Our Plans for the New Year!

This end of year/start of new year report will be accompanied by various Christmas moments and other 2006 'home school' photographs - enjoy!


(Older sister, now doing A Levels at school, modelling good reading practice ... reindeer antlers and all!)

Preliminary Plans for Early 2007

The basic plan for January through to Easter is to continue with the acquiring of literacy and numeracy - i.e. reading and writing the 45 Keywords for Foundation Stage (not following the National Curriculum and NLS slavishly, of course, but using them as a good enough guide at this stage) and being able to count objects up to 20 with reasonable consistency, do very simple addition under 10, some basic subtraction, plus consolidating their knowledge of the 2x Tables and putting it to practical use.



To that we’ll be adding the 10x Table, additional words beyond the Keywords, counting BACK in 2s and 10s, and starting work on some NEW projects. These include learning several popular and traditional poems off by heart - beginning with a personal favourite of mine, Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening’ - and doing some preliminary study on the Romans, in preparation for next year’s more concentrated work.



We have a reconstructed Roman Fort fairly near us (Coventry area) and an emphasis on Roman artefacts and lifestyle at our local museum (Rugby), so it should be easy to get the kids interested in the Romans without having to rely too heavily on books and worksheets. I also happen to be brushing up on my own school Latin at the moment, doing local evening classes, so I’ll even be able to introduce them to a few Latin words and phrases ... lucky them!



After starting off last term in a pretty military fashion, as I'm sure the Romans themselves would have done, i.e. insisting on academic work being done both morning and afternoon, life at ‘home school’ has eased off considerably in the past six weeks. We took a long half-term break and changed our working patterns substantially when we started again, doing the bulk of the day’s ‘sit-down’ work in the two hours after breakfast - since the boys are clearly better at academic study first thing in the morning - with less formal activities scheduled for the afternoon or even early evening.



Morning work is now usually worksheets and games/role-play or practical activities - finding ‘rhymes’ in oral poetry, shop play, counting with coins etc. In the afternoons, they tend either to play music - using our growing box of percussion instruments, many of them home-made - do exercise of one sort of another - after tiring of yoga for children, they now sometimes accompany me in doing DVD aerobics! - or do arts & crafts: drawing, painting, junk modelling, play-dough, bead threading, sock puppets, ‘theatre in a box’ etc.



When Dad was off sick recently, we took the opportunity to set up a home cafe, named Munchies Cafe by the boys, where they took it in turns to be chef and waiter. A menu board was created, meals priced up, a range of drinks and sandwiches actually made by one child while the other took the orders from their toddler sister, Mum & Dad, and finally, bills were drawn up with real coins exchanged.



Some adult supervision was, of course, necessary - especially when the sandwiches were being cut in half with a large bread knife! But overall, the boys managed most of the cafe ‘work’ on their own, and it was a very good experience for them.

Speak to you again in 2007!

Winter: Rhymes, Songs & Growing Another Year Older

This week we've been talking about winter and the seasons in general. It's actually still the tail-end of autumn here in Warwickshire, I suppose, but a few hard frosts earlier this month made me think it might be a good time to start discussing snow and hibernation etc.

So we've been learning a few easy songs/rhymes like this:

The North wind doth blow
And we shall have snow
And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing.
He'll sit in the barn
And keep himself warm,
Hiding his head 'neath his wing, poor thing.

These are probably not exactly the right words of that old English nursery rhyme but that's how I remembered them and the sentiment is about right. They always make me think of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, and the song of Winter:

WINTER

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
'Tu-who;
Tu-whit, Tu-who'- A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
'Tu-who;
Tu-whit, To-who'- A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.


So we talked about that too, and the kids, although not able to understand all the words, did find parts of it amusing! And marvellous too, a real country poem: owls and robins in the snow, shepherds, logs, and even milk frozen in the pail. It has such a lovely verbal texture too, so much rich imagery, Marian's red raw nose and those roasted crabs hissing in the bowl ...

We haven't yet had any snow, and long may it hold off, but here are the kids enjoying the snow last winter. We looked at these photos too and discussed how the children had changed, both physically and in terms of things learnt, how their knowledge of the world and themselves is expanding every year!

