Breakthroughs

• home education

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

9yo seems to finally be over his writing hurdle. Yesterday he reported that writing seems to be a lot easier, and as a result he hasn’t actively resisted/refused doing bookwork when I’ve put out the call to come and do it. Maybe he’s also realised that if he just comes and does the two pages he can go back to what he was doing quicker than if he tries to ignore me, then has a tantrum and argues about it, then does it with all of us in a cranky mood and then isn’t in the mood to do whatever it was he had been doing beforehand because the world is obviously dead set against him having any fun whatsoever. He still needs to work on some letter formation and is occasionally writing some things backwards but it seems to be coming a lot easier to him now which is great. I’ve told him it will get easier as it goes into muscle memory and his writing will slowly get neater the more he practises.

Then of course it may just be like mine and never be neat, because I simply cannot use a pen/cil to keep up with my brain, and he appears to be similar.

7yo seems to have grokked multiplication. She asked earlier today while doing her bilingual multiplication workbook and I said “butterfly eggs and leaves” and she immediately started drawing herself diagrams to solve the problems. Sadly I think she may have to learn times tables to be able to solve the basic problems faster, unlike 9yo she seems to take longer processing numbers and understanding maths rules. Her writing is pretty good as she does practise casually, she just writes things randomly throughout the day because itsuits what she’s doing at the time. Again still need to do a bit of work on letter formation and other than that she’s occasionally struggling with some of the Reading Eggs books because they have HUGE LINES and she ends up writing in strange sizes because she will write at half height and realise from the other side of the page that she was supposed to take up the whole height.

5yo is thoroughly confused about whether he’s left handed or right handed but he’s doing a decent job at tracing things that need to be traced and generaly following instructions, though for one of his Maths Seeds exercises I think he was supposed to write numbers in boxes concerning how many of each type of fruit were in a fruit bowl and he chose to draw a number of dots in each box instead. I was okay with that. I think we’re also finally approaching the end of 4 year old behaviour (neither of my boys did 4 very well) and I am getting a rather lovely almost 5 year old.

I’m in the process of organising an AQWA excursion and realising people don’t answer emails (either that or I just keep getting spam arrested because I’m obviously spam), it’s the first of four “school” type excursions this year. We’ve been waiting on school term to start so we can visit our usual haunts without being completely inundated by people. Now that I’ve caught up a bit on the workload I had (a lot of it was actually just writing install profile) I’m thinking of places we could go that aren’t as popular so that we can still pull off our weekly/fortnightly/as frequently as I can manage at the time excursions. Will make a list of them at some stage.

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