That would be the school situated in our living room, with a school day that goes nearly all round the clock
Home education for us is very home centred right atm, due mainly to soa’s needs and requirements. We are going to introduce a weekly music group as of next week, which will mean [...]
While soa is happy in her bouncy chair. She’s increasingly awake and alert during the day, and also increasingly happy to be separated from me for more than a minute at a time. It’s not many minutes though, so I’m typing rapidly!
Can’t remember when I last blogged properly about the older children (odd thing to [...]
My children are very similar, and very different.
I’m often accused of cloning, which I find amusing now that they are growing up – Big’s hair has darkened and her blue eyes are now brown. Small is still blond and blue eyed, but they are so very obviously brother and sister. Stick their half sibling there [...]
Didn’t get through our routine bits yesterday due to an early morning appt for Tim and myself, but did on Mon and today. Regular maths is giving Big confidence to attempt sums while out and about – she worked out the cost of two bits of fabric in the remnant shop as was this afternoon, [...]
for reasons that we won’t go into in detail here, Big was banned from gameboy, tv and computer today in a triple whammy never seen before. And as we don’t do sit down work on a Sunday, this meant I knew that I was in for a long day of trying to entertain her, preferably [...]
Not quite sure how the children entertained themselves for most of yesterday, as Tim and I were busy sorting and reorganising to move ourselves down from the loft bedroom. It was beginning to get a bit silly me climbing the ladder, and certainly wouldn’t have worked well once babe is actually here!
So I sorted through [...]
Wednesday was Maths, English and comparative religion. Well, comparative in that we compared it to the theory of evolution we’d looked at over the previous couple of days Small didn’t think much of it, he likes evolution, and keeps drawing little cartoon strips of how creatures could have got from one celled amoeba [...]
Children did maths and English first off – more work on idioms for Big, trying to draw humorous pictures to illustrate various idioms. Not sure about the humour value of the pictures, but it did get her thinking about the language involved, and she was a lot happier with that as an exercise.
Small actually made [...]
declared Small this evening.
He’d been asking for Brown Beaver’s phone number, and I wanted to know why he wanted it. He said that not everything had a why, and I said I thought it did. His response was that there was no why that the earth started, and I have to admit, I had no [...]
I have been waiting since January for my children to deschool, stop watching endless CBBC or playing on mind numbing websites, for them to show and develop some interests and learn to get along instead of screeching and bickering all day.
I’ve run out of patience
Maybe I don’t respond in the right way [...]
Weds, Thurs, Fri, can’t quite tell where one ended and the next began
This is mainly because I’m struggling atm. Bump is big and uncomfortable (and pleasingly wriggly!) and the strain on my back is pretty much constant now. I’m tired as I’m sleeping badly and backache is wearing me out and eroding [...]
Swimming has reverted to evenings, which should make for an easier Tuesday. Maybe. Certainly yesterday seemed easier, but that might have been because I got to lunchtime and keeled over, retiring to bed for a couple of hours!
Children played pretty much harmoniously all day, or at least, from when I made them turn the tv [...]
Sunday we had intended to go to Bawdsey radar open day via the foot ferry. But instead, after the cooked breakfast, the girls and I started on a patchwork skirt for their toys.
As is usual, I horrendously underestimated the time taken just to cut out 25 5″ squares, so C was still cutting at lunch [...]
Saturday morning evaporated away, I’m sure that there was playing, I seem to remember doing washing, oh and we communally weeded a tub to put in some tomato plants I’d been given. Turned out that the tub had previously had potatos in it and the children, but mainly C, rescued a big bowlful of very [...]
Bil was very organised this morning and struck the tent before the preteens were awake. Well, the second bedroom and the outer anyway. When they woke up and stumbled out he asked them if anything was missing.
“Um, the washing line?”
“What, not the tent?”
doh. They breakfasted and putered, and Big taught Princess and Scott how [...]
Not a particularly good combination for a harmonious morning! Despite their late night, all children were up reasonably early, although the preteens were the last, unsurprisingly. They mainly managed to play on moshi monsters – there was an attempt to play monopoly junior, but it was abandoned on the bedroom floor after not very long.
Adults [...]
Friday morning, we managed to locate all library books, and persuade Small that he needed to take some of them back. He was not very happy about this. He hasn’t read quite a few of them – he tends to start reading them and then get distracted on to something else, which is not a [...]
First day of the new system, it appears that the children had a rather different idea to how it was going to work than I did. Our system doesn’t involve boxes per child prestacked with work – I’m nowhere near that organised, and I doubt I ever will be. Instead their boxes have pictures that [...]
Another day of petty squabbling and far too much screen time, with reluctance to go outside (it did rain somewhat, which didn’t help) which culminated in tears at bedtime when Small wanted to play as they barely had all day, while Big wanted to be read to. So instead I convened an impromptu family meeting [...]
although why I spent them in Sainsburys I can’t imagine!
That was the afternoon though. The morning passed in the standard haze of ‘putering and refereeing small squabbles about who had overrun their turn and so on. Won a knitting machine on freecycle – principle is that we can give it a try, if we don’t [...]