Half Term Update

Apologies for not having posted on this blog for a few weeks. Things have been hectic here and I've been changing over various of my other blogs to the new and improved Blogger Beta format, which takes several hours per blog. I have no plans to upgrade this blog for the moment; maybe nearer Christmas.


Play Dough time, which means plenty of mess!

The boys have been consolidating their learning over the past weeks since the last blog entry. We've just had an extended half term rest period, with Dad at home. Before that, continuing on with reading has been the order of the day.

D. has raced ahead with his word recognisition skills and is now on book 7 of the Ladybird Read With Me scheme - not bad, considering they only started the scheme back in early September.


D. on a roll .... a log roll!

By contrast, M. is taking his time. Not struggling, but definitely not confident enough with word recognition for me to push him too hard. He's on book 4 at the moment, and seems to enjoy his short but intensive daily reading sessions - so long as he's not taken away from some more interesting arts and craft activity in order to do his reading!

We've played some more Missing Vowel games, making it harder by using Consonant-Vowel-Vowel-Consonant words like 'look', 'book', tool' etc. We've also discussed dipthongs in some detail and filled out a number of activity sheets on the use of dipthongs, with pictures to be coloured in afterwards. The boys seem to enjoy these activities too, with their little sister joining in where she can.

Highlight of the past few weeks has to be my purchase of the Alphapet book, with accompanying CD, an alphabet-based animal 'story' which the kids follow in the book whilst listening to the CD. It's a fun activity for all of them, with colourful illustrations of animals, and there are also places for the boys to repeat words they're looking at in the book, to reinforce spelling etc.


Elementary, my dear mother.

Favourite new half term toys include a sort of Sherlock Holmes kit for them to play detectives, with a notebook and pen for clues, plus magnifying glasses. They've been watching Basil the Great Mouse Detective, and then searching the house for clues ...

A Quiet Week

It's been a quiet week, with plenty of going-out-to-town activities, which has effectively meant that not much work has been done on paper, apart from some more worksheets on using vowels and the two times table. In other words, it's been a time of consolidation rather than new projects.

Around the start of the week, we listened again to Peter and the Wolf; this time the kids played along using various percussion instruments, trying to match the 'mood' of the music and, of course, the story itself.

That entailed the kids using shakers, maracas, tambourines, a small African drum, and even a kazoo at one point, believe it or not. M. is rather good on the kazoo, having got the idea of it instantly. By contrast, D. is perplexed by it - as am I! I have promised to buy them a xylophone later this month - even the smallest ones are rather expensive! - which I'm hoping will lend depth and increased versatility to their music sessions. A worthwhile investment, I feel though, since all three children seem to enjoy making music and are taking better care of the instruments than I had thought possible, always returning them to the music box after our sessions and being careful not to drop or damage them.

After listening to the music, they drew some more pictures to accompany the story. This is D.'s wonderfully atmospheric take on Peter and the Wolf, the title being an unprompted addition to the picture. You can see here how his handwriting skills are developing!



We also tried more meals using wholemeal pasta and wholegrain rice this week. Jamie Oliver eat your heart out! To be honest, I was rather annoyed by the headteacher at the boys' prospective school when, in response to me saying we couldn't afford to pay for school meals for both of them - very expensive for two at once! - she recommended I try to find the money from somewhere, as 'it might be the only healthy meal they get all day'. Cheeky so-and-so!

Of course, the boys didn't go to school in the end, and so have missed out on these 'healthy' school meals. Luckily for them, I do actually insist on fresh vegetables at every meal. This is wholemeal pasta shapes with a fresh tomato and mushroom sauce, garnished with parsley from the pot outside the back door and followed by end-of-season apples just picked from our own trees. You don't get much fresher than that ...



We'll be having our 'half-term break' soon, but will return in about ten days or a fortnight with some more posts about our home school activities.

