You will find almost as many different ways of home educating as you do home educating families from very structured, strictly following a curriculum school-at-home at one end of the spectrum to completely autonomous child-led learning at the other. I believe that if it's working for your family and your children, then it's right for you and anyone else's opinion is irrelevant. What can be tricky though is finding out what works for everyone in a family, both children and parents, when different members of that family have different needs and opinions, and this is something that has been an issue for us lately. A, while fully in agreement that trying to force structure and learning is counterproductive, has been feeling that K in particular would benefit from some more structure. When we disagree about approaches to HE, it tends to be that A would like things to be a little more structured, while I usually feel that it would end in conflict and not work unless the girls were up for it. Occasionally my suggestions of a bit more regular overtly 'learny' stuff are welcomed and then it all goes well until something crops up which gets us out of the routine of doing so and then it always takes us a while (longer than A would prefer) before we get back to the point of being ready to do so again. Following the discussion that K & I had, she is up for a bit more structure, but wants to do things on her own with me, which is sometimes very tricky as M frequently still feels the need to be with me.
This morning while M was ensconced on Pottermore, K and I took ourselves off and did some maths. At the weekend, she had found a grid on a whiteboard and had started filling it in with numbers, but had then gone off geocaching and it was abandoned. I suggested she might like to carry on with what she'd been doing. So she filled in the grid with a times table square with just a couple of mistakes which she corrected herself when I pointed them out, while I had a look in Maths for Mums and Dads at the section about simple multiplication and tables. She had put 0-9 along the top and down the side first, so ended with 81 in the bottom right corner rather than 100, which she mentioned herself, so I pointed out that she could just put 1-10 along the top and bottom and use them for the 1x table. Then we looked at the grid and I put a dotted line along the square numbers and we talked about those, she identified them and then when I asked if she noticed anything about the grid either side of the line discovered that it's symmetrical. We then talked about times tables generally and why they're useful to know. I asked K which she was confident in and what order she thought would be good to learn them in, then we compared her order to the order suggested in the above mentioned book. K is confident with 10x and 2x, which I wasn't surprised by, but I wasn't expecting her to say 9x next. She's comfortable reciting the 9x, but needs a bit more practice to know it out of order, so we agreed she'd have a go at improving with this one and with 5x, before moving on to the others. K really doesn't like the idea of being 'tested' but is happy for me to help her practice the tables by asking her questions every so often (but only around the house).
M left us to it for quite a while, but did want to come in towards the end of my session with K, but somewhat reluctantly agreed to leave us for a little bit longer. Then it was her turn for 'Mummy time' (while K had a go on Pottermore) and she wanted to play games, we agreed on Guess Who (although we've got the original version - a charity shop find) and had five very close games, the final one of which M finally one. Then we had a game of Strip Jack Naked, which after getting down to my final three cards I won, which M got rather upset about, since she feels that I 'always' win, and to be fair based on experience I do tend to most of the time in games of chance, which is rather unfortunate at present! Finally I suggested I teach her a new card game and taught her the basics of Cribbage. We just played a couple of hands, showing each other our cards and me showing her how it works and I explained that some card games are completely based on chance, but others are a combination of chance and skill. She picked up the idea of crib pretty quickly, but by the time we'd had a couple of hands it was time for lunch, I think I might be able to persuade her to have another go sometime though.
After lunch we had another couple of goes at the Mystery at Hogwarts game, which M won once and I won once. I'm always a bit relieved when M does win, as it gives me an opportunity to point out that I don't *always* win! Fortunately K doesn't mind in the slightest whether she wins or not.
Later, after popping to the shops, I did some cooking in preparation for Granny and Big Grandad coming for lunch tomorrow (my Dad is bringing my Mum and she's stopping for a few days before he picks her up again at the weekend), as we're having our hair cut in the morning, so it would all be a bit rushed to get it done then. The idea was that K & M would do some tidying while I did this and to be fair they did do a bit, but M appeared saying that she thought she would rather get her (long-neglected) workbooks out and do some work in them, so she did, doing a page of a maths workbook, sorting out words for the four basic arithmetic functions and then wrote an acrostic poem in another one.
At Brownies at the moment they are working on their 'healthy heart' badge and one of the tasks they've been set for this is keeping a food diary for a week, so both K & M started to write down everything they've eaten today after tea and then finished this off when we got home after korfball.
All in all a rather busy day! And M also asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to start doing five minutes writing each day again, something we did for a month a while a go, when I was getting stressed that K & M were doing little or no writing. We made an agreement that we all (me included) would sit down and write for five minutes a day and do so for a month, which worked quite well but we didn't continue it regularly after the agreed month was up. I said I thought it would if she was interested in doing so and told her I'd recently read about a short story competition that she or K might be interested in entering and both girls said they thought they might be.
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