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Youngest is now 12. Somewhat demand averse, but will deep dive at the drop of a hat into something they find interesting. Last week we had some time to spare between activities (home ed ninja tag and bowling at the start of the day and computer club at the end) so we wandered the charity shops, because why not, and found a new one that had mystery bags for children.
You all know I can’t resist a mystery bag, don’t you? There was a boys age 7-12 which said 13 items for £6 which seemed pretty good to me, so we left with that. And a neon drawing pad thing, new in box for £3. Do love a good charity shop.
Back to the car, and opened the bag, and while I wasn’t too impressed that they’d bulked up the numbers with 5 packs of fidget bands, there were a couple of books and 3 Kung Fu panda DVDs, so I think I’d still call it a win.
One of the books was a Bear Grylls adventure story Mission: Survival Gold of the Gods (affiliate link to the exact issue, cheaper versions are available!), which had a fabulous holographic design cover – compass points around the edge and a figure in the middle doing a range of fighting moves. TC (TigerChild) has a fascination with maps, directions and stuff like that, so there was a quick fire set of questions and answers about all the intermediate compass points – how many are there, what do they all mean, why are there numbers round the edge.
Fortunately, that was a set of quickfire questions I could answer, they aren’t always! 😆 So we covered that there are 16 named compass points and how they worked, and I thought that was that.
In the car on the way home at the end of the day, so several hours later, we were talking about the book, and I noticed that there’s a compass needle on google maps while you’re in navigation mode. I pointed it out to TC and asked if they could tell what direction we were going. The rest of the journey home was predictions about which direction we’d be going after the bends in the road we could see coming up, discussions of how surprising some of those directions were, which landmarks we could use to tell which direction was which, and how this would be useful so that TC could always find their way home.
Very low demand, absolutely no pressure, and it all grew out of a charity shop bundle, that will be reinforced every time they fall over the book that is currently in the middle of their bedroom floor (is that a floorcase?). So if you’re wondering how your home education can be low demand, and still full time, that’s how that works. It never stops, there’s learning in pretty much everything, but you don’t have to leap on it and make it into a lesson or a project. If it turns into a game you can share though, that’s the best of the best.
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