Well today we have been doing plenty of Home Education, it’s just that it’s me who has been learning instead of the children! I have raced through about 4 assessments on my online learning course while the children have largely entertained themselves. They have played with the wooden train track, the fuzzy felt faces, Tarly has done some puzzles and played with some little sponge shapes which she loves to make pictures out of. They have grazed on food – mainly fruit and occassionally had their attention caught by something on TV. We put Shrek on (that’s ‘normal Shrek, not Shrek 2 Mummy’), they stopped play for Dora and have just watched Bob the Builder. Scarlett has also been playing with water – she gets about 10 cups out from the plastic plates, bowls and cups kiddie cupboard (the only one without a lock!) and pours water between them all – she is learning loads from it: volume, colours, liquid behaviour and properties, pouring control and so on and for the price of the eventual small puddle on the carpet it keeps her quiet for ages too 🙂
Davies and I did a small amount of reading today too – we got out the Bob books which have been sitting on the shelf for ages and did the first one. He was pretty good with the sounding out the letters (although he does struggle with the concept of phonics a bit really – we had previously taught him alphabet letter names instead of the sounds they make) and joining them into words. He did tend to guess a bit by looking at the pictures and a couple of times I think he recognised the appearance of the word from previous pages instead of actually sounding the letters out, but then I guess that is how we all read eventually isn’t it? I certainly don’t sit there sounding out letters anymore unless it is a word I am unfamiliar with – so I guess even that is a necessary skill to pick up on the way to reading. Anyway my point is that despite the idea of sitting down doing stuff daily failing miserably last time we tried it, in small, relaxed bites we seem to be getting somewhere with the whole reading and writing thing. For Christmas we have bought them a few ELC grocery shop bits like the till and some extra money – so I will start some maths type play with them and I also quite like the idea of Davies being given pocket money in the new year too – to introduce the idea of spending, saving, having a specific amount and the chance to ‘earn’ more too – maybe he’s a bit young but we’ll see how he gets on.
I am feeling a bit better today – I have not taken any tablets and we have not been out rushing about either. Tonight though Mum and Dad are baby sitting while Ady and I go to Asda to buy up all the food for Christmas. I might just have to take some tablets to get me through that 🙂 Hopefully I am over the worst of it and will be fully recovered by the weekend.