And just as you're enjoying the nice blissful month of no weekly posts from bek, we're starting again! Anyway we're about midyear so this is part catch-up and part vague plan for the rest of the year.
We had one week of staggered flu (nothing too serious, just lots of sleeping, lethargy and general blarginess) followed by a week of gastro (again not too serious in the grand scheme, the kids were a bit lethargic but not listless, the biggest issue was the washing machine choosing to break down immediately before the gastro hit and it was out of action for a couple of weeks), followed by a short week (thanks to a public holiday) of me taking it easy because I was exhausted from the previous two, followed by a week of Josh catching a really bad flu and then a week of me catching a much milder version of that flu which technically only lasted a day, I just chose to take the rest of the week easy. We did have a few bouts of okay or mostly okay in that period fortunately.
During that period all learning was conversational with a bout of practicality in the form of me finally kicking off a Changeling: The Dreaming campaign I'd loosely discussed with a couple of other homeschoolers. The players were my big two (8 and 6) and a friend's three (15, 10 and 8). I thought I'd written enough notes for two sessions as I figured the 10 and unders would only last an hour. I was wrong, we broke after an hour and after a quick break they wanted to keep going. Usually with adults if I'm running a game we do more roleplaying than roll playing and use the dice where chancey things are involved. The kids actually enjoyed rolling and kept asking when it was their turn to roll so I did end up calling dice rolls for everything I could call rolls for. Breaking it down into Educationese for those who need it:
Each child has a character sheet containing stats on character attributes (strength etc) and skills (archery etc) as well as notes such as what their character looks like (though none of the kids have this filled in yet) and what they're carrying (I drew up the character sheets for the younger ones and gave each a choice of a Treasure or a Chimerical Companion, they have to write down anything extra they pick up etc). During dice rolls they were told to do things like roll "perception plus alertness" and they would have to find the relevant stats (reading/English) and then add the dots together (maths/addition) to work out how many dice they needed to roll. After rolling I would then tell them the target number and they would then find all the "success" dice that are equal to or higher than that number and reject the ones below that number (maths/sorting numbers). If they'd rolled any 1s, those were botches and would cancel a success so they would then have to remove a success dice for every botch (maths/manipulating numbers). If they'd rolled any 10s they get an extra roll and any successes generated from the extra roll is added to the total number of successes (maths/addition). Then of course there was the roleplaying itself which required getting into their characters (drama!) and turn taking and paying attention to what other people and their characters were doing (social skills).
I then tried to get my sprogs to write up their roleplaying notes with a lot of drama and difficulty and tears. It eventually entered into my thick skull to ask if they would find it easier if I told them what to write til they got better and more fluent at writing and would have to think less about the actual writing and more on what they wanted to write. Both agreed so I wrote out some notes for Tao on one side of his exercise book and told him to copy which he proceeded to do quite well while I sat down with Ru and told her what to write, including helping with spelling. I also nagged both about correct case. Tao needs to keep practising but his writing looked better when he was forced to use proper case, and Ru's writing improved drastically.
In the roleplaying game I sat at the playground. I saw three kids playing. We ran away from some shadow monsters. I made a portal. I danced around a big tree. We stayed over at someone's house.
There is a week in between the two samples. I then got told by a friend that knows these things that teaching writing in this way was part of Classical education, which I hadn't looked at that closely and realised after looking it up that Josh has (knowingly or otherwise but probably knowingly) been teaching them logic and rhetoric. We'll be doing weekly writing practice in this fashion after roleplaying sessions in addition to their bookwork-for-pocket-money. Ru tends to do extra writing practice on her own by writing lists of names (anything from weekdays to people that are in the house at that point in time to her friends).
The bookwork-for-pocket-money stalled completely while the various plagues were whisking through the house, and after I tried to restart it was met with much recalcitrance. They would do something eventually but often not what they'd been asked (they would "feel like" doing maths on "English nights" for example) so we agreed that they would get a "this week" and "next week" box and all the books would go into the "this week" box and they could pull out whatever each night and put that book into the "next week" box when done.