Literacy & Numeracy Take Over Other Activities

Having been reading some of the National Literacy & Numeracy Strategies for primary schools recently, I dropped some of the general knowledge topics on our agenda last week and concentrated on the basics of literacy and numeracy instead. Although I'm aware there's no need whatsoever to follow any national strategies like that, what I read in those documents made perfect sense to me and seemed like a good direction to take.

The boys will make much better progress, I'm sure, with general knowledge topics connected to science or geography or history etc., if they have already mastered the rudiments of reading and writing.

So we looked at vowels again, in more detail. We played a whole series of word games every day, on paper and on the whiteboard, such as Spot the Missing Vowel or Name this Dipthong! Of course, I kept it light and as basic as possible. They did not tend to use words of more than three letters for the first few days, looking at Consonant - Vowel - Consonant words until they seemed comfortable with the concept of vowels.



"We're Going on a Bear Hunt"

Missing Vowels:

w _ l k

w_ _ d

h _ t

d _ r k

b _ _ r


I then took the chance of introducing consonants. This is rather earlier than I had originally intended to introduce them, but the boys are going very well indeed with the current pace of work and I didn't want to hold them up. We sat down together and went through the entire alphabet in a book; the boys would read out each letter phonetically - they know them all off-by-heart now - and say whether or not it was a vowel. If it was NOT a vowel, I would write it on the whiteboard under the heading: CONSONANTS.

When they finished that exercise, we went through the list and thought up words that began with each consonant.

To finish up the week, I talked to the boys about simple dipthongs like 'ch' and 'sh', and our games moved on to longer common words such as 'shell', 'shoe', ship' and 'fish'. It was a moderately difficult exercise but useful in terms of drawing their attention to the length and shape of words, and to visual patterns inside the words themselves. We also touched on alliteration, thinking up lists of words beginning with the same letter. That was quite hard for them to do and I think perhaps a few games of 'I spy' might help them associate the 'sounds' of words like chair and table with the actual look of the initial letter. After all, their understanding of the world has been based around sounds so far; with the advent of reading it has to shift more towards visuals.

As for numeracy, I'm extremely pleased with their progress. Both boys can now count up to 20 with fair consistency and have started to learn the full rote of the 2 x Table, whereas before they were only counting in twos up to ten. Indeed, M. counts in twos at every opportunity. After a dodgy start at home schooling, due to a learning disability, I think he's now showing a real flair for mathematics, and the fact that he's better at something than his brother has given him a great deal of new confidence, which is spilling over into the literacy side of things, so that his reading is now improving at almost the same rate as his numeracy!



Amazing what a little healthy competition can do between twin brothers, though I'm sure the more politically correct attitude these days would be to discourage competition. But if it works and gets him trying harder, then I see no harm in it. It worked for the Kennedy family ...

We'll be back to normal activities in another fortnight, or at least once I feel the boys have really taken on board the skills required for basic competency in literacy and numeracy. I'm sure this new regime - with plenty of viva voce activities and board games - can do nothing but good.

Weather Graphs, Missing Vowels and Petals on the Wind

I am amazed at how quickly the boys have been able to pick up on the concept of a block graph; I can't imagine being able to comprehend something like that at their age. But what I anticipated being quite a difficult mathematics task has turned out to be one of the easiest so far.

This is how it worked. Last week, we kept a daily record of the weather, and this week, the boys helped me analyse the results and make up their very first graph to display those results at a glance.

To gather the information, we kept a record of each day's weather by ticking a box to indicate Rain, Sun, Wind or Cloud. Today, exactly one week later, we added up how many ticks each type of weather had received, and turned the results into this simple block graph, pictured below.



After the graph, we continued with last week's work on vowels, mainly playing 'spot the missing vowel' in a variety of simple Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words. This is a board-based activity they seem to be enjoying immensely -- which is just as well, as I've drawn up some 'Missing Vowel' worksheets for them to complete later this week!

They then spent some time playing with the dressing-up box, which led to requests for me to find the 'How to be a Ballet Dancer' DVD. This is them trying to be little petals on the wind ...

Autumn on the way ...

