I can't believe that it is the end of our 4th week of home schooling! I had imagined that by this stage I might have been having major regrets or been totally exhausted and am so pleasantly surprised that I'm neither exhausted (well no more than usual!) and have absolutely no regrets with what we have done for S.
This week has been a different week in working with S. It has become more and more apparent that S is at his least motivated and productive first thing in the morning and that to sit and do structured work is daft! For the last 3 days we have started the day doing Education City on the computer which has been great to warm him up. Discovering "Live Maths" on Education City has been great! Today S sat for a whole hour doing "Live Maths" whilst I prepared the tea and cleared up a bit. At first I was feeling bad that we were not sitting "working" and then I realised how stupid a thought that was! Here was my son (who up til now has found mental arithmetic a real challenge) loving doing mental arithmetic and excitedly challenging and pushing himself to answer more and more questions! By the end of his session today he'd answered over 3 days 601 maths questions!! He has reached the top of the leader board today and is over the moon!
We did eventually sit down at the desk and started to try to do some of the tasks that I'd prepared. We read our daily Bible story which led to S asking where Jerusalem was. We got the atlas out and tracked down where Israel was, where we were and chatted about how long it would take to get there. We then looked at some of the other countries and ended up in the United Kingdom. From there S wanted to know where all the cities in Scotland were who had football teams so we toured the country! This led on very easily to getting the football stadium book that I gave S's dad for Christmas last year. We looked up all the football stadiums that S wanted to see. Rather than missing an opportunity we looked up the capacity for each stadium. One of the maths targets for this age is to be able to read and understand big numbers in the 10000 + category - so this was perfect!! S quickly enjoyed reading out the number of seats in each stadium and then we guessed whether or not the next stadium would have more or less seats in it than the one we were looking at! It was so good to see the benefit of being able to go completely off in a tangent and to have S learning without even realising it!
Following that we looked at days, months, 6 + 7x table revision, (we'd done our reading earlier) and we designed and made our own football strip on a plain t-shirt.
This week has been yet another learning curve for me. The claustrophia has not been so bad for me this week with plenty other things going on and to see that I am beginning to loosen up and not have the intense need to be sitting at a desk doing "work"! I still think it is important for S to learn that he does need to do tasks that are maybe not his first choice all the time and that it is important to sit still sometimes and concentrate but it has been great to begin to understand and see how to sneak learning opportunities into so much!
We did discuss discipline today and I have told S that as of Monday we will be having a yellow and red card system with "time out". Whilst we are learning a lot S complains a lot about doing the work and wastes a lot of time being daft! I find this quite hard to deal with and am losing patience with it. I am aware as well that we might not home school for S's entire education and we need him not to develop bad habits and be able to respect elders whoever they are! Don't think he's overly impressed with the thought of time outs but I think it will be a necessary deterrent! We'll see....
So I'm motivated to face the next week. I think we are at the stage of revising the maths we've done so far and I'm going to give him an assessment of sorts next Friday to see if he is retaining the learning. It's 5 school weeks until Christmas now. I've agreed with S that if he works hard for the next 4 weeks we will stop then. At school they don't seem to do very much structured learning and I think it is only fair to him to give him a bit less pressure then too!
We have folks staying this weekend which is lovely and which has been good to encourage me to stop thinking about things to do and to be prepared for Monday today and not have it to prepare tomorrow. I am beginning to appreciate my weekends so much again!
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