The moment the light goes on...

I was going to write my final blog of the academic year tomorrow but this week has had so much to blog about I thought it would be better to get some of it down before swamping you with my rambles tomorrow! This week started on a flat note! The end of the week still seemed an eternity away for both of us and the prospect of getting through the final mental maths pages and then perhaps even more daunting "Money Maths"! Monday and Tuesday were a struggle! Then yesterday I decided to be spontaeous, break with my diary, down tools and take S down to a friend's farm for the day. While we'd been looking at the Olympics we learned that they used to train by carrying a calf on their shoulders. As the calf grew into a cow the athlete got stronger with the weight carried growing. This sparked off a big conversation with S about many things including names of baby animals which is still a big vocab hole for him. S expressed how much he would love to hold a lamb and learn how to talk to sheep. My friend who also home schools lives on a farm and I told her about this request. So, we were invited down and off we went. We had such a great day. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day for a drive south. At the farm we got a wee tour round the milking parlour, the calves, the hens and then S was taken on the quad bike up and around the fields to see the sheep. He loved it! We had lunch together of freshly baked bread and then the kids all played together whilst we put the world to right! S giggled away with his friend and was so happy! There are always little pointers with S as to how happy he is. There is an unrestrained laughter which to be honest we don't often see outwith the house as he is always working so hard to suss out a situation! He also went on the quad bike happily and ate the home made bread. These are 2 things completely out of his norm and comfort zone but he did it! A huge success! At the end of the day we were given loads of beautiful double yoked eggs to take home to the family. So a fantastic day. To see S so happy was just lovely. It did me so much good as well to speak to another home schooling mum who has similar dilemmas to me in various ways was so cathartic and to be out in the fresh air was much needed! So, this morning we approached our work with a fresh mind! We have really been struggling with subtraction and division and I have been losing patience. The penny has certainly not dropped and I was so reluctant to end the term on a negative note! It has been very interesting over the past couple of weeks to spend more time than normal with other home school families and to hear all the different ways of teaching. Some are very laid back in their approach to teaching their kids whilst some are really quite routinised. What is very clear about all of the parents is that they value their children just for being them and not for their achievements and abilities to "fit" in. I have been challenged about how rigid I am in working through our "curriculum" and not taking a step back to think about what is right for S at this moment. In my defense though I am so keen to teach S that when something is tricky or hard it is not right to just throw the towel in and not do it. I think sometimes with home schooling it can be very much the easier approach to abandon ship with a topic if it seems to evoke stress and be too hard. If I did this with S we would have done very very little since October. He wouldn't write, we wouldn't have touched money, time, multiplication, subtraction or symmetry! He would be an expert in his 6x table and could tell you all about fractions but that is all! Today was a perfect example of this. Following our pretty hopeless days on Monday and Tuesday I was dreading dragging him through the final pages of his mental maths book and maths workbook. After such a positive day yesterday I was determined to finish the term on a high! So, this morning I decided to try to take away all the anxiety from S that I could. S definitely is an auditory learner and finds it much harder to work out what he has to do simply by reading. I decided to read the questions to him and to be his scribe. This worked quite well for mental maths although still subtraction was not really clicking! I found a number square and decided to use that. Success! He flew through the final 10 questions. Now granted this is not mental maths but it's a strategy for S to use until he gets more and more familiar with the tasks! From this we moved onto the dreaded money. The first questions involved division. I knew they were going to be quite tricky for him. He's so tired that he is much slower than he is capable of and so I continued to scribe. For the first time though I drew a number line along the top of his workbook following the success of the number line in subtraction. It was great! The penny started to drop! What was the best bit was by the 2nd batch of money questions S took the pen out of my hand and said, "I want to do this next one. Let me do it!" It was fantastic. He had a spark! He had a twinkle in his eye and was ENJOYING his maths! We flew through the final two pages! It reminded me why I went into teaching in the first place. To be able to teach someone and for a topic to come alive is just fab! You may be thinking I'm getting a little overexcited at really quite a minor unexciting thing but I feel this has been a milestone in many ways! If I'd decided to just let S dictate what we studied we would have abandoned this topic and had a long long break from it. What I am learning though is that the excitement at grasping a difficult topic is so great for both S and I but actually more so for S that it is so good to persevere! Yes it is quite dull at times and yes it's a long road but the skills mastered are lifelong in many ways! I bet your glad I didn't put all this in tomorrow's blog! I'm asking S to write a "report" on his first year of home school to go with a report I will write (just in case the council do want to know which from what I've heard is doubtful!!). I'm fascinated to see what he writes!