I can’t believe it’s almost the end of the school year! I was just choosing books and preparing a lesson plan for 2023/2024 and now summer is already approaching. Well, you can’t really see summer outside the window… it’s just rain or wind. Only the calendar tells me that it’s time to book tickets for the holidays…
However, we’re not made of sugar and our homeschooling days are, as always, filled to the brim with more or less formal activities, both at home and outside.
If you have read our previous diaries, you already know that our learning style is somewhere between unschooling and formal school with elements of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. Just ordinary family life.
If you want to know what books and resources we use this year, jump into this particular post where I share our curriculum picks for 2023/2024.
English
With Domi, who is 9 years old (so year 4 in the UK) we follow The Good and the Beautiful Curriculum, which can be downloaded for free from their website. We have finished reading “Heather and the Highland Pony”, the book set in old days Scotland. The way TGTB Level 3 is structured is working beautifully for us. The entire curriculum is divided into 4 units; with each unit, you read a different book, and then some lessons will have extra activities based on the book you read. So in this particular unit, we have covered a lot about the geography of Scotland and its islands, climate, fauna, and flora. At the end of the unit, we made Scottish oatcakes. Yum…
Oskar who is 11 is following the Structure and Style lessons from the Institute of Excellence in Writing to get him ready for writing more complex assignments in his secondary school years.
Practising spelling according to their age is just part of our routine and we use Twinkl resources. I’ve added recently this little book for Domi: Schofield & Sims Spelling Book 4: Year 4.
Creative writing is going well – Oskar is working on a book loosely based on the Redwall series. I taught Domi the STORY Mountain to write stories:
Setting
Teaser
Oh No
Resolution
Yuppie!
Maths
Oskar worked with fractions and formulas in his Year 6 Maths book. I have also bought him an extra workbook to learn some financial skills, which he finds interesting. The book is called: Money, Maths, & Financial Literacy and I chose the UK version. I think it’s a basic translation from the American version with dollars being changed to pounds, as some scenarios do not represent UK reality… although it’s all good common sense knowledge!
I like it for simple explanations of finances and money management. For example, it talks about ways to earn more money, how to budget, how to calculate sales and compare prices and works its way up to banking and investments. It will serve us a long time as the further you progress the more complicated the topics become. And it has answers!
Oskar likes it because he is interested in investments and would like to have a fake eToro account, but he needs a phone number for this to work, so he has to wait a little longer. And if you wonder, eToro is a professional trading platform, but it offers quite a cool feature that our older boys use – you can set up an account with virtual money and practice investing to your heart’s content!
Domi revised addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with the help of Junior Maths books. On top of that I’ve added The Good and the Beautiful Maths curriculum which offers video lessons for free.
Science
With our garden bursting with vegetables, flowers, herbs and fruit, there are plenty of opportunities to learn biology. Domi had planted zinnias and he was really happy to watch them grow. He prepared a project on how plants grow and to do it he looked very closely at the parts of the flower. We did a similar activity before as part of a topic from our science book, but he engaged and focused this time so much more! Before, when I asked him to draw parts of the flower he did a rather rushed job, this time he did it without asking and very carefully drew and labelled all the parts. And he has finished with a beautiful picture of his favourite zinnia.
Oskar on the other hand decided to prepare a project on astronomy, which he loved but somehow forgot about for a while. He dusted the knowledge and after a visit to the library (and bringing a heavy stack of books), he wrote about supernovas, as well as watched a documentary about black holes. This documentary included some serious maths of calculating distances in light years and describing black holes using maths formulas. As he learned how to animate in Blender he made a short animation of a black hole.
We have started a new topic about materials and one of the activities was to make a water filter. It proved to be such a fun activity and boys experimented with different materials to filter water. In the end, they even wanted to drink the water so I boiled it but was quite glad when they forgot…. Other experiments they did involved testing a few materials for transparency, hardness, flexibility and magnetism (that one is always a hit!) as well as melting ice in different materials and trying to guess which would take the longest to melt (conductors and isolators)
And do have a look at our avocado!
Geography
We have studied the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) as well as looked at the general geography of Europe, its biomasses, and climate. We have tried to paint the entire continent with watercolours focusing on colouring its physical features.
As mentioned above in English we have covered some geography of Scotland while reading the unit book.
As for local geography, we kept in theme of coastal features and we visited Camber Sands with its unique sand dunes.
On one of the visits to the library, we picked up such an interesting little book of maps: Brilliant Maps for Curious Mind. We all loved to have a look at all the bizarre topics the maps cover.
JUST BE warned especially with younger children, there are a couple of maps referring to sexual activities.
History
The next topic in our chronological approach to history was the French Revolution, Napoleon and my own country’s struggles for independence after the unfortunate partitions in the XVIII century. Europe was in chaos and headed towards the Great War. The Great War interested Domi. He brought himself a stack of books about the topic and tried to recreate the complex affairs between the countries, which step by step lead to war, using his plastic soldiers.
Art and Music
Picture study is still our weekly activity and we have progressed so far through Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism movements in Western art. On our random visit to a charity shop, I picked up a couple of nice pictures and the boys constantly recognized one of them as the painting from the National Gallery workshop!
I tried to introduce more watercolours to our art so the boys can use extra techniques in their nature drawing. The results are not bad, however I didn’t see much enthusiasm…
Piano, Saxophone and Trumpet are our daily repertoire!
Design and Technology
Boys developed a few games in Scratch, and Oskar additionally makes animations in Blender. As a part of his astronomy project, he animated a black hole. This is something my boys much prefer from watercolours 😉
As we are going to visit our young cousins in the holidays, the boys decided to sew them lovely cat toys. I think the result is just cute!
Dad let them help with building the patio and the boys enjoy it very much.
Language
We keep listening to French stories on YouTube and ironically, we read about the American Thanksgiving holiday in a Polish book. But thanks to this, I told the boys about the Polish harvest festival and our beautiful folk costumes.
Sports and socialising
Swimming, football and hiking are as always part of our weekly schedule.
After meeting with friends and practising some stick fencing (they made up a knights’ game) Oskar decided to have a go at real fencing. Also our friend made wooden swords for kids to play with. He made it at the farm that has a woodworking workshop and we were invited to visit it. We had so much fun there! As always with our group of friends…
We are going to break for summer the official part of homeschooling (the books and schedule). The education part never ends in our home of course. So I wonder, did our diaries help you to find the inspiration and courage to start your own home education journey? I hope they show that home education is manageable and enjoyable, but please let me know in the comments!
