Panto time!

The end of our 7th week!  I can't believe how quickly this term has gone! 

This week has been another week of stops and starts.  Yesterday Scotland was hit by the worst storm for a decade and all the local schools were closed!  After the strike day of last week I had planned on teaching all the kids if that happened again.  However, the excitement of an unexpected day off is something I remember very very clearly and couldn't bring myself to dampen that down.  It's nearly the end of term and quite honestly one day will not do them any harm.  Instead we had a day of crafts, baking and movies.  It was a very chilled day.  S didn't come anywhere near the crafts or the baking but had good fun with his siblings!

Today was panto day!  When S left school the panto trip was all lined up so we felt that we really needed to take him so as not to miss out.  Totally unplanned we ended up sitting a few rows in front of the whole school!!  I wouldn't have chosen this as I don't think it was very fair for the twins to see us so near and not to be able to sit with us and we so much didn't want to cause a bother for the school.  All that considered the panto was fantastic and the whole family loved it, wherever we were sitting.  It was a long panto and by the time we left, did a wee message and had lunch it was time to pick up the other three from school!

I did try the more independant learning approach with S on the Wednesday.  He did plenty of protesting but actually did a LOT of work!  His addition was really pushed this week and although we lost 2 days of work I feel like he has made good progress here and I think he sees that too.  I'm going to persevere with assigning him "book work" every day and then we will have "together sofa time" too.  On Wednesday we sat and read about the Tudors - what children would have worn, what school was like, what punishments were given by the police and some other random facts.  S's reading book this week is set in the 15th century.  I wasn't very sure that S would enjoy this but I was very wrong and thanks to a great kids internet search engine the information was easy to find and ideal for kids.  I think S will take a while to settle into the new approach and not to have me sitting beside him the whole time but actually I think it will cut out a lot of the frustration and teach him more to work and not faff around just so much!  For me it's a bit strange!  I felt a wee bit like I was slacking not sitting beside him or preparing things for him!  However, that's when I remember that (a) I spend hours preparing for him at night when he's not there and (b) I am not a paid employee of a school! S is obviously working and getting through a curriculum, at our own pace and I need to stop feeling like I'm about to be appraised!!!!  This is quite hard to do though.  My ingrained attitude and training as a teacher and in education as a whole is obviously so alien to home educating and will take more than a couple of months to relax!! 

I did have a complete wobble of confidence the other day when I misread one of his maths questions.  I was completely thrown and it suddenly catapulted me back 20 years to my time in my math's classroom!  I was permanently misreading questions then!!  It did throw me but we worked through it and got it in the end - together! Hopefully we learnt a wee bit about problem solving thrown in there too!

End-of-term-itis is now beginning to set in.  We have one more week of "formal" home school.  The final week of term I'm going to plan a trip every day.  Not big "educational" trips but a focus for each day to get us both out.  Formal learning will wind down though - ready to gear up again in the new year.  This was supposed to be a short entry!  So - I'm off!