I am new to home ed. I freely admit that. This has become a learning experience for us all. Number bonds, partitioning, rounding up, rounding down...and that's just the mathematics. When I decided to home educate I made a plan. (Yes, you experienced HEers can laugh here if you want to.)
I haven't stuck to that plan, but I have modified it along the way, even in the short space of time we have been doing this it has become painfully obvious that what I initially thought HE would be like is nothing like what it is really like. I hope you followed that garbled sentence.
Incentives (Ok, ok, bribery) work well - "if you do this, we can do that" type of thing. When I first started I was on a HE high, but recently I feel I am not doing it right - is this normal? There is this little whispery voice that keeps saying "she is learning nothing".
I think it is also the menace of Christmas just around the corner. This is not like me, I love Christmas normally. This year though I keep on thinking "do we have to?" It just seems that Christmas started in some shops - Tesco for example - at the beginning of September. I have Christmas fatigue and it is only the middle of November. I have started shopping online and having it all sent to husbands work office - he is going to come back from his travels to santa's grotto.
To counter this continually evolving plan we have done the following today: some maths website games (rounding up or down numbers to the nearest 10), we read and illustrated a chapter of "Our Island History", made Roman lamps out of salt dough, found out that the Celts all ran away to Cornwall - according the the Faces of Britain and made marmalade, all before lunch time. Now, we are doing media studies in the form of a dvd. Translation: we are vegging out together.
And so the birth of a new plan entitled: Less is More.
4 comments:
sound like you're learning lots to me :)
i do find it has a rhythm, we have - and need - more 'fallow' days. Melissa Whiley (google her, you'll find her blog. or i have a link to it on mine) talks about tidal - high tide and low tide days. made sense for me :)
I don't just have a HE plan. Every night before I go to bed I have a plan for the next day, HE, chores, food, it never works out but I'm not going to give up. One day, a whole day will go to my plan!
Oh yes I would definitely recommend reading the Melissa Whiley articles on tidal homeschooling. They're fantastic. I find the more I plan the more stressed I get that we aren't getting everything done and so I seem to plan even more and so goes a vicious circle.
At the moment we have having some downtime as we have just moved back to England and are waiting to move house but they are still doing stuff themselves.
So far today they found some leaves at the bus stop and were looking at the different colours, been to the library and chosen some books, Josh brought nuts for the birds and Ellie got some pork scratchings for daddy. Josh got the right money out of my purse for the bus fare back and they are now playing with their cuddly toys in the dining room. This afternoon we are going squirrel hunting in the park.
So we are very much on a low tide at the moment and treating it like we are on holiday here and rediscovering places to visit but I know that once we get moved house again in the New Year we will be back to a High Tide.
oh, i forgot to add, we tend to have a monthly theme - it's reptiles at the mo, and it was battle of hastings last month and victorians the month before.
This gives them - and more importantly me - a focus, so if nothing's planned, we've got somewhere to start in thinking of places to go or books to get.
Post a Comment