We'll be doing far more on autumn next month, but I decided to touch on it the other day, having found some fallen acorns whilst walking in Rugby. We don't have any oak trees near us, though we do have some vast horse-chestnut trees, so it seemed a good time to talk about different trees and their individual leaf shapes and seed types. We touched on human DNA too, talking about inherited characteristics like eye and hair colour, height, nose and ear shapes etc. (Particularly relevant to the boys as poor D. has inherited his father's over-sized ears!) My drawings of different leaf shapes on the white board are not exactly marvellous, but luckily, I don't think the kids noticed ...

We found some horse-chestnut leaves and conkers still in their shells, as well as lying fallen and shiny in the grass - such wonderful things, conkers! Discussions included branch size and why acorns are attached by such slender stems, while the heavier conkers need a thick stem.

Soon we'll be able to gather more leaves, as their colours change and they start to fall in earnest, so we can then do leaf-rubbings with wax crayons and maybe some associated 'sorting' games according to size, colour, shape, type of tree, etc.




But harvest time is here, certainly, even if the weather's still too warm some days to be entirely autumnal. We have a local church harvest festival this weekend, with an auction of fresh produce after the service. Meanwhile, at home, our own apples are begging to be picked, and although there are far more than we can possibly manage to eat alone, we went out the other day to gather a few bowlfuls from the three apple trees in our back garden.

We also discussed general harvesting techniques again, after covering it last week - we've actually been able to watch the farmers bringing in the various harvests from our back garden, as we're surrounded by farming land here - and then used the apples we'd picked in a counting activity later that day.

This is one of the older apple trees, bent and gnarled, but extremely fertile. Perfect fruit for pies and crumbles ...

Two Times Snakey and other activities

It's been a busy second week of 'home school' here. The boys are settling in nicely to the routine and are growing to appreciate the release of Saturdays and Sundays, which I have decided will be non-school days for the moment. That may change in the future but just now it provides a useful break for everyone.

I am very pleased with their progress overall, and the fact that they have embraced the concept of home school so willingly and with good application. Some days I have even been able to get some work of my own done - I'm a writer - while the kids were engaged in time-consuming tasks like giant puzzle-making, painting and drawing, and the odd counting worksheet complete with pots of buttons/marbles/coins etc.


2 x Snakey
Now that the boys are fairly comfortable with numbers 1 - 20, I've upped the stakes. Using a Times Table suggestions book for 5-7 year olds, I've adapted an idea for the 2x Table and made this simple 'game' for the boys.

We call it the ... drum-roll, please ... "2 x SNAKEY" Game.




It's not really a game, as the boys are not yet au fait with how to use a set of dice. Instead, each player picks a button at random out of the yoghurt pot and reads the sticker on it, which has either 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 x 2 on it. They then have to match the sum to the answer on the snake board, i.e. 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10. There's no winner, but if they match the button correctly, they get a 'star' on our 'star system' which adds up over the week from play activities like this.

As they get better at doing the first 5 sums, I'll then start including the buttons for the second 5, to take us through to number 20 on the snake.

It was simple and quick to make, using a vast hoard of old buttons generously donated by our local sewing store, and a couple of pieces of yellow card sellotaped together on the back, with a snake roughly drawn and coloured in to provide the answers to the 2x Table.

This game was greatly faciliated by the purchase of a £3 Times Table tape from, you've guessed it, Sainsbury's. It features cheery music which the kids love and are already engaging with, and even I. joins in, though I'm sure she has little idea what 1 x 2 actually means!

DICTIONARY WORK
We also did some written work this week. D.'s ability to write words is expanding at an enormous rate. He was reading a Richard Scarry dictionary book a few days ago and suddenly asked for a pencil and paper. He then started to copy out words at randomn from the dictionary, sometimes asking me for help in how to pronounce them or to explain the accompanying pictures.




M. followed suit in a rather less confident fashion - he's not keen on reading and writing, but does LOVE having stories read to him. Something to build on there.

Art Attack!
The usual art activities happened this week too. They had paint available at the Friday afternoon session, which was not entirely successful, as they need close supervision to make painting really work for their skill level, and I desperately needed some time to work so had to leave them alone with it for about twenty minutes! They didn't make that much mess, amazingly, but I did feel afterwards that no great progress had been made towards controlling paint and using it for specific purposes rather than just mixing it randomly together and splodging the resultant greeny-brown mush about on paper. Still, I expect they learnt something there about what happens when you mix four different paint colours together; you get the same greeny-brown mush every time.




