!schooling 0000 Brahe 25 - 0000 01 Copernicus | Feb 11-15

• home education

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Seeing as I’m rejigging everything else anyway I think when I throw the boulders back in the river it will be following theAbysmal Calendar. It’s going to make date conversions interesting (suppose I better write that module at some stage) but even in the current rudimentary stages I’m finding date projections and calculations easier with theAbysmal than with the Gregorian (where I need to look at the calendar because it doesn’t always visualise correctly in my head). Yes I have actually had a plan for this year (since November in fact), no I haven’t written it down and sorted out all the final details yet, I’m working on it.

8yo

Had this brilliant idea for a bubble blowing drum. Excitedly told me about it, I listened and then suggested he draw me a diagram with labels as I wasn’t going to remember all that (and he might not later either). He scurried off with half a ream of A4 paper (which I retrieved and left him with three sheets). He made a title page and provided two labelled diagrams (top and side views) and asked me to 3d it.

I told him I needed measurements to 3d and he added to the title page that the thing was “about 7in”. Why he wanted to count in inches is beyond me. He really, really needs to work on his writing and now that he’s reading fluently (though he still likes to complain about anything he construes as a large block of text being “too hard”, I have seen him parsing large blocks of texts without looking like it’s too difficult when he wants to) I feel okay working more on that. I didn’t want to push it too much before as he was already struggling with reading and epic meltdowns seemed to send us backwards.

Got back into playing Pokemon on his DS. After he’d asked me several questions about various moves I got suspicious and looked over his shoulder. As suspected, he was looking through his HM/TM list. I said to him “You see that big block of text you’re refusing to read at the moment? That will tell you what it does.” Haven’t heard from him since. He then came to me asking when “Kink” evolved. I said I had no idea and to look it up. So he sat at the laptop and the following occurred:

8yo: how do you spell when?
me: w - h - e - n.
8yo: how do you spell does?
me: d - o - e - s.
8yo: how do you spell kink?
me: …you’re on your own there. Go look in your pokedex.
[8yo scurries off to get his DS]
8yo: what’s that weird thing between the k and the i?
me: an L. It’s “klink” apparently.
8yo: how do you spell evolve?
[this one takes a few goes]

He eventually gets a results page and sure enough proves his ability to parse large blocks of text when it suits him when he picks out the required number from the results and goes off feeling pleased that he only has one more level to gain before his Klink evolves. Then of course the next order of business was finding out when the evolution evolved and this time the answer wasn’t in the blurbs on the result set. He asked me and I told him to read the blurbs and work out which one to click on to get the answer and it wasn’t a multichoice quiz, he could just back out and pick a different one if the one he clicked on first didn’t have the answer.

One night he had nightmares about giant spiders, so we had this long rambly conversation starting with why it was physically impossible for a spider to get as large as they did in his nightmare, and somehow progressed on to talking about crocodiles not having changed much since the time of the dinosaurs and fairly recently discovered submerged cities that are several thousand years old creating potential problems for anthropology as we know it.

A lot of bread gets eaten in this house. 8yo enjoys making bread so it’s usually his job to make some when we run out before the next shop or just whenever he feels like it. All through last year he required minimal supervision and the occasional help with a hard word and this year he was able to get most of the ingredients down from the pantry himself due to being taller, and didn’t need any help at all with reading or measurements (aside from asking which was the teaspoon and which the tablespoon). He threw me momentarily when he was saying he needed “one and four” cups of milk powder. He does actually know what a quarter is, just not the name for it, so I ran through the idea of cutting up an apple and followed through the following morning with fruit and paper problems.

He flew through his maths workbook pages and while I said at the time that he could finish the book if he wanted, I’m now seriously contemplating just moving him onto his new books and giving the old one to 6yo. There was a minor kerfuffle with the English workbook as I’d moved them and he couldn’t find his Reading Eggs book, I found an Excel Reading and Comprehension one for 6-8yos which I’m pretty sure was for him so he got into that. I initially got him to go through the word lists at the beginning of the book marking off what words he knew (most of them in the first three lists), and then we realised how many lists there were and jumped to the first exercise. Once more as I suspected he reads fine, he read the questions to me unhesitatingly except for a couple of unfamiliar words and some places where he wasn’t sure if the letter he was looking at was a d or a b. I was rather surprised to discover he can actually write neatly when he has to, such as when being forced to write on short lines and inside boxes. We’ve started writing in his journal for writing practice, and when he writes just to write down his ideas he generally writes well; a few letters are malformed or incorrectly executed (says the person who sometimes dashes ts and ls upside down when the preceding letter is e or a) and the case is all over the place depending on what he feels more comfortable writing, and when he’s writing fast to get an idea down fast it starts to get bigger (filling up three lines instead of two). We play Minecraft immediately afterwards so he’s been approaching journal writing enthusiastically even if he whinges all the way through as I push the proper case and punctuation.

6yo

Made a huge mess three glitter paintings, one of which was primarily green tones. Most of the mess was due to forgetting to put down newspaper first. As I was helping her clean up I again observed the absolute necessity of moving the pantry shelf from the dining room and replacing it with a bookshelf to put all their workbooks and some other miscellany on.

She sat on the floor next to me for ages playing with the money in her wallet, trying to add up how much she had and working out how many cents in a dollar.

I’ve cut her down to one page of maths workbook per session as she is using an addition/subtraction book aimed at 10-12yos (she picked it from the bookshop as apparently the age appropriate one I showed her was “too easy” when she glanced through it, so I told her to find one that had some stuff she could do and some stuff she couldn’t), and while she’s going through the exercise fine it’s really taxing her. Getting her to read or write is no problem, need to work on her word spacing and I’m going to very gently start pushing appropriate use of case.

4yo

While I was playing Minecraft with the big kids he happily informed me that I had so many of each item in the quick inventory, which was cute up to the point where he helpfully kept me updated while I was in the middle of building something and the numbers kept changing rapidly.

Told him we were doing maths and he should get his “lion” book (the Excel maths book for 3-4yos has a picture of a lion cub on the cover) but he decided he was going to do a Reading Eggs book instead and spent the session happily tracing letters and joining up photographs of things to the letter they started with.

Found out why Reading Eggs wasn’t working on his account (he’d been happily clicking on the “block” tabs that Adblock puts on Flash items) and remedied, so he’s now back in full power.

Altogether now

The two big kids independently assembled Pokemon decks (8yo helped 6yo out) and play tested them.

We took a trek out to Wilkinson Homestead to organise a homeschool excursion which was orignally slated for next month but after being there a while I agreed with the curator that April or June (May was booked out) was a much better option. Went on an extremely quick explore as it was hot and the kids were restless. 8yo and 6yo absorbed a bit, don’t think 4yo got anything as he was struggling with “don’t touch” for most of it.

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