For pretty much as long as she has been able to talk, Big’s last question of the day has been “what are we doing tomorrow?” and my standard answer is “I don’t know yet”. I’m not a person who lives by plans, and my children are, so I figure that this time around with home ed, I’d better have a good idea of what’s happening next.
This is not going to mean lessons to a timetable – I’m more of a seat of your pants person than that. I would hardly have a blog with this title otherwise 😉 But I do need an idea of what we need to cover and a shape to the week or Small will run wild as well. I’m going to get a planner up on the wall showing when we’re going away and stuff of interest like that – it helps him a lot to be able to count down to events he’s looking forward to. It will also help when he begins to understand what a week is and what a month is – I foresee lots of that type of work in his near future 😀
So I’m looking at Nature detectives club – I like the idea of a weekly activity and of that being based around the natural world. Both the kids thrive on the outdoors, so the more we have planned that draws them outside the better. One way or another there will be gardening, although as there’s likely to be at least one and more likely two moves in the year, it may be small scale gardening to begin with.
For maths I’m looking at Stile for Small at least. He likes the system and he works at it independently, so it would be a good way to get him going. He’s pretty much unteachable a lot of the time, so it has to be something that he can learn from with minimal input, although he may let me extend it if he’s enjoying it.
Big is another story. Sometime over the last couple of years she’s lost her nerve with maths and although I’ve gone someway to repairing that, we’ve still a way to go. I think we’ll work Montessori style, I may be building manipulatives or buying a few in (note to self, must ask S, Tim’s s-i-l where she got the test tubes from that she used in a flower arrangement a while back). We need to nail basic maths facts, get a real grip on the decimal hierarchy and spin out into measuring, estimating and real world problems, which we should mainly be able to do with crafts and cooking.
Big got a fab cookbook from Tim’s family for christmas. Apparently it’s the one his nieces used to learn to cook, and having tasted their cooking, I’m more than pleased to follow their lead. I think that at least once a week she will be preparing us a meal from it (or other sources) and we should be trying to fit in some more baking as well.
Our first project is going to be based around the human body, nutrition and exercise. I need Small to understand that man cannot live on bananas alone 😉 and I also need him to understand how to work on a project. His work will involve plenty of labelled diagrams, he’s good at that sort of thing, and once he’s diagrammed something, he doesn’t seem to forget it.
For history and geography we may well make use of resources I already have. 120 Great History Projects
strikes again. Actually one of the things that Big did when home education was first mentioned again was go and get it out and start daydreaming about what she could do from it, so I think it will go down pretty well.
Did I miss anything much out? They both read like there’s no tomorrow, I may try to persuade them to do some book reviews as I think it’s good to keep a list of what they’ve been perusing. I’ll try for some readalouds as well, they enjoy that kind of thing, and I got more into it at school. For science I’m planning on finally getting round to my Power House kit – I’m looking forward to it, dunno what the kids are going to think 😉 Exercise wise, well, there’s walking to the library and walking to the park, running around the park, walking back again (moaning because it’s uphill, you get the idea). I want to try to get them swimming a couple of times before Centerparcs, but we’ll see.
There will be piano playing on Big’s part, much crafting and drawing from both of them, continual fighting over the computer to improve their bearvilles and hopefully rather more calmness and happiness engendered all around.
I can hope, can’t I?
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