The Home Educators at home…

do bugger all, bugger all, bugger all, the Home Educators at home do bugger all. All day long.

Well okay not bugger all but I do something think the term ‘home’ education is very misleading, we do far more gallivanting education than we do home education.

I’ve done laundry, lots of laundry. A bit of baking (only horrid white bread so I made cheese scones for my lunch and some choc chip cookies as all of last weeks disappeared over the weekend without me having any), some rag-rugging (decorated one with some underwater beads, I may well yet adorn it further, I quite like them with a ragrug background and then other stuff attached. A giraffe which went wrong and we decided looked far more like a pony so Scarlett now has and then a far better giraffe).

Davies brought me a couple of red nose reader books this morning and whizzed through them. This is all utterly Davies-led, he has suddenly decided he wants to be able to read, has taken on board that it will only come with practise and wants to sit and read to me every day. I have said I will remind him once each day if he’s not already brought me a book and if he doesn’t want to do it he doesn’t have to. Today he was telling me about how he’s realised he doesn’t have to spell out / read every single word because some of them he knows from reading before so he recognises them and doesn’t need to work them out again ‘just like when I see ‘Davies’ and I just know it says ‘Davies”. Scarlett is very interested in what’s going on but still insists she doesn’t want to learn yet ;). Our bookshelves are long due an overhaul as I suspect we have stuff we could get rid of and stuff we could reacquaint ourselves with again now that abilities and interests have changed again. Might try and sort that before Helmsley and bring any unwanted books up with us to give away or leave on their shelves like at Melrose a few years ago :).

Davies and Scarlett then played with the geomags for ages – some Viva Pinata inspired game, then spent some time in the playroom on which originally looked like a proper playing game but I think degenerated into wanton glitter sprinkling soon afterwards resulting in removal of glitter to a high shelf. I will not allow autonomous glitter access any longer when all that is really happening is the inside of the hoover is getting pretty! They then came and sat and played DS and listened to the music I was playing (Beatles, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse, INXS). We talked a bit about Nina Simone and I found some information out about her and showed them some youtube footage of her too. They both like The Beatles a lot so I said I’d get some more of their stuff from work.

We didn’t have the TV until teatime and watched Newsround and some zoo programme. Bedtime reading was Elmer chosen by Davies and a book about rocks and fossils chosen from the pile by Scarlett. Davies had expressed an interest in learning more about rocks and fossils and minerals so I’ve brought some books home and am trying to think of some way of opening that out a bit more once the lunacy that is December is out of the way.