It was also That Time Of Year again (we have several in any given year) where we reshuffle stuff to try and make everything work slightly more efficiently for everyone. I discussed a weekly timetable with the bigs and while Tao was at Auskick training, Ru and I sat down and wrote out a timetable on A4 paper and she attached it to the fridge under their chores list along with Tao's footy fixtures. Our weeks from next week til we go to Christmas Island for three weeks and then after we get back from Christmas Island are going to involve:
- visiting my grandmother (the kids' "Great Nanny") who is suffering dementia or something similar and has some pretty bad short term memory issues. What my aunty and I noted when I was visiting regularly last year was that she seemed to improve a little watching the kids scurry around the place like maniacs. I actually feel a bit bad about this as I was intending on visiting regularly this entire year and have never quite organised myself enough to do it
- visiting a dear friend on the way back from Great Nanny's. This family used to homeschool, a new baby and various other stresses has led them to pop the kids into school for the rest of the year and re-evaluate next year. In the meantime our kids miss each other so we've organised weekly catchups after school
- "library day". Usually Josh will rampage into the library at some point either on the weekend or after work and doesn't have a whole lot of time to spend there. The vague plan is to hang out in the kids' section and let the kids play some puzzles and board games and puppets and possibly read a couple of books while there before choosing 1-2 books to take home to read. Ideally the books will be on weekly rotation though obviously if we don't finish a book that will be kept and the child only gets one book out the following week
- Hubscursions (Learning Hub Excursions). The WANLN "Learning Hub" (not to be confused with a couple of other Learning Hubs that operate in various locations around the Perth area, it's a popular name for homeschool groups for some reason) has a committee of two of us with input from a third and an offer of input from a fourth as required. We managed to miss all of last term's museum trips due to the plagues, so will plan what's going on this coming term. Basically it's a weekly trip to the same location and focusing on different parts of that location according to interest
- kung fu training one night a week, all kids usually come. Tao and Ru will usually train a total about 50 and 30 minutes respectively (out of a 2hr class, and not necessarily in one stretch), Cub tends to just dip in and out of techniques with me making futile attempts to fix his stances
- Tao has one night of footy training a week and one game on the weekend
- there is one major grocery shop each fortnight and on the same day in the "off" week we do a smaller top up shop. Additionally there is a market day on the weekend where we get fruits and vegetables
- we have one weekly park meet with other homeschoolers, kids currently ranging in age from baby to 15, after which a couple of them will often come back to ours for a little while
- the kids have roleplaying on Saturday afternoons at our place at the moment, though we may be shifting to the other family's new house once they've settled as there isn't the distraction of the PS3
Ru and Cub then engaged in the science of making lemonade (solutions and dissolving stuff...though we didn't try to get to saturation with the sugar) from some ripe lemons the kids had picked off our lemon tree the previous day.
Tao's reading has become a lot more fluent and he reads with expression (which I find really cute, completely unbiased of course). Ru's reading and word recognitiona nd being able to work them out has gotten a lot better. Cub recognises individual letters and numbers but hasn't worked out how to put them together yet. We're back to reading simple chapter books with the bigs, with them reading a chapter to us and then us reading one to them at bedtime. Cub "reads" along predicting the next word or sentence fragment in well loved books, though he's been choosing to listen to chapters out of Horrible Histories for the last couple of nights.
This week's reading materials:
Tao - Pencil of Doom by Andy Griffiths
Ruan - Abigail the Breeze Fairy by Daisy Meadows
Cub - parts of The Awesome Egyptians by Terry Deary and Peter Hepplewhite and parts of The Terrible Tudors by Terry Deary and Neil Tonge, Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss and a Disney cover of The Three Little Pigs.
I've also found the perfect (on screen at least) Approxiprimer base: an 11.6" Horize Clevo W110ER laptop from Logical Blue One (which I grabbed a couple of because they were reduced in price and I wasn't sure how long they'd be reduced for; if you're in Perth and want to support local these units can also be purchased from Affordable Laptops as a "Metabox Clevo W110ER" with similar customisation options). After they've arrived I'll blog about Approxiprimering them and how they go. They are quite pricey and my poor card still isn't quite sure what hit it. We're in serious recovery mode at the moment. It did get me thinking again about the One Device Per Child idea I throw around my brain at least as a background process. Haven't made any progress on that front and not likely to because I'm not putting enough energy into it. Anyway the machines will be running Edubuntu and all the games we have will be run on Wine.
Anyway. I have stuff to organise (always with the stuff to organise, never bloody ending :) and six months to get these kids writing well so we can move onto bigger and better things next year.