I'll be covering primary and secondary colours with them next month. Slowly. With aprons and floor coverings in place.

Making Labels

In the run-up to the traditional time when we think about autumn and the harvest, we talked about food and food labelling this week. We started by looking at tins of sweetcorn - purely because I happened to have bought a multipack of sweetcorn, which meant the three children could each have a tin of their own to look at while we discussed what was on the label.

We talked about food preparation words and symbols: storage, microwave or hob, cooking time, best before dates, even nutritional information. Then I peeled off one of the labels so they could see it was actually a rectangle in shape, but when curled round the tin it became cylindrical. That got them interested!

Their pens, paper, glue etc. were all close at hand, so we got some things out of the cupboard and started to make our own labels. D.'s prototype label was peas, but he wanted to do a better one, so we stuck that on a tin of pilchards. He then chose the safe option of sweetcorn, M. wanted 'chocolate peas' in his tin, and their younger sister stoutly insisted that hers was just 'red food'.



Using the old label I'd peeled off as a template, I cut out some 'labels' for each child on coloured paper and reminded them about the food preparation, storage and nutritional information that could appear on their labels. (I thought coloured paper was better than plain white, as it conceals the huge amount of space often left unused when younger children are drawing!)

When the labels were finished, I helped with the lettering on M.'s label, and his sister's, and then we stuck them onto the tins with glue. D. did a very good job, I felt, writing all the words himself and drawing a very creditable image of sweetcorn in between 'sweet' and 'corn'.



TIP: Apart from the one I had already removed, I left the other labels underneath the home-made labels, so it wouldn't be too much of a magical mystery meal whenever someone decided to open them in the future!

Birmingham ArtsFest Trip

It was the Birmingham ArtsFest this last weekend, so we took the boys into Birmingham for the day - about an hour's drive. It was a culture shock for them, being rather more used to sheep and wide open fields than skyscrapers and large numbers of people, especially in Centenary Square where most of the ArtsFest stalls were and where a huge open-air stage had been erected for the weekend, but they coped with it well. Both boys loved the big bull statue at the head of the Bullring, and the amazing architecture on display all around them. They also loved the doughnut stand beneath the Birmingham Eye wheel!

We spent half an hour in this absolutely vast branch of Borders bookshop in the Bullring, then ate a picnic lunch near St. Martin's Church, which was fairly quiet - in contrast to the busier end of town that day.




We could have spent much longer in the bookshop, the boys were enjoying it so much, wanting to explore everything, but alas, one of my older children needed to get to a Royal Shakespeare Company stage fighting workshop. Since it was a family event, we went along as a group, and the boys thoroughly enjoyed that too. They watched the RSC cast demonstrate everything from pretending to punch someone to 'mock' fighting with staffs, and were particularly amused when their big sister volunteered to 'kick' one of the actors in the head.

Naturally, we talked to them afterwards about it being all pretend, and dangerous to try at home, but I fear M. may have picked up some sneaky pointers for his frequent tussles with D.





Having bought some books at Borders, we talked about money and coins when we got home. The boys were introduced to the 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins. They made rubbings in their maths books and labelled each coin rubbing.





Tomorrow they will be playing shop, using the same coins in exchange for pretend goods and putting our recent discussions about 'adding and subtracting' to practical use.

Chalky & Co.

Outside Artwork

It was fine weather so the boys spent several hours outside this afternoon. Chalks in various colours were handed out for freestyle artwork. This is D's chalk drawing of the Iron Man (after the Ted Hughes' story of the same name) who 'might come alive at night' according to D.


By contrast, M. wanted to play dead. He fell off the roof, apparently. Hence the chalk outline, drawn by D. -- M. kept wriggling so it's a bit wobbly in places. They have a macabre sense of humour.

