Green colours have finally started to reign supreme, although spring in our area is exceptionally cold, windy and wet. However, you cannot be discouraged. Plants and animals know that it’s time to wake up from hibernation, so we can’t be worse! Apart from the Easter period, when we got a little lazy, we were busy as always, trying to find a balance in our home education. Balance between formal and structured learning, garden activities, life in harmony with nature and interesting trips.
Our general home education philosophy is to provide my children with lots of opportunities to facilitate learning through everyday experiences and interactions. In particular, it includes following a weekly routine of completing lessons in English, Maths, History, Geography and Science and complementing them with variety of activities, projects, trips and conversations.
And what does it look like in practice? What does home educating children do all days?
English
On top of our usual The Good and the Beautiful and Structure and Style curriculum we always do a lot of reading.
Why?
Because…. When we read we broaden our experiences so we are no longer trapped in the limits of our own experiences… (I believe C.S. Lewis wrote it).
Thanks to our friends, boys have discovered the Redwall series and they are devouring them at the speed of light.
Recent books from the book club that we attend monthly, were unfortunately voted boring.
As our read-aloud this term, we picked Swiss Family Robinson.
Quite randomly I found a writing competition looking through a list of interesting competitions (www.schoolreadinglist.co.uk) and both boys entered a story. The competition was organized by the Royal Mint Museum and the topic was Coins and Sea. Oskar was immediately interested and planned a story using knowledge from history where we had recently read about Queen Elizabeth’s pirates. Domi wrote a simple story about a storm, a disaster and archaeologists excavating a shipwreck years later.
We keep practicing spelling according to their level age and skills using Twinkl resources for years 4 and 6. Also, we use Grammar books by Scholastic – they are great! Each page has a simple and short explanation of the topic and a few exercises. We find them more interesting than CGP.
Maths
Both boys continue with their Maths Books and I add Twinkl Maths Mysteries every now and then. It’s a funny way to make sure they understand concepts. Another method of checking knowledge are conversations. You just have to listen to what they talk about.
Just an example:
During the lesson with Domi about 3D shapes, Oskar told us that the place where the edges meet is called the vertex (vertices in plural) and he knows this because he uses Blender (an animation program).
Domi and I are finishing the book for Year 3 and the last chapters are quite short but interesting: symmetry, shape and statistics (graphs!) For Venn Diagrams I have added a couple of exercises to practice multiplications like sorting numbers into factors of 3 and 4.
History
We started our timeline quite some time ago, but it was rather dull with just dates, names and events. So recently I have added pictures to make it more appealing.
A bit of glorious Polish history entered a scene when we were reading about the Ottoman Empire and the Battle of Vienna. Literary entered as Polish King Jan III Sobieski came with his famous hussars to help against the Turks. We did extra reading about hussars – a horse army that the entire 17th century Europe was afraid of.
Also while learning about Protestant and catholic struggles in England, and the situation in Scotland I have found a good living book for Oskar: Outlaws of Ravenhurst.
As for composers – now we are studying Bach’s life and music.
Science
We follow our usual book: Exploring Creation with Physics and Chemistry plus we watch the lessons from the Theater of Science. This term we are looking into sound so boys learn to play on the vine glasses! We have also studied the periodic table and attempted to prepare Periodic Table cookies… It proved to be a rather mundane task and we gave up halfway. Well… I need to remember that learning is a journey 😉
But it is Spring so there is a lot going on besides our standard schedule.
In fact the science books are being forgotten quite often!
First of all – we have kittens! Oh, what fun they are! And of course, it’s a valuable lesson in nature and life cycles. Boys have watched how protective and caring the mother is, how she feeds and washes and generally cares for her babies. They watch them grow, open their eyes, start walking and now they are everywhere, running, scratching, playing and commonly getting into all sorts of mischief.
We have entered Twinkl Page of Nature competition and Domi as a topic of his work chose Cats and Their Life Cycle. It was amazing to see him so focused on researching information about cats, looking into different books, carefully copying onto his page difficult information (why cat’s eyes glow in the dark) and checking unknown terms in the dictionary. Oskar randomly picked Lynx as his point of interest and prepared a page about them. He also made an animated lynx in Blender! Oskar has also noted that bluetits moved into our birdhouse. We will keep watching for them.
Secondly – this is a season of gardening! Here Dad is a great help as I don’t have such a green thumb, but we have planted quite a few tomatoes, courgettes, radishes (already harvesting!) and corn for fun. Oh and we have a constant supply of fresh herbs like chive, parsley and mint for our kitchen. The boys decided they love a mint tea with a hint of honey.
Domi chose some flowers to plant so we will see how they will grow. We had not much luck with sunflowers this year – most of them had been eaten by slugs… Bad luck, as last year they served us as a great object for practising gathering statistics data! Oh and Dad showed boys how to graft an apple tree. Grafting is a way of propagating new fruit trees using buds or twigs – the ‘scion wood’ from an existing tree and fusing it onto a branch or stem of another tree – ‘the rootstock’.
Since there are so many flowers around and our apple tree is blooming we have looked very closely at the flowers and their parts. As a result, we dissected a flower, studied its male and female parts and talked about how they get pollinated to produce new babies. Very natural and gentle intro to sexual education.
As we have started to read Swiss Family Robinson we have looked into simple machines. In the first chapter, the family make a simple machine to help lift parts of the boat, so the boys were experimenting with making all sorts of levers outside.
Nature walks – this is part of our science and we keep visiting our local woods often. The highlight of this season was definitely bluebells. Entire carpets of them! We have discovered that they are local to the British Isles and rarely found in other parts of Europe.
Avocado experiment – our avocado keep growing veeeery slowly…
Geography
In Geography, we study European countries: Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Scandinavia and we look into our geoographical local features – the coast in particular hence we have visited the Seven Sisters.
Languages
We keep listening to French stories on YouTube but generally, I try to add more Polish. Poetry is an easy but beautiful way to develop linguistic skills and great vocabulary. Somehow we don’t read many English poems, so I decided to introduce some old Polish poems to learn. They are quite funny and the boys want to practice memorising them! Especially outside and lying in the hammock!
Art and Music
Studying pictures and painters in chronological order became one of our favourite lessons. We look at the pictures and learn about the painters and the era during which they lived and made art, then boys try to reproduce some of the paintings. We look at the architecture as well as the music of the period.
As for hands-on art, we have taken our dusty easel outside for a spring clean and the boys painted the garden. It was very interesting to see different perspectives on the same topic. Also, I have found my old art magazines where you have step-by-step instructions on how to draw and paint using different techniques. These magazines are for more advanced students, all the same boys just picked them up and following the instructions created quite a few good drawings.
And of course, boys practice their instruments daily and I don’t have to nag or even remind them.
Design and Technology
Here again, our work moved outside. The boys started to rebuild their den from last year, trying to construct it more sturdily. They also simply help Dad build the patio. During one of our walks we have attempted to build rafts. And at home they made some finger-knitted toys for the kittens.
Both Oskar and Domi make simple games in Scratch while Oskar also learns how to use Blender.
Sports and socialising
Football, swimming and hiking are parts of our home education PE curriculum! Recently, we have started a little ‘sport meets maths’ project where we run laps around the garden and we time them to see how much we improved. Later we will plot the results on a simple chart.
We meet with other homeschooled friends regularly and recently we visited Knole Park (Deer Park as we call it) and Ashdown Forest just for fun with friends. We sometimes go shopping together, go to church and stay for social afterwards, plus visit older friends.
