A Learning Experience to Remember: August 2021-August 2022

This has been a great weekend: with lots of family time, hours of garden time, and two nature walks. They loved showing off their woodland spoils to their friend next door. There's been an extraordinary number of bubble baths due to them coming in from the garden absolutely filthy from top to toe, and they filled a washing basket just between them! As our learning journey moves forward constantly and weekends are not traditionally recognised, there was plenty of home educating to counterbalance the outdoor adventures.  We woke up our sleepy brains with a good Spanish session which all three children are loving and picking up fast. This morning we had several renditions of Jack Hartmann musical educational videos on colours and alphabet. We sang 1-100, and looked at days of the week for the first time. I also sang a Spanish song about colours to them which I am sure they will learn quickly, if only to stop mum singing it to them. Breakfast time approached and as they sit round the f...

If you go down to the steps today, you're in for a big surprise.....Around the corner from our house lies a short flight of steps which leads us down to the local canal walk and to the children it's like stepping into a magical world. We step on to the path and there's two choices, shall we travel to the left or the right of the path, as both directions promise different adventures.  Let's initially turn to the left and picture the following scene: a long winding path following the canal which is a beautiful stretch of water, home to a number of ducks. The sides are adorned with an abundance of blackberry bushes, the black fruit gleaming in the sun tempting us for an impromptu snack. The girls can recognise them now , but they always check with us first, it's our first year of foraging with them. We discovered two bushes of what looked like black currants today, one looked unsafe with green pus oozing out of the berry when it was squeezed, and one had familiar red j...

This particular day started at 4.30am, with Xander marching round the bed chanting the alphabet. I stumbled downstairs and my personal educational journey commenced at this ridiculous time in the morning as I quickly realised that Xanders stomach tube had broken, so his morning meds were hitting the floor rather than his stomach. I replaced the peg end for the first time ever by myself whilst half asleep and it worked! Medicines and feeds could once again commence. Where's the coffee!  The English session consisted of Kira finishing of her Farm animal reading book and reading the entire of Shirley Hughes 'Sally's Secrets', aimed at an aged five reader. We finished reading and discussing the horse project book and watched some show jumping on YouTube. Sophia later wrote a few sentences dictated to her, incorporating a mix of common words, basic punctuation, and words from the 'At', 'It', 'Ow', 'In', 'On' and 'En' families. ...

Greetings dear readers, I cannot recommend learning spelling via the word family method enough, it is really working well with Sophia who struggles with retaining spellings more than a few moments after she's told you. I dictated a couple of sentences to her using a mix of common words and words from the 'At', 'Ow' and 'It' families, as well as basic punctuation. She could use the tools she's learnt so far with a mix of phonics and word families to write it out for me, just needing the odd reminder on spacing. She was so excited when she saw the finished article and proudly read it back to me.  They wanted educational play lists on then, and Spanish was the consensus. Jack Hartmann has a really good, fun, catchy video on Spanish Colours which is a family favourite. Xander recognised the language and started telling us 1-7 in Spanish unexpectedly, toddlers are such sponges, they really do take in far more from their surroundings then we realise. He also r...

There are times currently when my son has to spend prelonged periods of time in hospital, and my previous post discussed how I continue to teach him through illness and in a different environment than his normal one at home. This second part of the topic will cover how the learning journey continued going forward at home for the girls when I was not with them for days/weeks on end.  There are several reasons why I teach all year round, rather than following more traditional set holiday times throughout the year which falls in line with schools. One important reason however is the anticipation of long spells of illness within our family. It is not just be frequent hospital visits or long hospital stays, which can interrupt our learning journey, but also when my children fall ill even with the simplest cold they are made incredibly poorly and subsequently it can take far longer for them to recover than normal, and the resulting work flow is put on hold until status quo resumed once m...

There are times currently when my three year old has to spend prelonged periods of time in hospital. This two part blog post covers how we balance moving the learning experience outside the family routine for Xander and how it continues going forward at home for the girls when their regular teacher is gone for days/weeks on end.  We have just faced a prelonged separation within our family, whereby Xander and I were in isolation in hospital for seven weeks, and since then we have had a further two week stay. The easy solution would be to forget about teaching in this situation, he was in grave danger of dying, and enduring chemo and total body radiation. Likewise the girls were dealing with the trauma of losing their mum and brother for a long period of time. However as a family we believed that maintaining normality would be the best way for us all to get through this tough time. He was too young to have the official teaching support which is in place for school aged children, so I...