dont have to sit here and listen to him whittering on (English spelling)! I was confused by Textpattern - I couldnt work out what it did from the website, so big ears over there had to down load it and give it a look. I have say that if I were not trying to work on something else this evening I would have taken similar approach. If the documents dont explain what is going on then - take a look at the code, its often more meaningful!
On the other hand, the more I see of WordPress innards the less impressed I am. Perhaps I should be looking for a better system, perhaps I should write my own ? But on the other hand life is short…
It’s opensource, it’s probably about as good as anything built by a tribe of monkeys with computers.
I haven’t looked at the code for either of them beyond making them work, life’s too short.
“Life’s too short”?
Females…
By the way, “whittering” is incorrect. I do not whitter. I expostulate.
expostulate.. yes sometimes, most times…but sometimes you whitter
Seems that WordPress 2.0 is mostly an update to the administrative function. I couldn’t find any comprehensive document detailing the functional changes from 1.5.2.
Could we agree on “babble”?