Garden Sports

M & D have only recently mastered the tricky art of hopping with both feet together. Their little sister does an odd sort of trot instead, but tries to keep up with her brothers. To encourage them all to practise two-foot hopping, they did some hopping in and out of hoops on the grass first, then took part in a sack race.

M. won. He always does!



A Home School Mum and her Money are Soon Parted?
Tesco's Sports Day Kit for 4 children, bought on sale last month for £1.97, reduced by about six pounds: sacks, beanbags, egg & spoon, starter's flag, ankle ties, ground stakes. Excellent value.

Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow

This is not quite a tiny acorn, nor will it result in a giant oak, but about six weeks ago, when I made the decision to home school my four year old twin sons, I made a point of reading up on the National Curriculum and then reproducing various detailed plans which would allow me to follow a similar route through what is known as the 'reception' year.

Now, I know perfectly well that I don't need to follow the National Curriculum. I can teach 'em to play a paper-comb and the spoons if I like, and leave reading and writing until they're ten. But my motto is 'If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it' and if some poor soul - or rather, group of poor souls - has spent many months putting together a carefully crafted curriculum for four to five year olds which will cover the basics in the minimum of time, then why on earth should I try to devise my own curriculum?

I would very much like my sons to learn things off the beaten track, things which they could never possibly hope to learn in a state infant school, especially given D.'s voracious and inquiring mind, but I think being able to read and write to at least a rudimentary level is an essential step towards that ideal. So I've cherry-picked the most important parts of the National Curriculum and put together some basic schemes of work.

Following this are the patterns of learning I've put together, weaving together the best elements on the way toward an overall scheme for the next three months, taking us to Christmas:


SEPTEMBER 2006: Preliminary ideas
Create booklet of ‘feelings’
Look at own baby photos
Contact other Home Ed families
Learn ‘alphabet’ song
Parts of the Body (Draw round child & label drawing - chalk outside if dry)
Health/Harvest
Introduce food groups
Past/Present
Create notice board for This Week,Last Week, Next Week
Colours(Primary & Secondary colours)

The above plan follows ideas I've seen elsewhere for the first few weeks of school under the National Curriculum for Reception. The one below seems a logical response to the boys' basic need for literacy & numeracy as fast as possible.


September 2006: Literacy & Numeracy

Numeracy:
Counting to 10
Writing numerals 1 - 10
Addition & Subtraction: simple sums under 10

Literacy:
Learn to write own first name
Introducing the Alphabet:
focus on one section per week (recognition)


This early planning has fallen by the wayside in most places, as I've spent the summer teaching the boys (most of) the alphabet and counting to 10; they have also started writing numerals, reaching 5 so far. D. is able to write M.'s name extremely well, oddly enough, but not his own. I wonder if that's a common phenomenon with twins. Although he clearly dislikes using pencils and is easily distracted, M. can write a shortened version of his name, with encouragement.

As for general literacy, both boys have shot ahead of my modest initial scheme with amazing alacrity.

D. is now able to read basic texts and is partway through the fifth book in the Ladybird 'Read With Me' scheme - not as trendy as the Oxford Reading Tree but a solid introduction to reading (plus a friend happened to give us a number of the Ladybird Readers for free!) - and I have also started looking at stand-alone library books in the early reader category with him.

M. has just finished the first book in the Ladybird scheme, and although he relies heavily on context and the pictures, he is still making good progress. Far better progress, in fact, than I could have imagined at the start of the summer!

Which brings me to the more detailed Weekly Plans, of which the following is an example based on our current work.

NB. The 'shop game' refers to a nice little shopping basket of pretend food items I bought on offer recently from Sainsbury's and a plastic till with accessories from Tesco's: £8 approx. for the two. I normally buy home school materials from charity shops wherever possible - especially puzzles, books and old board games - but couldn't resist the price reduction on these two items.


