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!