WEEKLY PLAN: Week commencing 5th September

Tuesday
Create a personal timeline, using ‘old’ and ‘new’ items
& photos. Discuss ‘growing up’.
Learn to write the number 5
Playing at shop - introduce money/food exchange
Yoga for kids (a library DVD rented this week only) - 20 mins

Wednesday
Introduce Parts of the Body (draw round body outside
using chalk if dry enough)
Do self-portrait page in red booklet (a personal record)
Sorting food items from ‘shop’ game into groups:
tins/bottles/boxes & solids/liquids etc.
Do preliminary ‘seasons’ work in science books
Yoga for kids - 20 mins

Thursday
Learn to write the number 6
Fill out another page in red booklet (personal record)
Make 4 page booklet of ‘feelings:
happy/sad/angry/afraid using pencilled faces
Music time: ‘5 Currant Buns’ song
Yoga for kids - 20 mins

Friday
Talk about This Week/Next Week:
create a timeline to show past/future activities
Consolidate earlier alphabet work:
the goal is to write letters a - g by tracing dotted letters
Yoga for kids - 20 mins


Daily Activities
Running in tandem with this weekly plan are daily activities which echo the idea of a daily literacy & numeracy session, starting off with 10 - 15 mins one-on-one reading time for each child and a joint mental arithmetic session of about 10 mins.

As far as physical development is concerned, we have a large garden here and running about in it freely for an hour or more is also a key part of each day, with indoor alternatives available for bad weather - hoop/beanbag/yoga/sofa-abseiling & other similar physical activities. All of which their younger sister is happy to join in with, and being quite a strapping girl for two and half years old, is at more or less the same level as D. at least in terms of physical development.

So, we're all set here for the start of 'term' - no doubt the pace will begin to slacken somewhat within a few weeks, but just at the moment, even the boys are quite excited at the thought of 'home schooling with Mum' ...

Welcome to our Home School blog!

I am a mother of five, educating twin sons at home who should have started school this September, 2006. I am neither new to home schooling nor to blogging, but this is my first home education blog. This blog has been created as an aide-memoire more than anything else, and also for posting up photos of our home school activities and details of what we plan to study. It's not aimed at anyone in particular but if other home schoolers or people curious about home education stumble across it in the course of browsing the net, I hope it amuses and provides a few ideas.

My decision to remove my two boys from their intended school came after visiting the school on several occasions and finding several members of staff hostile and patronising. This, I feel, was in response to my natural concern that one of my sons, who has special needs, would not fall easily into step at this very tightly-run school, whose emphasis was firmly on academic results rather than creative development. Several unfortunate incidents during his visits to the school alarmed me, and finding the head teacher almost as uncooperative as the teaching staff made me take the rather drastic decision to home school both of them.

It is true that I could have found an alternative school at the last minute, but I was suspicious that this problem would simply have recurred at another school, given the current school climate which is so biased towards academic results above all else. Also, I have home educated my children before, at various stages of their lives - I have two grown-up daughters as well as three children under five - so I saw nothing to be afraid of in keeping my sons at home, at least for a year or two, possibly longer.

Ironically, I do actually believe in academic progress and results, but achieved in a less militarised atmosphere! So the activity plans and posts on this blog may come quite close to those of a typical Reception class curriculum at times, but the way they are carried out will be in a laid-back home schooling style. Which means that if my son with special needs can't keep up with the daily activities, it will be fine to cover old ground with him and consolidate his learning while his twin brother steams ahead with new work. This has always been the pattern in their learning so far and I see no reason to change now.

My home education plans are always kept flexible. So while months, weeks and even days are planned in advance, usually linking in with the seasons and annual festivals, there is nothing to stop us switching activities from one week to another, or dropping an activity which proves boring or fruitless. Some weeks we may not work at all on academic subjects, but follow a special project instead.

This lack of rigid structure is quite normal in home schooling, if you have never come across such a regime before. After all, as all home schoolers will tell you, one solid hour of learning at home can equal three or even more hours of learning at school. This is mainly because crowd control and other en masse activities - dozens or hundreds of kids queuing for lunch, queuing for assembly, waiting their turn to read - do not exist at home. I can also give one-to-one attention where necessary without having to move on to the next child before the lesson has been thoroughly understood, unlike busy teachers in a large Reception class.

I hope you enjoy this blog. Do leave comments below posts if you wish, and I will reply where possible.